recognize and confirm its first and only claim. Miss Julia Wedgewood, who has shown much familiarity with the religious history of the eighteenth century, has written a remarkably able "Study on Wesley," which she begins by saying: "For those who take their impressions from hearsay, the name of John Wesley is no more than a symbol for the religion of the illiterate." But, rejecting such impression for the thoughtful student, she proceeds to ask and answer: What, then, was the central fact in his character? It was that which is the common property of all who inspire new force into the religious life of a nation; it was the conviction which, when barely stated, sounds a truism, that God governs this world, and not only that which lies beyond the grave. Who disputes it, we are inclined to ask, now? The reader who will peruse these pages will probably confess that in the eighteenth century it was disputed by all who filled the chief offices of the Church of England." Methodism was not a network of doctrines, and yet Methodist preachers went everywhere preaching the doctrines. But there was no one of them which was not held in a modified form by the Established Church, and to-day are believed, if similarly modified, in almost every branch of the Christian Church. Miss Wedgewood has divined the distinguishing secret and power of Wesley and Methodism, both in England and America. It was God in this world with you and me, the divine life inwrought with the lives of men. You remember how it first came, and when it came. John Wesley attended a meeting in Aldersgate Street, London, on Wednesday evening, May 24, 1738, and, while listening to some one reading from Luther's "Preface to the Epistle to the Romans," he became a Methodist. That experience then and there obtained was Methodism; and I am a Methodist. You know what I mean. We are Wesleyan Methodists.

What, then, is the mission of this Methodism to the extremes of society? Nothing more or nothing less than it was to John Wesley and Charles, George Whitefield, and the Lady Selina, countess of Huntingdon, the crowds at Bristol, Kingswood colliers, and Newgate prisoners, or you and me. There are no extremes of society, in the nature of the case, above it, and certainly none below it. Did it go into all these extremes of society when it first began, does it now, and will it in all the years to come? Methodism found its way into the orders of nobility, found frequent audience before lords and bishops, and found favor with great men and rulers, and even the king. Whitefield's preaching had great influence with dignitaries, those who moved in higher circles, and it extended to the royal family. The Prince of Wales was greatly pleased and profited from his preaching, and he made many inquiries concerning the doctrines of Whitefield, the Wesleys, and their contemporaries; and, when a bishop was complaining to King George II of the popularity and success of Mr. Whitefield, and entreating his majesty to use his influence in some way to silence him, the king silenced the bishop by replying: "I believe the best way to silence him would be to make a bishop of him." On another occasion the king refused to interfere with Mr. Wesley. George Washington declared his great respect for Mr. Wesley, and an interesting correspondence took place between him and Bishops Coke and Asbury when he was declared the first President of the United States. Lord Dartmouth, for whom the college in Hanover, New Hampshire,

was named, was a Methodist, and it was of him that the poet Cowper wrote the lines:

"We boast some rich ones whom the Gospel sways,

And one who wears a coronet and prays."

Whitefield opened a meeting-house for the courtly circles in Lady Huntingdon's parlors, and there preached to the princes, lords, and ladies of the realm. Horace Walpole once sneeringly said of Lady Elizabeth Hastings that "the queen of the Methodists got her daughter named 'Lady of the Bed-chamber to the Princesses;' but it is all off again, as she will not let her play cards on Sunday." Such was the power of this eminent woman's influence that Macaulay was right in saying: "At Rome the countess of Huntingdon would have a place in the calendar as St. Selina." When George Whitefield was in the zenith of his popularity, his influence was so powerful that Lord Clare wrote him a letter requesting his assistance at Bristol at the ensuing general election. But there was a consistency among these simple Methodists, even when they had climbed up into full view under the glare of the lights of fashion and social distinction. They were Methodists still. Mr. Whitefield wrote back to Lord Clare, and excused himself from the service by commending to him a verse of one of the hymns of his friend and brother, Charles Wesley:

"Nothing is worth a thought beneath,
But how I may escape the death
That never, never dies;

How make mine own election sure,
And, when I fail on earth, secure

A mansion in the skies."

But the greatness of Methodism was not secured through its many friends at court. The truth is, the orders of nobility in this world at no time do much for great truths in any department of usefulness. There were many eminently pious people among the lordly Methodists, dukes and earls and barons and other titled friends of Lady Huntingdon, who worshiped at Donnington Park, but the courtly circles of the realm furnished the wordly ornaments of Methodism rather than any substantial part of the great substructure upon which the marvelous work of the century was to be builded. This the sagacity of the wiser Wesley led him to see they would do, and only do. The higher extremes of society are only the decorations of the race. A like sagacity led the professor of political economy in Columbia College, when advising in the matter of church building, to say: "Decorate construction; never construct decoration." George Whitefield, born of a wine-dealer, and come from being a servantboy at "the Bell Inn," in Gloucester, founded his Methodism upon the fashionable circles of Great Britain, but it has never gone above its beginnings, nor even continued in equal influence there. John Wesley could not be despised in his birth and family by either the good or the great, and yet he courted no greatness among men, but divined a permanent place for his Methodism in the hearts and lives of the poor people. In speaking of his preference for the middling and lower classes to the wealthy and fashionable, he once said: "If I might choose, I should still, as I have done hitherto, preach the Gospel to the poor."

These first great preachers, themselves men of letters, often preached

to great scholars, even when these same scholars were unbelievers. David Hume once said it was worth going twenty miles to hear Whitefield speak. Lord Chesterfield was present at Lady Huntingdon's house to hear Whitefield preach on the morning of the same day that Hume and Lord Bolingbroke heard him in the evening. Bolingbroke was so delighted that he invited Whitefield to call and see him the next morning, which he did. The compliment of Lord Chesterfield, who often heard the great preacher, we all remember: "Sir, I shall not tell you what I shall tell others, how highly I approve of you." Benjamin Franklin, in writing of him after his death, said: "I knew him intimately upward of thirty years. His integrity, disinterestedness, and indefatigable zeal in prosecuting every good work I have never seen equaled, I shall never see excelled." There were no men of learning who were not interested to hear him, either in England or America. He preached before Yale College and Harvard University, and was nowhere more popular than in Boston. Dr. Samuel Johnson said he could talk all day and all night too with John Wesley, and his biographer says he was grieved because Wesley could not spend more time with him. Bishops and archbishops anonymously and publicly attacked him because of his ability in presenting his peculiar views. It was not because Methodism was lacking either in ability or scholarship that it did not capture all England and Scotland. The honored names of John Fletcher and Adam Clarke and Thomas Coke and Samuel Drew and Richard Watson, as well as the founders of Methodism, will yet find their way into the text-books of English literature, where they are not now, when other writers are come or men can rise above their own prejudices and contempt. But scholarship is no chief corner-stone upon which to erect a great Church. "For other foundation can no man lay than that is laid, which is Jesus Christ."

The great secret of Methodist success was in its great power for good in the lowliest and lowest extremes of society. A hundred years of power down there has given us a grip upon the world's wealth and learning, and fashion and high-born families, which if wisely held and turned, may yet give this whole habitable earth to God and his Son. That second Rome has already begun to die, and by prophecy her great estate is bequeathed to Wesley and his world-wide scattered itinerants. And all this, not because bishops and archbishops trembled at the power of the Wesleys up near the king, but because, as Green, in his "Short History of the English People" has so beautifully said: "Their voice was soon heard in the wildest and most barbarous corners of the land, among the bleak moors of Northumberland or in the dens of London or in the long galleries where the Cornish miner hears, in the pauses of his labor, the sobbing of the sea." How came we here, or in any other great city of this land? Was it by being built down from the top? It is true, our earliest preachers came here from over the waters, so did our people too, but by the time the second generation of Methodists came on all the preachers had gone back but the fewest of the few. No, our Methodist preachers were dug like Balzac's novels, out of the hearts of the people. When a man was wanted some god-father or god-mother poured out his or her heart against the skies, and God went over this land and lifted out from among the trees some son of the soil like Jesse Lee. These men had gathered power of impulse like the storm-cloud behind the hills, and they went to and fro

in the cities and country until this whole land was made to blossom like the rose.

Extremes of society! There are none, if we have men tall enough to stand in one and reach up into another. And this the Wesleys and their preachers after them did do. It was no common enthusiast who could wring gold from the close-fisted Franklin and admiration from the fastidious Horace Walpole, or who could look down from the top of a green knoll at Kingswood on twenty thousand colliers going from the Bristol coal-pits, and see as he preached the tears making white channels down their blackened cheeks."

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What, then, is the mission of Methodism to the extremes of society now? And what will it be in the century which now begins? Just what it was when this first century began. Let the spirit of the fathers seize their sons.

"Come, Holy Ghost, for thee we call;
Spirit of burning, come."

We will have great men, educated men, princely preachers; we must have them; we have had them since Wesley and Whitefield. Whence came Fisk and Olin and Hedding and Bascom and Durbin and McClintock and Ames and Janes and Pierce and Simpson? The extremes will go on, but we will find them and rend them and bind them together until the high shall sink into the low, and the low shall rise into the high. There are no castes which shall not crumble. The black will cease to be injured by the white, the bond by the free. Tall men have gone into India and China and Japan, and others are now going into Africa, and soon we shall send them into the islands of the seas. And they will do there what their brothers do here. In our last two General Conferences there sat side by side with us and the low castes there a high caste brother from India, so high he was named for the gods who were once worshipped at his home. Soon they will come from the East and the West, until there shall be no more caste to come. We have put our highest brothers to sleep where the lowest castes run, one just a little outside the gates in the bed of the Indian Ocean, one in Syria, and now another in the farther China at Foochow, as a pledge that we shall yet chase these symbols of darkness in all Asia up against the light of the sun, and then "from India unto Ethiopia" until Wesley shall go with Jesus to the last man. We shall toil and condescend. We shall suffer in sorrow and pain. We shall be persecuted for righteousness' sake, and many must yet be despised as the many have been, and we shall only hold to the high by a patient working with the low. Only thus may we be worthy to go

"Up among the good ascended,

All their pains and sorrows ended;
By their Triune Head defended,

To find our peace and rest forever.

THE MISSION OF METHODISM TO THE EXTREMES

OF SOCIETY.

J. B. A. AHRENS, D. D.

THE atmosphere of lofty altitudes, as well as that of deep abysses, afflicts the body. On the former, the rarefaction; in the latter, putridity. The table lands are those which are sought for human habitation.

Thus the extremes of society are usually not genial to us; we feel not at ease when associated with them. The great mass of people are the common people; men of mediocre means, ability, and station. To these we are naturally attracted, while the extremes repel us. In connection with the former, congeniality serves as an accommodating hand-maid; but aversion chills our affection when we attempt approaches to the latter.

But in the apostolic commission to do good unto all men, the convenient hedge of personal "likes and dislikes" is removed. As Christian sowers we must scatter seeds of kindness not only on inviting savannas, but also on steep mountains and in fog-shrouded valleys. The one needy is our neighbor, and it behooveth us to render aid like the good Samaritan in the parable, without consulting personal inclination or disinclination. We must imitate our Heavenly Father, who is no respecter of persons. He so loved the world-all men indiscriminately-as to provide a scheme of salvation for all alike. The rich and poor, the high and low, erudite and illiterate are invited to the marriage supper of the Lamb. "Come unto me" all-no one excluded. In Isaiah xlv, 25, the Lord said: "Look unto me and be ye saved, all the ends of the earth "-the ends of the earth socially as well as geographically.

Strange to say, but it is nevertheless true, that the opulent are often sadly neglected religiously. As in the world, so also not unfrequently in the Church, they have few true friends, if any. Flatterers and sycophants surround them. Their little good is excessively magnified; their evil ignored. Flowers of favoring compliments are strewn on their pathway; wreaths of undeserved laudation encircle their name. It would be more than human in them not to believe the declarations of their apparent admirers, and with self-complacency bury their spiritual "dry bones" beneath the green sward of Pharisaism. All fear, and often the preachers too, to incur the ill-will of the rich, by calling their vices by their proper names, and assuring them that, unless they turn away from their sins and are converted, they will be cast out from the presence of the Lord, the same as any impecunious wretch. One of these sycophants designs to borrow money; another one expects to effect a large and profitable sale; still another one has an eye to matrimonial alliance for his son, just starting in business; and the preacher of course he designs soon to be around with the subscriptionbook, since the parsonage has not yet been fully paid for. Men of great learning are almost equally deprived of correct information in regard to their spiritual wants. Their exceeding erudition usually overawes men of ordinary attainments. As if superiority of one intellectual faculty insured general superiority! Great excellency of one faculty is often found in connection with general intellectual deformity. Who has