upheaval of religion in England to which Methodism is owing, was the result of some subterranean wave of feeling not restrained within the limits of any particular nation.

The member of this brotherhood whose influence upon Wesley appears to have been most lively at this time was the first planter of the Church at Herrnhut, a carpenter by trade, formerly a Roman Catholic, Christian David. Besides his religious biography, Wesley has thought it worth while to give us an extract from a sermon of his which made so great an impression upon him that he wrote it down afterwards from recollection. 'Here is a mystery, here the wise men of the world are lost. It is foolishness unto them, sin is the only thing that divides men from God. Sin (let him that heareth understand) is the only thing that unites them to God,—that is, the only thing which moves the Lamb of God to have compassion upon and by His blood to give them access to the Father. This then do, if you will lay a right foundation. Go straight to God with all your ungodliness. Tell Him, "Thou, whose eyes are as a flame of fire scorching the heart, seest that I am ungodly. I plead nothing else. I do not say I am contrite, but I am ungodly. There fore bring me to Him that justifieth the ungodly. Let Thy blood be the propitiation for me. For there is nothing in me but ungodliness.'

This extract is valuable both as explaining the influence of the Moravians upon Wesley and his subsequent misunderstanding of and recoil from their doctrine. He felt now, with all the vividness of a sudden discovery which startles the mind by its simplicity, that the sense of need was all that was necessary for the

soul to bring to God; and any utterance of this truth, even one which implied that a virtuous life was a disadvantage in the eyes of God, came home to him with the utmost power. He would never probably have denied this truth, but it took so different a proportion in his mind after the separation from the Moravians that it seemed to them he had ceased to believe it.

Even thus early there was a seed of dissatisfaction in his mind towards them. After his return to England, which he reached on September 16th, he wrote to Zinzendorf, thanking him warmly for his hospitality to him, and telling him how reluctantly he had quitted so soon the society of 'the Christians who love one another;' but adding, 'I hope to see them at least once more, he says, were it only to give them the fruit of my love by speaking freely on a few things which I did not approve, perhaps because I did not understand them.' What some of these 'few things were we gather from the conclusion of his letter, where he desires 'that God would make Zinzendorf to abound more and more in all lowliness, faith, and love, particularly towards those who are without. The charge here implied is repeated by Wesley in after years, with how much justice it is not very easy to say. The Moravians were not in one sense wanting to those who were without: they were very successful missionaries. Perhaps what Wesley meant was true while the censure with which he associated it was false. The Moravians were certainly not like the Methodists, an aggressive brotherhood. They sought to preach Christianity where it had never been heard of, but they did not, like Wesley, endeavour to bring all who called themselves Christians to the particular

attitude which they took up themselves. It would have been a misfortune in this case if either society could have imposed its own aims on the other. Wesley's work in life was quite distinct from anything that he could have performed as a member of the United Brethren; nothing is to be regretted in their separation but that confusion of a special vocation with a universal duty without which alloy perhaps no society of men were ever firmly welded together.

CHAPTER VII.

WHITEFIELD THE FIELD PREACHER.

WHITEFIELD, and not Wesley, is the prominent figure in the opening of the Methodist drama, which occupies the winter of 1738-39. The notices of this 'new sect,' which in a year of opening war surprise us by their frequency, are all concerned with him. Wesley's was the strongest, but it was also the less impetuous nature, and in the earlier stages of any movement it is impulse and not weight that produces the most effect. In one sense Wesley may be called his pupil in one of the distinctive features of Methodism, field preaching, he did no more than follow the example of one whom he addressed at times as a spiritual son. Nor was it a novelty when Whitefield, yielding to the current of events, first sought a wider scope for the enormous audiences attracted by his preaching. Howell Harris, a young Welsh layman, who had been twice refused ordination, had preceded him in this path by three or four years, and had had predecessors in his turn; but Whitefield is the first conspicuous instance of religious addresses in the open air.

He arrived in London on December 8, 1738, after a year in Georgia which affords a striking contrast to

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the Wesleys' sojourn there. It was at the request of the men who had driven them from America that he was appointed their minister (an office for which he declined any salary); and but for the necessity of obtaining priest's Orders, and collecting money for the Orphan House he sought to found in Georgia, he would, he says, have remained perfectly happy in his 'little foreign cure.' The Trustees for Georgia received him most cordially, being no doubt `delighted to find that a religious man could visit the colony without setting it in a flame. But his reception was not equally favourable on all sides; five pulpits were closed against him in two days, some of the religious societies were bitter against him, and Gibson, Bishop of London, asked him during an interview, which however Whitefield describes as friendly, whether his published journals were not a little tinctured with enthusiasm.' It is difficult to select any one word habitually used in our day which shall express all the unreasoning dislike roused by the term 'enthusiasm in the eighteenth century. It meant to them much what fanaticism means to us, but suggested darker associations even than those which we recall at the name of a fanatic. In spite of this aspersion Whitefield found warm partisans in England, and tells us that he was received at Bristol, where he went to visit his relations, with 'inexpressible joy;' while it was here that the opposition of the clergy first opened to him the ground he was to make his own, and drove him to preach in the fields.

On first coming to Bristol, Whitefield had been promised the use of Redcliffe church, but when it came to the point the clergyman who had made the