bursts of religious emotion being all very much alike. The accounts of the late revival in Ireland, for instance, present us with unmistakeable evidence of bodily sensations accompanying the emotions of repentance, and not in proportion the strength of those emotions, which is the peculiarity of these manifestations resulting from Wesley's preaching. The following quotation from a letter may prove valuable as illustrating Wesley's accounts with the description of the same facts in a different phraseology, as it may be accepted as unquestionably a specimen of a milder form of the disorder which occupied so much of Wesley's attention at this time. 'We heard of a policeman to-day' (September 3, 1859), 'who, from being an indifferent careless man, had become an example to all his companions, and he has just been with us for an hour and a half. He said he was sorry he had not education or words to explain all that he wished to say: but it appears that, from being perfectly indifferent to religion, he felt a desire to pray; that after that he began to feel a very great weight about his heart, and strange and unhappy feelings; and that when he had gone into a church,, thinking he could pray better there, a most extraordinary feeling came over him, as if he could not move any of his limbs. He continued some time in this strange state, and one night when he went to bed felt quite ill, and towards morning heard a voice saying to him," Get up, and seek the salvation of your soul." The love of Jesus seemed to shine into his heart, and he has been very happy ever since.'

What are we to think of accounts such as these? Imposture, more or less unconscious hysteria, and all

the intermediate shades of self-deception and physical malady cannot explain the facts that such things happen. No one will say that these causes have nothing to do with the result: it is evident that many of Wesley's patients were affected by causes which had nothing to do with religion. The larger proportion of these cases took place in crowded rooms; and the agitation had continued more than a month (April 17 to May 21, 1739) before any one was struck down in the open air. The fact that the much more vehement and exciting preaching of Whitefield failed to produce this agitation to anything like the same extent, and that Charles Wesley's notification on one occasion that any one who was convulsed should be carried out of the congregation ensured perfect quiet, is enough to prove, what we might be sure of without any proof, that love of producing a sensation was sometimes the agent at work. There is something in the awestruck attention with which Wesley met these manifestations which has a tendency to foster them, even when the persons affected are perfectly honest,-and there are many shades between perfect honesty and conscious acting. We must remember, too, what kind of people they were who were thus affected. The lower-middle class of Hanoverian England were turbulent beyond the sense in which uncultivated people are always turbulent. The same instincts which found gratification in cruel amusements and in intoxication would also derive a certain satisfaction from the horrible ravings which Wesley has copied into his journal; they indicate a kind of spiritual gin to which the Kingswood Methodist might have recourse without encountering those

difficulties with which the Government had surrounded

its physical symbol.

These causes all help to explain the spread of the disorder: they do not explain its origin. What remains, then, when the large element of nervous imitation, unconscious acting, and that strange love of producing a sensation so remarkable in uneducated persons, are subtracted? There remains no doubt as one element, a distinct physical disorder, which we may identify, for instance, with the dancing mania of the fourteenth century, the victims to which whirled in mad excitement, and with many other strange convulsive movements that seem to have been contagious. But this is not all: any one who studies the account, with the same attention as he would give to that of any other strange event, will be convinced that there was something in the personal influence of Wesley (for it certainly does not remain in his sermons) which had the power of impressing on a dull and lethargic world such a sense of the horror of evil, its mysterious closeness to the human soul, and the need of a miracle for the separation of the two, as no one, perhaps, could suddenly receive without some violent physical effect.

CHAPTER IX.

SEPARATION FROM THE MORAVIANS.

WHILE Wesley formed the centre of this strange influence, he was still a member of a community essentially opposed to everything of the kind. The Fetter Lane Society, it will be remembered, was formed avowedly by the advice of Peter Boehler, and the Moravian organization had been followed out in that little Society, as far as it went. But, so far from having any abiding sympathy with the Moravians, John Wesley's prejudices were offended by their strongest characteristics. The word which absorbed the largest fund of his prejudice was mysticism. Like enthusiasm in the ears of the Bishops, it was a description of something vague and dangerous, that was to be attacked all the more vehemently because it was not obviously evil. His definition is an emphatic expression of dislike. 'Under the term mysticism,' he writes from Georgia, I comprehend those, and only those' (a comprehensive definition), 'who slight any of the means of grace!' Now the Moravians certainly slighted what Wesley called the means of grace: they looked upon the new life which both he and they regarded as the great fact of Christianity as an influence which had no connection with any out

ward channel, and which was to be received only by a complete cessation from all activity of the individual. This divine influence was, in their eyes, a continual stream, which would fill the soul were it but once emptied of all beside. Hence their efforts were directed towards silencing all spiritual utterance, sometimes even that of prayer, and bringing the soul into a state of perfect quiescence, as unlike as possible to the vehement emotion which Wesley hailed as the symptom of the new birth. Hence, too, they took little account of any ordinances of the Church. They did not necessarily abjure these; Gambold, it will be remembered, protested that he did not consider himself to be leaving the Church of England in joining the Moravian Brotherhood. But what they felt strongly, and sometimes expressed in an exaggerated form, was that these ordinances, so far from being any help to the soul in attaining this divine influx of life, might become a positive hindrance in doing so if they were regarded as necessarily channels of that influx. They discouraged, moreover, any retrospective view of this crisis, desiring to keep the spirit continually in the attitude of aspiration; and they shrank especially from Wesley's idea of perfection as something that could be consciously grasped and held as a possession: the sense of helplessness and need was in their view a permanent element in the Christian consciousness. They felt strongly that the highest point of attainment was imperfect; Wesley felt strongly that the lowest point of aspiration must be perfect; and in addition to their real causes of difference both sides imagined themselves assailing error when they merely insisted on nomenclature.