indictment; but the offenders saw the advantage they would gain in appearing to separate upon a doctrinal point, and one of them exclaimed, 'It is our holding election which is the true cause of your separating from us.' 'You know in your own conscience it is not,' replied Wesley. 'There are several Predestinarians in our Societies both in London and Bristol, nor did I ever yet put one out of either because he held that opinion.' 'Well,' said the objector, who apparently felt the justice of this remark, 'we will break up our Society, on condition you will receive and employ Mr. Cennick as you did before.' 'My brother has wronged me much,' replied Wesley with temperate firmness, 'but he doth not say "I repent." 'Unless in not speaking in your defence, I do not know that I wronged you at all,' said Cennick. Nothing then remains, it seems,' said he, 'but for each to choose which Society he pleases.' A short prayer followed, and then Cennick left the room, and about half those present followed him, and were afterwards merged in Whitefield's Society, till Cennick, in 1745, separated from him and went over to the Moravians, in which Society he died some years later.

Cennick was a mere adherent of Whitefield's, and his separation from Wesley was only the first stage of the final separation of the two Methodist leaders: both took place immediately afterwards. It was during this month that Whitefield published a pamphlet fitted to encumber the controversy with matter more irrelevant, more personal, and more unwise than has often been dragged in to embitter and confuse dispute in the long history of controversy. The attempt to answer Wesley's arguments occupied but a small

proportion of the pamphlet; nearly half his space is devoted to the useless discussion as to the expediency of using them, a discussion which he made much worse than useless by the turn he gave it. After recounting and blaming the means which Wesley had taken to decide upon preaching his sermon-drawing lots, he allowed his eagerness to convince his opponent of folly to carry him so far as to publish to the world the story of his attempted detention at Deal when about to sail for America the first time. It was in March 1741, after many months of reflection, that he made the irreparable blunder after which his friendship with Wesley could never be taken up exactly on the same footing.

What little there is in the pamphlet of a directly controversial nature does not, however, strike the present writer as altogether contemptible in the way of argument. Much of Wesley's reasoning was indeed so weak that the answer suggested itself on merely reading the objection. Whitefield had no difficulty in disposing of the assertion that if 'predestination be true, then is all preaching vain,' 'that if a sick man knows that he must unavoidably die, or unavoidably recover, it is unreasonable for him to take any physic at all,' which, extraordinary as it seems, is brought forward by Wesley as an argument against predestination. But what is most valuable and interesting in the letter is the distinctness with which he points out the logical tendency of Wesley's doctrine. If those texts, "God willeth not the death of a sinner," "I have no pleasure in him that dieth," are to be taken in their strict sense,' he says, with the sense of bringing Wesley's doctrine to a re

ductio ad absurdum, 'then no one will be damned. You cannot make good the assertion that Christ died for them that perish, without holding, as Peter Boehler lately frankly confessed in a letter, that all the damned souls will hereafter be brought out of hell.' And he ends with an unanswerable question, 'How can all be universally redeemed if all are not universally saved?'

The passage is worth pondering. No one could have been more horrified at any suggestion of the inexactness of Scripture than Whitefield, in a general way. But when it came to the dogma of everlasting punishment, he confesses that the literal sense of the New Testament must not be pressed, or we could no longer hold that any human being would be hopelessly lost.

The visit to England during which this pamphlet was published was Whitefield's evil hour. He had been during his visit in America under a hurtful influence: a friend of the name of Seward who had gone out with him seems to have been the person to encourage all that was weak in him; he had written an arrogant tirade against Tillotson and the author of 'The Whole Duty of Man'—the idols of orthodox England in that day; and finally he had taken up a very censorious and trivial tone towards Wesley on other matters than predestination, and had written to complain of the sumptuous furniture in the Kingswood meeting-room-which grandeur turned out on investigation to consist of a pair of tin candlesticks and a green baize cloth. The bond was still close which united him to Charles Wesley, who had been the first to become intimate with him, and was always the last

to let go a friend. 'It would have melted any heart,' writes Whitefield, with his usual sentimental profusion, 'to have heard us weeping, after prayer that, if possible, the breach might be prevented.' But there was nothing of this spirit in the meeting between him and the elder brother, which took place on March 28th, 1741. Though Whitefield had only been in England about a fortnight before they met, Wesley had, he says, already heard much of Whitefield's 'unkind be haviour,' and they now came together merely to understand each other's attitude. Whitefield told his old friend that they preached two different gospels, and avowed his intention to preach against him, wherever he preached at all. A friend who made a third at this interview reminded Whitefield of a promise made only a few days before, that he would never preach against the Wesleys, let his private opinion be what it might. But the fitful nature of the man made promises of small avail-this, he declared, had been only an effect of human weakness, and he was now of another mind. Wesley greatly approved his plainness of speech, and Whitefield heard his objections, urged in a coherent and logical manner, very different from his own impetuous and capricious attack. It was, Wesley argued in his usual orderly manner, firstly, very imprudent to publish an answer to his sermon at all, as it was putting weapons in the hands of those who were glad to damage their common cause; secondly, if he must publish, he need not have mentioned Wesley's name; thirdly, the answer was insufficient, 'leaving four of my eight arguments untouched;' fourthly, that so much was irrelevant and injurious in it as to make an open and probably irreparable breach between them,

'seeing for a treacherous wound and the betraying of secrets every one will depart.'

Thus the close of 1741 saw the Evangelical body split up into three divisions. Those who were in sympathy with what is called mystical religion, who disliked the violent manifestations of early Methodism, and were without its strong missionary tendency, had joined the 'United Brethren,' or Moravians. Those who adhered to the doctrine of predestination, or, as it is called in theological language, of election, and who considered this a vital point (for at this stage of the controversy there was nothing, as has been seen, in the mere belief to exclude them from Wesley's Society), had joined themselves to a body which to a certain degree found a centre in Whitefield, though he never occupied anything like the same position which John Wesley held to the third division-the Wesleyan Methodists-now formed into a coherent union ruled by one master spirit, all the more firmly fixed in this position of pre-eminence because it was unsought by himself.