solved, for his soul's sake, never to undertake parochial duty. We read, too, of his letting his hair flow loose on his shoulders, when it was the universal fashion to wear it dressed.

Next, he goes as a Missionary to Georgia to convert the Indians; and, on his voyage, progressing in his asceticism, he wholly leaves off flesh and wine, sleeps on the floor, and rises at four in the morning. Then, he is zealous for the Rubric, withholding Baptism from children except by immersion, repelling one Dissenter from the communion, unless he were re-baptized, and refusing to bury another. Then, he forms an attachment to a lady who came to him for religious advice, disappoints her in obedience to his Moravian directors, denies her the communion on the ground of duplicity towards himself, is prosecuted for defamation, and escapes for England while the trial is pending.

On his return, he falls under the influence of Boehler, and experiences what he considers conversion and assurance. He preaches the new-birth, and the phenomenon of convulsions follows among his hearers; pulpits are closed against him, and he preaches in the fields. Converts lead to religious companies; companies to meeting-houses; meetinghouses to a lay-ministry, to which he reluctantly consents. The class system and itinerancy follow.

Four years had hardly passed since his return from America, and all this was done. Methodism had come into existence as a society and as a doctrine; and its first extravagances had given way to order, though to miracles it still laid claim. Charges of favouring Pope and Pretender are preferred; and the new Societies have to avow in emphatic terms their attachment to the house of Hanover and the Church of England. Other calumnies, however, succeed: mobs rise and ill-treat the new religionists in various places.

The theology of the sect becomes of a definite

character; it consists in the doctrines of the sensible new-birth, the suddenness of conversion, assurance, the gift of perfection, and, what these tenets imply, the inefficacy of forms under the gospel, whether rites, polity, or even creeds.

When he is towards fifty, Mr. Wesley marries: his wife is a jealous, violent-tempered woman, who, at the end of twenty years, leaves him for good, running off with his papers.

Soon after his return from America, he had commenced the Annual Conference of Preachers, regulated, if the word be not a misnomer here, on this principle, that in matters of practice each should be ruled, as far as his conscience would allow, by the majority; but in matters of opinion by himself alone. He establishes this body with the avowal that his followers will either leaven the whole Church or be thrust out; after a time, he begins to doubt whether presbyters may not ordain; next, he obtains orders for some of his lay-assistants from a so-styled Bishop of Arcadia; at length, when he is past eighty, he himself consecrates one of his followers as Bishop for the ordination of clergy in his American congregations.

Even in his own day, and much more since his death, his variations of opinion become successive excuses for fresh sects. What he had received from tradition, or learned from contemporaries, or crudely imagined, or thrown out hastily, became matter for development in others. Thus, whereas he had separated from Whitfield from hatred of Calvinism and had been not unwilling to praise, not only St. Ignatius Loyola, but Pelagius and Servetus, Relly, re-acting from Whitfield, extended the principle of comprehension, and gave birth to the Universalists in the United States, who now number at least five hundred and fifty Churches. Again, when Bell professed the gifts of miracles and prophecy, Maxfield supported him, and seceded with

a number of brethren, professing that man might be absolutely perfect, infallible, and beyond temptation.

Immediately on Wesley's death arose an agitation in favour of conferring on preachers the administration of the Sacraments; an innovation which he had on the whole steadily withstood. Kilham, who wrote a book in behalf of the measure, with the significant title of "Progress of Liberty," was expelled by the Conference, and, at the end of six years after Wesley's death, had founded the Methodist New Connexion. The principle which led to this secession from the body worked its way within it, and had its slow development in the course of twenty years. In 1816 the Conference admitted it; and then a secession took place, in the opposite direction, on the principle of respecting, as Wesley had enjoined, the prerogatives of the Established Church. The new body called themselves "Church Methodists," while they named the parent-society which they had left "Dissenting Methodists," and professed to be "members of the Church of England" like Mr. Wesley, having "no design to interfere with the Church or with dissenting societies."

Others have wished to perpetuate the bodily extravagances which attended Wesley's first preaching; and hence the Primitive Methodists, or Ranters, who even admit of female preachers, and form the largest body of the Wesleyan family in Great Britain which has separated from the Conference. Another secession is that of the Bryanites; another, of the Independent Methodists, who reject a "hired ministry," as they call it, and admit nothing but lay teachers. And another is that of the Protestant Methodists, who objected, or at least objected in 1829, to ministerial education, the growth of a sacerdotal spirit, and the ornaments of worship, as displayed in the Conference Connexion. Later still is Dr. Warren's secession, which has issued in the

Wesleyan Association, founded on the general principle of the New Connexion.

Though these various seceding bodies amount in this country to above a third of the mother-persuasion, they are most of them comparatively small, and would never be confounded with it. The Conference Connexion remains the representative of the Wesleyan ideas; in its gradual independence and growing substantiveness, in its conservative spirit in politics, in its doctrines of the new-birth, justification, and assurance, it is following or developing the principles of its founder. In its rivalry of the Establishment, it has acted against his feelings and advice; in the growth of the hierarchical element, it has abandoned his principle for his example; in its violence against the Church of Rome, it has forgotten the first years of his religious life; in its care for ministerial education, and its relinquishment of field-preaching, it shows that the point is reached in its course when order takes the place of enthusiasm.

Varieties in a teacher, and schisms among his pal pert

followers, are an evidence of life; though life is no criterion of truth, for unreal but plausible, or isolated ideas may powerfully affect multitudes. On the other hand, they do not argue the absence of one real idea in the movement in which they are found, but only that this man or that is not infallible.

2

SECTION II.

ON THE KINDS OF DEVELOPMENT IN IDEAS.

To attempt an accurate analysis or complete enumeration of the processes of thought, whether purely speculative or practical, which come under the notion of development, exceeds the pretensions of an Essay like the present; but, without some general

view of the various mental exercises which go by the name, we shall have no security against confusion in our reasoning and exposure to criticism.

1. First, then it must be borne in mind that the word is commonly used, and is used here, in three senses indiscriminately, from defect of our language; on the one hand for the process of development, on the other for the result; and again either generally, for a development true or not true, (that is, faithful or unfaithful to the ideas from which it started,) or exclusively for a development deserving the name. A false or unfaithful development is called a corruption.

2. Next, it is plain that mathematical developments, that is, the system of truths drawn out from mathematical definitions or equations, do not fall under our present subject, though altogether analogous to it. There can be no corruption in such development, because they are conducted on strict demonstration; and the conclusions in which they terminate, being necessary, cannot be declensions from the original idea.

3. Nor, of course, do physical developments, as the growth of animal or vegetable nature, come into consideration; excepting that, as mathematical, they may be taken as illustrations of those developments to which we have to direct our attention.

4. Nor have we to consider material developments, which, though effected by human contrivance, are still physical; as the development, as it is called, of the national resources. We speak, for instance, of Ireland, the United States, or the valley of the Indus, as admitting of a great development; by which we mean, that those countries have fertile tracts, or abundant products, or broad and deep rivers, or central positions for commerce, or capacious and commodious harbours, the materials and instruments of wealth, and these turned to insufficient account. Development in this case will pro