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fession of an obnoxious tenet, and their open contempt of ecclesiastical subordination. Nor was this the worst; Whitefield, with all his enthusiasm, produced no extravagancies in his hearers; but Wesley, on whom, when Whitefield returned to Georgia, the whole conduct of the machine devolved, was not only an enthusiast himself, but the cause of still greater enthusiasm in others, and had the unhappy art of inoculating his audience with convulsions and frenzy, surpassing the most extraordinary symptoms to which animal magnetism has given rise, and calculated more than any other possible occurrence, short of actual criminality, to alarm and disgust the rational friends of religion, and to bring disgrace on the name of the Christian religion itself. Violent outcries, howling, gnashing of teeth, frightful convulsions, frenzy, blasphemy, epileptic and apoplectic symptoms were excited in turn on different individuals in the Methodist congregations. Cries were heard in their Love Feasts as of people being put to the sword; and the ravings of despair, which seemed to arise from an actual foretaste of torment, were strangely blended with rapturous shouts of 'glory! glory!' These strange symptoms were, at first, variously accounted for, according to the different prejudices and predilections of men, as proceeding from imposture, from the heat and crowded state of their meeting houses, the perceptible influence of the Holy Ghost, or the agency of evil spirits. Wesley referred all the cases, without exception, to one or other of the two last-named causes, and rested his conviction of the fact on what he called ocular demonstration. From imposture very many of the cases might be satisfactorily vindicated, and as they occurred indifferently in the open air or in the meeting-houses, the heat of the latter could have nothing to do with the affair. But, though one of our critical contemporaries has sagely raised a doubt whether they might not really be supernatural, there are few, we believe, even among the Methodists themselves, who will, at the present day, assign them such a character; far less are there many who would consider them as infallible or even probable tokens of God's spirit.

It is in the first place contrary to the whole analogy of Christian history, that conversion should be really accompanied by such convulsive agitations. We read in the Acts of the Apostles of many persons brought from ignorance and hatred of the gospel to a sure aud lasting faith in Christ; but where do we read that Cornelius fell down, and shrieked, and gnashed his teeth, and tore his hair, and remained as one dead, under the force of St. Peter's oratory, or that the Proconsul Sergius did so when St. Paul was preaching before him? St. Paul himself was struck blind for a time by the visible glory of Christ, and was agitated, as might be reasonably

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expected, on discovering the guilt he had unknowingly incurred by persecuting the followers of the Crucified; but we cannot find that St. Paul went through any of those manoeuvres which, at the commencement of Methodism, were esteemed if not necessary yet usual and certain tokens of the new birth. Nor, in all the history of his progress through Greece and Asia, are any such occurrences mentioned, though in the prison scene at Philippi, and during the long and pathetic discourse which he delivered at Troas, we should, if they ever occurred, have surely expected to meet with them. Nor, when describing the effects and fruit of his doctrine, in his Epistles to the Corinthians and Galatians, though he does not fail to notice the power of the Spirit which attended his labours to produce conviction, repentance, and peace in the Holy Ghost, does he say a word of such phenomena. And what will still more certainly prove that such symptoms were not then excited, is the fact that, though he objects many circumstances of enthusiasm and tumult to the Corinthians in their public worship, he never lays down rules for the treatment of such cases when genuine, nor reprobates their simulation when (as they doubtless would have been in many instances,) they were counterfeited by those who did not really feel them. The whole history of the church, indeed, bears us out in the same observation; and the exceptions which occur are such as the admirers of Wesley would not thank us for, the Montanists, the French Prophets, and the notorious impositions and abominations of the Nuns and Friars of the Romish Communion. No such effects were ever produced by any of the collects or prayers of the church; they never followed the preaching of Luther, of Calvin, of Latimer, of Cranmer, nor even of Wesley's own coadjutor Whitefield; yet who will deny that all these men had been the instruments of Divine Grace to lead many to repentance and salvation? And how improbable at best is it that God should have made his arm bare' in this manner with the hearers of Wesley only, or that his Spirit should, in this single instance, have sent signs and tokens which had been hitherto the exclusive inheritance of error or imposture ?

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This was the triumphant part of Lavington's enthusiasm of the Methodists and Papists compared,' in which, by proving that similar symptoms had, in every age, and even among the heathen world, been felt or pretended by the victims or familiars of a fanatical and idolatrous priesthood, he proves to demonstration, that they could be no certain or probable signs of Divine Grace; but, on the other hand, that they were strong presumption against the sects among whom they prevailed and were encouraged. But when Lavington went on to account for them by imposture in the patients themselves, or in Wesley, and to insinuate various abominable means by which such effects might be produced in persons of weak nerves, or sus

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br ceptible temperaments, he entirely mistook the character of Wesley himself, and did injustice to, by far, the greater number of these religious convulsionaries.

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It is true that many instances occurred in which the ecstasies were voluntary and assumed. Charles Wesley, who was of a less credulous temper than his brother, detected several instances of imposture.

A woman at Kingswood was distorting herself and crying out loudly while he preached; she became quite calm when he assured her that he did not think the better of her for it. A girl at Bristol being questioned judiciously concerning her frequent fits and trances, confessed that what she did was for the purpose of making Mr. Wesley take notice of her.

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"To-day," he says in his journal, one came who was pleased to fall into a fit for my entertainment. He beat himself heartily; I thought it a pity to hinder him; so instead of singing over him as had often been done, we left him to recover at his leisure. A girl, as she began her cry, I ordered to be carried out; her convulsions were so violent as to take away the use of her limbs till they laid her without at the door, and left her; then she immediately found her legs and walked off. Some very unstill sisters, who always took care to stand near me and tried who could cry loudest, since I have had them removed out of my sight, have been as quiet as lambs. The first night I preached here, half my words were lost through the noise of their outcries; last night before I began, I gave public notice that whosoever cried so as to drown my voice, should, without any man's hurting or judging them, be gently carried to the farthest corner of the room: but my porters had no employment the whole night."-vol. i. pp. 303, 304.

What happened at Kingswood was certainly likely to happen at Bristol, and it is neither unreasonable nor uncharitable to suppose, that in very many instances, the same trick, which was in this instance detected, was played off with more success, and that, such ecstasies being fashionable and accounted creditable to the place where they occurred, many persons would be found unwilling that their own town or village should be less under conviction than that of their neighbours. It is certain, however, that as men are intoxicated by strong drink, affecting the mind through the body, so are they by strong passions influencing the body through the mind. Many of the persons thus affected had probably been previously strangers to any religious feeling; many more had never heard any thing like eloquence; and an eloquence like Wesley's, recommended by a dignified manner, an harmonious voice, and a thorough persuasion of the truth and importance of all which he asserted, employed on the most awful truths, and deriving fresh effect from the apparent condescension of the speaker to persons little accustomed to tenderness or solicitude from those in a superior station, might well thrill the

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heart and give any direction to their feelings which he thought proper. 'Oh!' said John Nelson, one of his most ardent converts, speaking of the first time he heard Wesley preach,

'that was a blessed morning for my soul! As soon as he got up on the stand, he stroked back his hair and turned his face towards where I stood, and I thought he fixed his eyes on me. His countenance struck such an awful dread upon me before I heard him speak, that it made my heart beat like the pendulum of a clock; and when he did speak, I thought his whole discourse was aimed at me.' Nelson might well think thus, for it was a peculiar characteristic of Wesley in his discourses, that in winding up his sermons,-in pointing his exhortations and driving them home, he spoke as if he were addressing himself to an individual, so that every one to whom the condition which he described was applicable, felt as if he were singled out; and the preacher's words were then like the eyes of a portrait which seem to look at every beholder. "Who," said the preacher, "Who art thou, that now seest and feelest both thine inward and outward ungodliness? Thou art the man! I want thee for my Lord, I challenge thee for a child of God by faith. The Lord hath need of thee. Thou who feelest thou art just fit for hell, art just fit to advance his glory,-the glory of his free grace, justifying the ungodly and him that worketh not. O come quickly!, Believe in the Lord Jesus: and thou, even thou, art reconciled to God.”— vol. i. pp. 407, 408.

Nelson was a man of vigorous mind and body, and therefore, however moved, he did not fall into hysterics. But, it is plain that the feelings which he has described would, in a weaker intellect or a frame less robust, have given rise to them. Some such were, of course, always found among the crowds who attended on these occasions. And it is well known, and it was one of the foundations on which the animal magnetists built their vile scheme of imposture, that there is no disease so infectious as convulsive and epileptic affections. The most whimsical part of the affair perhaps is, that, when phenomena exactly similar were ostentatiously exhibited and confidently appealed to by another set of enthusiasts, (the French prophets, as they were generally called, or Calvinist refugees from the Cevennes,) Wesley was as incredulous as Lavington had been, and used pretty nearly the same arguments against their miracles as Lavington had used against those of the methodists. It at once occurred to him, in this instance, that the emotion might be hysterical or artificial.' He warned his followers that such things were of a doubtful, disputable nature. That they were not to judge of the spirit by which any one spake by appearances, or by their own inward feelings; no, nor by any dreams, visions or revelations supposed to be made to their souls, any more than by their tears, or any involuntary effects produced on their bodies.' Before he had ended this very sermon, eight of his own people fell down in violent agonies,

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and it occurred neither to himself nor his auditors that his reasoning could possibly apply, or that in this instance there was any thing doubtful or disputable!

It has been already observed that, except in one instance, where the congregation had been for some time previous under Wesley's care, no such effects were produced by Whitefield's preaching. The cause of this difference between the two friends is not very easy to discover; but it may, perhaps, be found partly in the singularity of Wesley's dress and appearance, while Whitefield wore the wig and attire usual to the clergy of the day; partly in the fact that Calvinism is rather a metaphysical, than a pathetic system of religion; partly in those personal applications to the bodily fears rather than the reason and affection of his auditors, which Wesley was in the habit of making, and most of all in the circumstance that both he himself and his followers, considering these agitations as signs of grace, were extremely desirous to feel them themselves and produce them in others. But of these extravagancies, and of the enthusiasm which they displayed and excited, the evil consequences were by no means confined either to the prejudice which they excited against Wesley, or to the discredit which they threw on the name of religion in general, or to their frequent ill effects on the bodily and mental health of those who experienced them. Enthusiasm is, in itself, an evil of no common magnitude. As it is the expectation of a result without premising the proper means, it has a natural tendency to make us think those means unimportant, or to abstract our attention from them, and to blind us to the true state of our spiritual account with God: to lead us to fear where no fear is, or to hope where hope is presumption. Nor, in spite of Wesley's cautions and disclaimers, was it possible that such effects should not often flow from discourses in which so much was sacrificed to the producing of a present effect on his hearers, and in which those hearers were taught to look for supernatural struggles and supernatural deliverance, not exemplified in a steady forsaking of sin, and the daily and continued helps of God's Spirit, but in conviction suddenly infused and assurance suddenly imparted. Wesley himself was, unquestionably, very far from an Antinomian, but Antinomianism, however disavowed, has been of frequent occurrence among his followers; nor could it be otherwise among people whose attention was directed less to their actions than to their feelings. Out of the heart, indeed, proceed the issues of life, but he who seeks to judge of his own heart by any rule but that of his general conduct, will often be fatally deceived, inasmuch as he will be sure to find there, according to his natural temper, whatever he greatly fears or whatever he confidently hopes to discover. Nor was it to be expected that wise and experienced men should countenance and

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