sciousness and confidence of his own powers must have been increased, when, as he says, he saw the white gutters made by the tears which plentifully fell down their black cheeks-black as they came out of their coal-pits. "The open firmament above me," says he, "the prospect of the adjacent fields, with the sight of thousands and thousands, some in coaches, some on horseback, and some in the trees, and at times all affected and drenched in tears together; to which sometimes was added the solemnity of the approaching evening, was almost too much for, and quite overcame me." —vol. i. p. 236. Till now we have seen that the governing authorities of the church, far from being unfriendly to the methodists, had done almost every thing in their power to conciliate and render them useful. Whitefield in particular had been a sort of favourite, and he had been instituted just before, by the Primate and the Bishop of London, to the Rectory of Savannah in Georgia. Now, however, the Chancellor of Bristol prohibited him from preaching within the bounds of that diocese; and Whitefield, who determined to persevere, and had a considerable longing to be persecuted, began to talk of looking for nothing but afflictions and bonds; of some protestants being as ready as papists to breathe out not only threatenings but slaughters, and of his joy in the prospect of resisting unto blood for the truths of religion. The expectations which this ardent enthusiasm produced in Whitefield were generated in Wesley, about the same time, by his strange predilection for divination by the Sortes Biblica. Whitefield was soon to return to Georgia, and begged him to come down to Bristol to keep up, in his absence, the impression which he had made in its neighbourhood. Wesley opened his Bible at a hazard to know the event of his journey; nor could any texts have been more dismally discouraging than those which he thus stumbled on; all were about death, or burial, or suffering for the sake of Christ. The journey would have been abandoned had not Wesley appealed from the Bible to the Moravian plan of casting lots; the dice came up for his going, and go he did, though with a full persuasion that he was to be martyred. Whitefield introduced him to his Kingswood congregation, and gave him, before his own departure, an example of field-preaching, which Wesley, with considerable hesitation, at length resolved to follow, in spite of the Chancellor's inhibition and the authority of the Canons; thus throwing off, in one conspicuous instance at least, his allegiance to the church of which he still professed himself a zealous member. Yet it may be urged in his favour, that the practice which he thus adopted, and which still prevails wherever the Franciscan and Dominican friars are found, was by no means unexampled in England, and that the circumstances of the times were such as to give at at least a plausible prospect of advantage from its revival, as well as from the revival of that system of itinerancy which it supposes. During the first centuries of the Saxon Church there were no parochial divisions; the clergy resided in convents adjoining the Bishop's Cathedral, they were sent out from thence to instruct the country people, and administer the duties of religion in the few churches that existed, or, where there was no church, at a cross in the open air. air. When they had executed their commission they returned, and others went out to perform the same course of duty. To this occasional and precarious instruction succeeded the establishment of resident parish priests, endowed by pious Lords with the tythes of the domain of their patron; and as these became general, itinerancy fell into disuse, till the increasing ignorance and carelessness of the Parochial Clergy gave occasion to its revival in the Christian world by Francis of Assisi, and his followers or imitators, who, with the Pope's full sanction, though somewhat tardily extorted, went forth from their monasteries on foot, and in the garb of ostentatious poverty-reædificare ecclesiam quâ lapsura esset. The circumstance of this revival, as Mr. Hallam has well observed in his excellent work on the Middle Ages, corresponded, in a very remarkable degree, with the manner in which the cause of modern methodism has been conducted. There was the same affectation of popular eloquence and rustic plainness, the same attacks on the character and doctrines of the Parochial clergy; who, in their turn, complained of the same desertion of their churches and ministry in favour of these uncalled for auxiliaries. Erasmus, in an amusing colloquy, has represented a squabble between a village parson and two mendicant Friars; and the ludicrous ornaments usual in our gothic places of worship, are very frequently caricatures either of the regular or secular clergy, according as the building was devoted to the use of the one or other of these rival bodies. Notwithstanding these vexatious and irritating consequences of the system, it was, no doubt, productive of much advantage to the general power and stability of the Romish Church, and was as beneficial to Christianity itself as the manifold corruptions of that creed, which only the Friars had to teach, could admit of. And though the conduct and doctrine of the begging Friars themselves had become scandalous and contemptible at the time of our English reformation, it was by no means the intention of the original promoters of that measure, however unadvisable subsequent circumstances may have rendered it, to allow the system of itinerancy and field-preaching to fall into disuse and oblivion. There were, indeed, many reasons why such measures were now even more necessary than ever. The unequal division of parishes, VOL. XXIV. NO. XLVII. C the the immoderate extent and overflowing population of some, and the insufficient maintenance afforded by others; the want of churches in some quarters, and of qualified preachers in many more; these evils which had called for such a subsidiary and equalizing force in the times of popery, were increased to an enormous extent by the profligate and predatory manner in which the reformation had been carried on; by the transfer of so considerable a part of the ecclesiastical revenues into the hands of laymen; by the destruction of so many chantries, and the secularization of so many monasteries. It is, therefore, a well known part of that plan of ecclesiastical policy which the wisdom of Cranmer, and the piety of King Edward, contemplated, that a certain number of divines should travel up and down the country to instruct the people in the true principles of the reformation.* And the measure was adopted, not indeed by appointment of the state, but with full concurrence of the civil and ecclesiastical authorities, in a part of the kingdom where it was greatly wanted, by the excellent Bernard Gilpin. That it was not carried into effect in every diocese is not imputable to the pious fathers of the church who designed it, but to the many misfortunes to which the church was exposed during the persecution which followed under Mary; and it is highly probable that if such a plan had been suggested in the first instance either to Laud, Wake, Potter, or any other of our more able and enlightened primates, they would have at once perceived the advantage of securing so powerful an engine to the service of the church, and employing it to remedy those inconveniences, so far as they admitted of a remedy, which the spoliations of Henry VIII. and the rise of Puritanism had occasioned by detracting from the natural influence of the clergy on the minds of men, and consigning a large share of the population of England to almost inevitable ignorance and brutality. Nor, if Wesley had appeared as the founder of such an order of Predicants, could his name have ever been recollected but as a signal benefactor to the church, and the cause of considerable advantage to England, Ireland, and the world. The misfortune was, that this, like most other great and important measures, was not a first conception, but a proceeding which accidentally arose from previous circumstances. Those circumstances were of a kind little likely to conciliate that church which such an engine was in itself well suited to extend and strengthen; and, above all, the Wesleys had already disqualified themselves for the patronage and assistance of the Bishops, by their public pro * The number actually appointed for this end was six (not four as Mr. Southey (p. 397,) supposes.)-Harley, Beli, Horn, Grindall, Penn, and Knox, the Scottish reformer. See Burnet, Reform. p. 111, b. iv. A.D. 1553. fession 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 and lasting faith in Christ; but where do we read that Cornelius fell down, and shrieked, and guashed 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 c 2 expected 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? 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 a 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 ceptible |