E wonder what John

Wesley would think of himself as a character in romance. He had not the horror of imaginative literature which some of his followers have exhibited. It is well known that he edited an edition of Brooke's The Fool of Quality," as well as wrote a commentary on Shakespeare, both of which his less largeminded executors suppressed.

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It is significant of the more strenuous thought of the period that some of the most successful tales of the times have had distinctively religious subjects, as, "The Christian," "The Master-Christian," and now Miss Braddon's "Infidel." The heroine of this story, the daughter of a London renegade clergyman and hack-writer, was brought up steeped in the free-thought of Voltaire and the Encyclopædists. By a romantic event she becomes the wife and widow of an Irish lord. She flaunts it amid the gayest devotees of fashion. But she comes under the power of Methodism, and especially under the personal spell of John Wesley. The potent example of Methodist zeal in saving the bodies, as well as the souls of men, breaks down her prejudice and leads to her acceptance of the evangelical religion. A vivid picture of the times is given, of the torchlight preaching of Whitefield, the sordid wretchedness of the poor, and heartless frivolity of the rich. The transforming power of Methodist teaching and practice are strikingly set forth in this remarkable tale.

We quote a few passages from this book as reflecting strongly the character and influence of that great man who more than any other moulded the religious life of the English-speaking world, not only for the time in which he lived, but we venture to say for all time.

At an evening service in John Wesley's chapel at the Old Foundry, George Stobart, a candidate for the

"The Infidel." A Romance. By M. E. Braddon. New York and London: Harper & Brothers. Toronto: George N. Morang & Co. Pp. 544. Price, $1.50.

affections of Antonia Thornton, had been "convicted of sin." Swift as the descent of the dove over the waters of the Jordan had been the awakening of his conscience from the long sleep of boyhood and youth. In that awful moment the depth of his iniquity had been opened to him, and he had discovered the hollowness of a life without God in the world.

Antonia Thornton had read Voltaire before she read the Gospel, and that inexorable pen had cast a blight over the sacred pages, and infused the poison of a malignant satire into the fountain of living waters. The cynic's blighting sneer had withered all that womanhood has of instinctive pietyof upward-looking reverence for the Christian ideal. There is no fire so scathing, no poison so searching, as the light ridicule of a master mind. The woman who had been educated by Voltaire could not find hope or comfort in the great apostle's argument for immortality. Was not Paul himself only trying to believe?

The circle in which Antonia Thornton moved had little sympathy with Methodism or with religion of any sort. Its spirit is shown in the following conversation :

"We shall meet in town next winter, perhaps, if you do not join the bluestocking circle, the Montagus and Carters, or turn religious, and spend all

your evenings listening to a cushion-thumping Methodist at Lady Huntingdon's pious soirees."

"Your ladyship may be sure I shall prefer Ranelagh to the Oxford Methodists. I was not educated to love cant."

"Oh, the creatures are sincere; some of them, I believe, sincere fanatics. And the Wesleys have good blood. Their mother was an Annesley, Lord Valentia's great-granddaughter. The Wesleys are gentlemen; and I doubt that is why people don't rave about them as they do about Whitefield, who was drawer in a Gloucester tavern."

George Stobart was brought under the influence of Wesley and became one of his most valued fellow-workers. He was in those years a soldier of the church militant, and had stood by John Wesley's side on more than one occasion when the missiles of a howling mob flew thick and fast around

that hardy itinerant, and when riot threatened to end in murder.

Mr. Wesley had given him a mission among the poorest wretches of Lambeth. He had set up a dispensary there, and schools for the children, and a night-class for grown men. He toiled among them for many hours three or four days a week. He went to the prisons and read to the condemned creatures, and came home broken-hearted at the cruelty of the law, at the sinfulness of mankind. For the last two years George Stobart had been one of Wesley's favourite helpers, and had accompanied his chief in several of those itinerant journeys which made half England Wesleyan. He preached at Bristol, rode with Wesley, preaching at every stage of the journey, from Bristol to Falmouth, where he stood shoulder to shoulder with him in one of the worst riots the Christian hero ever faced. He was with him through the roughest encounters in Lancashire, stood beside him on the Market Cross at Bolton, when the great wild mob surged round them and stones flew thick and fast, and where, as if by a miracle, while many of the rabble were hurt, the preacher remained untouched.

In all this, in the effect of his own preaching, in the hazards and adventures of those long rides across the face of a country where most things were new, Stobart found unalloyed delight. He loved his mission in the streets and alleys of Lambeth, his visits to the London gaols, for here he had to wrestle with the devils of ignorance and blasphemy, to preach cleanliness to men and women who had been born and reared in filth, to meet the wants of a multitude with a handful of silver, to give counsel, sympathy, compassion where he could not give bread. This was work that pleased him. Here he felt himself the soldier and servant of Christ.

The following is a conversation between George Stobart and Antonia Thornton:

"We go among the untaught savages of a civilized country, madam. If there is need of God's word anywhere upon this earth it is needed where we go. Thousands of awakened souls answer for the usefulness of our labours."

"And you are content to pass your life in such work? You have not taken it up for a year or so, to abandon it when the fever of enthusiasm cools ?"

"I have no such fever, madam.

On my honour, madam, if but half the women of fashion in London were as sane as that noble lady, society would be in a much better way than it is."

"Oh, I grant you we have mad women enough. Nearly all the clever ones lean that way. But I doubt your religious mania is the worst, and a woman must be far gone who fills her house with a mixed rabble of crazy nobility and converted bricklayers. I am told Lady Huntingdon recognizes no distinctions of class among her followers."

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Nay, there you are wrong, Lady Peggy," cried Antonia, for Mr. Whitefield preaches to the quality in her ladyship's drawing-room, but goes down to her kitchen to convert the rabble."

"Lady Huntingdon models her life upon the precepts of her Redeemer, madam," said Stobart, ignoring this interruption. "I hope you do not consider that an evidence of lunacy."

"There is a way of doing things, Mr. Stobart. God forbid I should blame anybody for being kind and condescending to the poor."

"Christians never condescend, madam. They have too acute a sense of their own lowness to consider any of their fellow creatures beneath them. They are no more capable of condescending toward each other than the worms that crawl in the same furrow."

"Ah, I see these Oxford Methodists have got you in their net. Well, sir, I admire an enthusiast, even if he is mistaken. Everybody in London is so much of a pattern that there are seasons when the wretch who fired the

Ephesian dome would be a welcome figure in company-since any enthusiasm, right or wrong, is better than perpetual flatness. . . . I confess to being sick of feather work and shell work, and the women who can think of nothing else, and even the musical fanatics weary me with their everlasting babble about Handel and the Italian singers. There is not a spark of mind among the whole army of cognoscenti. With a month's labour I'd teach the inhabitants of a parrot house to jabber the same flummery."

As George Stobart stood watching those radiant figures his imagination conjured up the vision of an alley in which he had spent his morning hours, going from house to house, with a famished crowd hanging on his footsteps, a scene of sordid misery he could not remember without a shudder. Oh, those hungry faces, those gaunt and spectral forms, skeletons upon which the filthy rags hung loose; those faces of women that had once been fair before vice, want, and the smallpox disfigured them; those villanous faces of men who had spent half their lives in gaol, of women who had spent all their womanhood in infamy, and, mixed with these, the faces of little children still unmarked by the brand of sin, children whom he had longed to gather up in his arms and carry out of that hell upon earth, had there been any refuge for such! His heart sickened as he looked at the splendour of clothes and jewels, pictures, statues, curios, and thought how many of God's creatures might be plucked from the furnace and set on the highway to heaven for the cost of all that finery.

Antonia, now the widow of Lord Kilrush, finds occupation for her restless soul, sated and sickened with the inanities of fashionable life, addicts herself to works of philanthropy, to visitation of the poor and sick.

After a visit to a dying woman Stobart led Lady Kilrush through crowded courts and alleys, where every object that her eyes rested on was a thing that revolted or pained herbrutal faces, famished faces, lowering viciousness, despairing want. brazen impudence that fixed her with a bold stare, and then burst into an angry laugh at her beauty, or pointed scornfully to the diamonds in her ears. Insolent remarks were flung after her;

en in the gutters larded their with curses; obscene exclamaeeted the strange apparition man SO unlike the native 1. Had she been some

freak of nature at a show in Bartholomew Fair she could scarcely have been looked at with a more brutal curiosity.

Stobart held her arm fast in his, and hurried her through the filthy throng. hurried her past houses that he knew for dangerous-houses in which smallpox or gaol fever had been raging, fever as terrible as that of the year '50, when half the bar at the Old Bailey had been stricken with death during the long hours of a famous trial for murder. Gaol-birds were common in those rotten dens where King George's poor had their abode, and they brought smallpox and putrid fever home with them from King George's populous prisons, where the vile and the unfortunate, the poor debtor and the notorious felon, were herded cheek by jowl in a common misery. He was careful to take her only into the cleanest houses, to steer clear of vice and violence. He showed her his best cases-cases where Gospel teaching had worked for good; the people he had helped into a decent way of life— industrious mothers; pious old women toiling for orphaned grandchildren; young women, redeemed from sin, maintaining themselves in a semistarvation, content to drudge twelve hours a day just to keep off hunger.

Her heart melted with pity and glowed with generous impulses. She clasped the women's hands, she vowed she would be their friend and helper, and showered her gold among them.

"Teach me how to help them." she said. "Oh, these martyrs of poverty! Show me how to make their lives happier."

George Stobart left London early in April in Mr. Wesley's company, and rode with that indefatigable man through the rural English landscape. making from forty to fifty miles a day, and halting every day at some market cross or on some heathy knoll on the outskirts of town or village to preach the Gospel to listening throngs. The journey on this occasion took them through quiet agricultural communities and small market towns, where the ill-usage that Wesley had suffered at Bolton and at Falmouth was undreamed of among the congregations who hung upon his words and loved his presence.

He was now in middle life, hale and wiry, a small, neatly built man. with an extraordinary capacity of enduring fatigue and a serene temper which made light of scanty fare and rough quarters. He was an untiring

rider, but had never troubled himself to acquire the art of horsemanship, and as he mostly read a book during his country rides, he had fallen into a slovenly, stooping attitude over the neck of his horse. He had often been thrown, but rarely hurt, and had a Spartan indifference to such disasters. He loved a good horse, but was willing to put up with any beast that would carry him to the spot where he was expected. He hated to break an appointment, and was the most punctual as well as the most polite of men.

Meanwhile Stobart's wife had died and his affections were strongly drawn to the accomplished and brilliant Lady Kilrush.

"If you can keep your conscience clear of evil," said Wesley, "and win this woman from the toils of Satan you will do well; but tamper not with the truth, and if you fail in bringing her to a right way of thinking part company with her for ever. You know that I am your friend, Stobart. My heart went out to you at the beginning of our acquaintance, when you told me of your marriage with a young woman SO much your inferior in worldly rank, for your attachment to a girl of the servant class recalled my own experience. The woman I loved best, before I met Mrs. Wesley, was a woman who had been a domestic servant, but whose intellect and character fitted her for the highest place in the esteem of all good people. Circumstances prevented our unionand I made another choice."

He concluded his speech with an involuntary sigh, and George Stobart knew that the great leader who had many enthusiastic followers and helpers among the women of his flock, had not been fortunate in that one woman who ought to have been first in her sympathy with his work.

Stobart spent a month on the road with his chief, preaching at Bristol and to the Kingswood miners, and journeying from south to north with him, in company with one of Wesley's earliest and best lay-preachers, a man of humble birth, but greatly gifted for his work among assemblies, in which more than half of his hearers were heathens, to whom the word of

God was a new thing-souls dulled by the monotony of daily toil, and only to be aroused from the apathy of a brutish ignorance by an emotional preacher. Those who had stood by Whitefield's side when the tears rolled down the miners' blackened faces

knew how strong, how urgent, how pathetic must be the appeal, and how sure the result when that appeal was pitched in the right key.

The little band bore every hardship and inconvenience of a journey on horseback through all kinds of weather with unvarying good humour, for Wesley's cheerful spirits set them so fine an example of Christian contentment that they who were his juniors would have been ashamed to complain.

In some of the towns on their route Mr. Wesley had friends who were eager to entertain the travellers and in whose pious households they fared well. In other places they had to put up with the rough meals and hard beds of inns rarely frequented by gentle folks or sometimes, belated in desolate regions, had to take shelter in a roadside hovel, where they could scarce command a loaf of black bread for their supper and a shakedown of straw for their couch.

She

A sermon of Whitefield's, preached to thousands of hearers on Kennington Common in the sultry stillness of an August night, had awakened a poor, sinning, suffering woman. was one of the many who went to hear the famous preacher, prompted by idle curiosity, and who left him changed and exalted, shuddering at the sins of the past, horrified at the perils of the future. That wave of penitent feeling might have ebbed as quickly as it rose but for George Stobart, who found the sinner while the effect of Whitefield's eloquence was new, and completed the work of conversiona work more easily accomplished, perhaps, by reason of Sally Dormer's broken health.

Antonia looked at him with something of awe in her gaze. She never heard him pray. He had argued with her; he had striven his hardest to make her think as he thought, but he had never prayed for her. Into that holier region, that nearer approach to the God he worshipped, she had never passed. The temple doors were shut against so obstinate an unbeliever, so hardened a scorner.

His face seemed the face of a stranger, transfigured by that rapture of faith in the spirit world, made so like to the angels, in whose actual and everlasting existence this manthis rational, educated Englishman, of an over-civilized epoch-firmly believed. He believed, and was made happy by his belief. This present life was of no more value to him than

the dull brown husk of the worm that knows it is to be a butterfly. To the Voltairian this thing was wonderful. The very strangeness of it fascinated her, and she listened with deepest interest to George Stobart's prayer.

The man believed in Him to whom he prayed, and presently the ice melted and the fire came, and the speaker forgot all surrounding things. The earthly fetters fell away from his liberated soul, and he was alone with his God, as much alone as Moses on the mountain, as Christ in the garden. Moving words came from the heart so deeply moved, burning words from the spirit on fire with an exalted faith. Perhaps the thing that moved Antonia most was the unspeakable pity and compassion, the love that this man felt for the castaway. She had been told that the Oxford Methodists were a sanctimonious, pragmatical sect, whose heaven was an exclusive. freehold, and who delighted in consigning their fellow-creatures to everlasting flames. But here she found sympathy with the sinner stronger than abhorrence of the sin. And her reason that reason of which she was so proud-told her that with such a sinner none but an enthusiast could have prevailed. It needed the fiery speech of a Whitefield, the passionate appeal of an impassioned orator, to awaken a soul so dead.

The great revival had been the work of a handful of young men-men whom the Church might have kept had her rulers been able to gauge their power, but who had been sent into the fields to carry on their work of conversion as their Master was sent before them.

George Stobart worked among the sick and the dying with unflagging zeal; he gave them the best of himself, all that he had of faith in God and Christ, sustaining their spirits in the last awful hours of consciousness by his own exaltation. He gave them inexhaustible pity and love, the compassion that is only possible to a man of keen imagination and quick sympathies. He understood their inarticulate sorrows, and was able to lift their minds above the actual to the unseen, and to convince them of an eternity of bliss that should pay them for a life of misery-promise more easy to believe now that all life's miseries belonged to the past, and were dwarfed by the nearness of death.

"that Whitefield is to preach at Kennington Common to-morrow night, to a vaster audience than his new tabernacle, large as it is, could contain, and I should like better to hear him under the starry vault of a June evening than in the sultry fustiness of a crowded meeting-house. I have eveL been interested in your description of those open-air meetings where you yourself have been a preacher. There is something romantic and heartstirring in your picture of the rugged heath, the throng of humanity huddled together under a wild night sky, seeing not each other's faces, but hearing the beating of each other's hearts, the quickened breath of agitated feeling. and in the midst of that listening silence the shrill cry of some overwrought creature falling to the ground in a transport of agitation. which you and Mr. Wesley take to be the visitation of a divine power.

"I have not courage to go alone to such a meeting, and I do not care to ask any of my modish friends to go with me, though there are several among my acquaintance who are admirers of Mr. Whitefield and occasional attendants at Lady Huntingdon's pious assemblies. To them, did I express this desire, I might seem a hypocrite. You who have sounded the depths of my mind, and who know that although I am an unbeliever I have never been a scoffer, will think more indulgently of me."

A platform had been erected about six feet from the ground, and on this there had been placed a row of chairs and a table for the preacher, with a brass lantern standing on each side of the large quarto Bible. Whitefield was there with one of his helpers, a member of Parliament, his devoted adherent, and two ladies, one of whom was the Countess of Yarmouth's daughter, Lady Chesterfield, dowered with the blood of the Guelphs, and a fine fortune from the royal coffers. Whitefield's most illustrious convert, and a shining light in Lady Huntingdon's saintly circle.

From the preacher's platform almost to the edge of the common the crowd extended, black and dense, a company gathered from all over London, and compounded of classes so various that almost every metropolitan type might be found there, from the Churchman of highest dignity, come to criticise and condemn, to the street hawker, the professional mendicant, come to taste an excitement scarcely inferior to gin.