large. Some of its members died early; | was told that some of the schoolboys were others fell away before the discourage inclined to despise others who came to Τ ment and ridicule heaped upon them. school without shoes and stockings. How But John and Charles Wesley, and George was he to cure this? He did, what not Whitefield -the organizer, the poet, the perhaps one teacher out of a million would orator of the Wesleyan movement went have thought of doing, he himself went on until they had become the revivers in barefoot to teach them! The boys could England of a dead and torpid religionism; no longer look down on comrades who the standard-bearers of what might well came to school without shoes and stockhave seemed to be a forlorn hope; the ings, when their own teacher-clergyvoices which cried over the valley of dry man, and scholar, and gentleman as he bones: "Come from the four winds, Owas came to school shoeless and stockbreath, and breathe upon these slain that ingless! They were amazed; but he kept they may live." them to their books, and before the end of the week had cured them of their vanity. It is the custom to speak of Wesley's mission to Georgia as a failure. A failure it was not. Whitefield, who followed him to Georgia, even ventures to say: "The good which Mr. John Wesley has done in America is inexpressible. His name is very precious among the people, and he has laid a foundation that I hope neither men nor devils will ever be able to shake." He felt, however, that he was flinging away his best years in a partial effort. He was driven to return to England, which he only reached in February, 1738, after trying and dangerous adventures. He would hardly have survived the perils of this journey but for the fine health and unbroken cheerfulness which were the result and the reward of his habitual tem self-discipline he had strengthened a constitution so naturally weak that, but for it, instead of living to eighty-eight, he would certainly have been cut off in early manhood. In October, 1735, the two brothers sailed with General Oglethorpe to Georgia. John's object was to sacrifice himself, not only as a chaplain to the emigrants, but also as a missionary to the American Indians. This was probably the least fruitful and the least happy episode in the lives of the young evangelists. Both of them were still High Churchmen of the old Anglican school, with strong notions of discipline. John never scrupled to reprove any one, not only for notorious sins, but for anything—such as dress, or what he regarded as levity in conduct; and he excited deadly animosities by repelling from the holy communion any one who did not come up to his ideal standard, or who had not given him previous notice. His life, indeed, was as blameless and noble as it always was; but we see in his con-perance, soberness, and chastity. By duct a certain hardness and autocracy, and want of sympathy and tact. Yet, nothing could exceed his earnestness and selfsacrifice. He had but a small salary, he ate but little, he drank no wine, he limited his hours of sleep, he rose at four in the This fine health and simple diet enabled morning, he labored incessantly at preach-him rapidly to get over the misery of seaing, visiting, and teaching. The early colonists were of various nations, and therefore he read prayers to them in Italjan, in French, and in German, as well as in English; and since he also taught the children of his schools, his Sundays were days of incessant and astonishing labor. During his journeys in the colony he often slept all night in the open air, exposed to all the dews that fell. Sometimes he was wet through with dew and rain. He wore Indian shoes, and slept rolled up in a blanket. Though he travelled through places infested with wild beasts, he would never carry a weapon; he said that he had a cane to try the depths of the rivers through which he had to wade, but would not have a ferrule at the end of it lest it should look like a weapon." One instance of his sincerity and self-denial is well worth recording. At Savannah he sickness in his homeward voyage, and during the six weeks that it occupied, his work was characteristically energetic. Overcoming his reluctance, he went among the sailors, and spoke individually to every one of them. He taught the cabin-boy. He instructed two poor negroes who were on board. To the single French passenger he talked in French, and every day explained to him a chapter of the New Testament; and all this while he continued his own personal studies. Yet, among these noble, evangelistic, apostolical, self-denying labors, Wesley, in his own opinion, had not yet found the light. "It is now two years," he wrote, "and eight months since I left my native country to teach the Indians the nature of Christianity. But what have I learned myself in the mean time? Why, (what I the least of all expected) that I, who went to America to convert others, was never myself converted to God." His misgivings were the result of intercourse with simple, earnest, devout Moravians on his voyage out. He had consulted a Moravian minister named Spangenberg about his work. Spangenberg asked him a few questions. His first question surprised Wesley. It was, "Does the spirit of God bear witness with your spirit that you are a child of God?" Wesley, a little astonished at the question, hesitated for an answer. "Do you know Jesus Christ?" said Spangenberg. "I know," said Wesley, "that he is the Saviour of the world." "True," said the Moravian, "but do you know that he has saved you? "I hope,' ," said Wesley, "he has died to save me.' Spangenberg only added, "Do you know yourself? "I do" said Wesley; "but," he adds at a later time, "I fear they were vain words." He dated his full conversion from the time of his conversations with a young Moravian missionary, Peter Böhler, who taught him a simpler form of the Gospel, and brought home to him the Lutheran doctrine of justification by faith. By him," says Wesley, "in the hand of the great God on March 5, 1738, I was clearly convinced of unbelief, of the want of that faith by which alone we are saved." He at once concluded that he was unfit to preach, but Böhler urged him to go on. But what can I preach?" asked Wesley. "Preach faith till you have it," said his friend, "and then you will preach faith, because you have it." For a time he remained in uncertainty and heaviness, but on May 26, 1738, at five in the morning, he opened his New Testament at the words, "There are given unto us exceeding great and precious promises." That day, at St. Paul's, he heard the anthem, "Out of the deeps have I called unto thee, O Lord," and in the evening he went to a little religious meeting, where some one was reading Luther's preface to the epistle to the Romans. "About a quarter before nine," says Wesley, "while he was describing the change which God works in the heart through faith in Christ, I felt my heart strangely warmed. I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone, for salvation; and an assurance was given me that he had taken away my sins, even mine, and saved me from the law of sin and death." tian. "Have a care, Mr. Wesley," said Mr. Hutton, "how you despise the benefits received by the two sacraments." "If you have not been a Christian ever since I knew you," said Mrs. Hutton, "you have been a great hypocrite, for you made us all believe that you were one." Wesley explained what he had meant. He said: "When we renounce everything but faith, and get into Christ, then, and not till then, have we any reason to believe that we are Christians." He considered that up to that time he had only had the faith of a servant, not the peace and assurance of a son. In this narrative is contained the secret of all the mighty work of revival which Wesley lived to achieve in England. A gentleman, a scholar, a High Churchman, a presbyter of the English Church, a fellow of an Oxford college, there would have been nothing even in the sincerity of his piety to lead to the great work of his life-nothing to uplift him above the somnolent respectability of the ordinary easy-going Christian-if he had not learnt from the Moravians something of the depth of their convictions, and the flame of their devoted zeal. It is needless to follow the further incidents of his life. It was spent, without any intermission, in the fullest work of an evangelist to masses of his fellow-countrymen, whom the Church of England for the most part neglected and ignored, and whom it was his mission to convert from the practical heathendom into which they had fallen. His vast success was owing, first and foremost, to his inspiring conviction that he was doing the work to which God had called him, and doing it with God's visible benediction. But no small part of the supreme impression which he made upon his age was due to the character which has left to all time a luminous example. In his case, as in all cases, self-sacrifice was infinitely fruitful. That spirit of self-sacrifice inspired especially his generosity, his courage, and his high endurance. I. The example of such generosity as Wesley's is not only rare, but almost unique. He rose completely superior to that mammon-worship and avarice which are the sunken reefs on which so many a vessel of human life is shattered, and most of all as it nears the close of its voyage. It was one of the principles of the Holy Shortly afterwards, at the house of his Club to give away every year whatever of friend Mr. Hutton, in College Street their income remained after they had proWestminster, Wesley surprised a little vided for their own actual necessities. company of friends by telling them that Wesley was foremost in this good work. five days before he had not been a Chris-"I abridged myself," he says, "of all E superfluities, and many that are called courage. The world bestows a somewhat courage. But Wesley showed that high- were jangled; drunken fiddlers and ballad A clergyman, who wrote one of the very II. Another great quality in Wesley's rooms. III. To face all this, and to face it day after day, and year by year, in England, in Scotland, in Wales, in Cornwall, in Ireland, required a supreme bravery, and persistence. Yet it needed even greater courage to meet hurricanes of abuse and tornadoes of slander. Wesley had to face this also on all sides. The most popular | superintending the complex and growing actors of the day held him up to odium interests of the numerous societies which and ridicule in lewd comedies. Reams of had sprung into buoyant being through calumny were written against him; shoals the labors of himself and his godly helpof pamphlets, full of virulence and false-ers. Once show him the path of duty, hood, were poured forth from the press. and with a dauntless step he trod it. The most simple, the most innocent, the Nothing frightened him out of it. Nothmost generous of men, he was called a ing could allure him from it. However smuggler, a liar, an immoral and designing arduous the work, however great the pri intriguer, a pope, a Jesuit, a swindler, the vations, if his master bade him go he most notorious hypocrite living. The went. 66 My brother Charles," he once clergy, I grieve to say, led the way. Row-remarked, " among the difficulties of our land Hill called Wesley "a lying apostle, early ministry, used to say: 'If the Lord a designing wolf, a dealer in stolen would give me wings, I would fly.' I used wares; "and said that he was "as unprin- to answer: If the Lord bids me fly, I cipled as a rook, and as silly as a jackdaw, would trust him for the wings.' Hapfirst pilfering his neighbor's plumage, and pily he outlived years of hatred, and died then going proudly forth to display it to a in honor. His work began in an underlaughing world." Augustus Toplady said, graduate's room at Oxford, and, when he among floods of other and worse abuse, died, there were one hundred and twenty that "for thirty years he had been endeav- thousand members of his societies. There oring to palm on his credulous followers are now five million two hundred and his pernicious doctrines, with all the fifty thousand, under thirty-three thousand sophistry of a Jesuit, and the dictatorial ministers, and if children and general wor authority of a pope; " and described him shippers be counted, there are, perhaps, as "the most rancorous hater of the gos- twenty-five millions. Might he not say pel system that ever appeared in En- now, in the words which he chose for his gland." Bishop Lavington, of Exeter, text when he laid the foundation stone of denounced the Methodists as a dangerous the City Road Chapel, "This hath God and presumptuous sect, animated with an wrought?" In Westminster Abbey thou enthusiastical and fanatical spirit; and sands gaze with interest on the beautiful said that they were "either innocent mad- memorial which has been raised to him men or infamous cheats." Bishop Gibson, and his brother-the presentment of their of London, actually made it one of his faces in white marble not whiter than their grounds of complaint against them that lives. On it are carved three of his they have had the boldness to preach in memorable sayings. One is: "I look on the fields and other open places, and by all the world as my parish." Another is: public advertisement to invite the rabble "God buries his workmen, but continues to be their hearers ;" and he was indig- his work." The third is his ejaculation: nant because Methodists thronged to the "The best of all is, God is with us." Holy Communion in such numbers that uttered it on his death-bed, and then, once the clergymen had no time to dine before more, raising his arm and lifting his voice afternoon service! The revival of religion in grateful triumph, he emphatically rehad to make its way among hostile bish-peated: "The best of all is, God is with ops, furious controversialists, jibing and libellous newspapers, angry men of the world, prejudiced juries, and brutal lies. And yet it prevailed, because "one with God is always in a majority." 66 Wesley's labors were marvellous. He is described as a man not well fed or of Herculean frame, but slight and frail; as a man without indulgences, feeding for eight months every year chiefly at the tables of the poor; wifeless, childless, homeless, yet always cheerful, always happy, always hard at work, even to the age of eighty-eight flying with all the sprightliness of youth through the three kingdoms, preaching twice every day, indoors and out of doors, in churches, chapels, cottages, and sheds, and everywhere us!" He Such was John Wesley. Exactly one hundred years have elapsed since his death, and now we can judge him aright. He was a man, and therefore by no means exempt from the faults and errors which spring from our human limitations; but few men have been more supremely faithful to the best he knew. My object in this paper has merely been to sketch the outline of his life, and to indicate those conditions of his labor and of his character which secured to one who in genius was not equal to many of his contemporaries the supreme honor of evoking the dormant religious instincts of millions of human souls. It is not possible in this to paper describe the great revival which roused you," the lord mayor had said, "and as for the lady mayoress, she cry too;" and the gentleman smiled and told the little story so dryly and drolly that my sister and I couldn't help laughing, and we went on repeating to one another afterwards, "As for the lady mayoress, she cry too." And then as asual we asked who was that. "Don't you know Lord Palmerston by sight?" says my father. England from the general slumber and the | who had been in state to a theatrical per- Good deeds cannot die: They with the sun and moon revive their light, From Macmillan's Magazine. II. I have a friend who declares that Fate is a humorist, linking us all together by strangest whims, even by broad jokes at times; and this one vague little humor of the weeping lady mayoress is my one per trator of the last generation. Another miscellaneous apparition out of my caldron rises before me as I write. On a certain day we went to call at Mrs. Proctor's with our father. We found an old man standing in the middle of the room, taking leave of his hostess, nodding his head he was a little like a Chinese mandarin with an ivory face. His expression never changed but seemed quite fixed. He knew my father and spoke to him and to us too, still in this odd, fixed way. Then he looked at my sister. "My little girl," he said to her, "will you come and live with me? You shall be as happy as the day is long, you shall have a white pony to ride, and feed upon red-currant jelly." This prospect was so alarming and unexpected that the poor little girl suddenly blushed up and burst into tears. The old man was Mr. Samuel Rogers, but happily he did not see her cry, for he was already on his way to the door. I AM suddenly conscious as I write that my experiences are very partial; a witch's caldron must needs after all contain heterogeneous scraps, and mine, alas! can be no exception to the rest. It produces nothing more valuable than odds and ends happily harmless enough, neither sweltered venom nor fillet of finny snake, but the back of one great man's head, the hat and umbrella of another. The first time I ever saw Mr. Gladstone I only saw the My father was very fond of going to the soles of his boots. A friend had taken me play, and he used to take us when we into the ventilator of the House of Com-were children, one on each side of him, in mons, where we listened to a noble speech and watched the two shadows on the grating overhead of the feet of the messenger of glad tidings. One special back I cannot refrain from writing down, in a dark blue frock coat and strapped trousers, walking leisurely before us up Piccadilly. The sun is shining, and an odd sort of brass buckle which fastens an old-fashioned stock, flashes like a star. "Do look!" I say to my father. "Who is that old gentleman ?" "That old gentleman! Why, that is the Duke of Wellington," said my father. On another occasion I remember some one coming up to us and beginning to talk very charmingly, and among other things describing some new lord mayor a hansom. He used to take us to the opera, too, which was less of a treat. Magnificent envelopes, with unicorns and heraldic emblazonments, used to come very constantly, containing tickets and boxes for the opera. In those days we thought everybody had boxes for the opera as a matter of course. We used to be installed in the front places with our chins resting on the velvet ledges of the box. For a time it used to be very delightful, then sometimes I used suddenly to wake up to find the singing still going on and on as in a dream. I can still see Lablache, a huge, reverberating mountain, a sort of Olympus, thundering forth glorious sounds, and addressing deep, resounding |