indulgence with the more reason, because, impelled as he was by a stern regard to the great principles of Christian purity which he saw to be endangered so to protest, he was not thinker, not philosopher enough to perceive that his protest, though quite good and solid as related to Antinomian enormities, was only a film, or an evasion, as it stood related to Calvinistic truths. Everything for which a Calvinist not of fanatical temper - would contend, is embraced within the compass of Wesley's own preaching language, and might indubitably be thence inferred.

Wesley rejected, in terms, the "Election of Grace," on account of its alliance-inseparable as he supposed, with Reprobation; but in so doing he fought a wordy phantom; and while thus engaged he lost sight of the reality-the unsolved and insoluble mystery of the spiritual condition of the human family. No Calvinist insisted with more force or point than he did upon the facts of this awful condition; and no one availed himself in more solemn terms of the incentives thence arising, for urging men to repentance. He went forth among the impenitent million as he ought to go; — not as if, in slender tortuous tones, he would beg a hearing, that he might excuse, evade, or unriddle the mystery of the wide-spread ruin; but as the Apostles went — assuming, without doubt or abatement, its reality, and then labouring to rescue men, one by one, from its fatal bearing upon their immortal destiny. No effective assault has ever been made upon the consciences of men, whether educated or uneducated, on any other ground than this. The unmitigated fact which Reprobation assumes, Wesley also assumed. The exact difference between himself and the Reprobationists was this that they put an anthropomorphic and unwarrantable interpretation upon the fact, and an interpretation which

was sure to be blasphemously rendered by fanatics. He, with a genuine zeal for the honour of God, spreads over it a thin sophism, also anthropomorphic.

Fiery arrows they were, indeed, which his sinewy arm aimed at the hearts of men from the pulpit; yet each arrow was fledged, if not with Reprobation, with that which is not much rather to be chosen than itself. Wesley's preaching, so far as it was effective for dispersing the infatuations of the human mind, although it was clear of Calvinistic fanaticism and bad taste, carried with it, in the view of thoughtful men, the undiminished load of its difficulties. Lighten this load at all, and Methodism could not have spread, and would not have been.

And yet there was nothing disingenuous in Wesley's conduct in this behalf; for, verily he believed that that ill-judged burst of rhetoric, in which he himself borders so near upon blasphemy, and apostrophises "the Devil," was as sound in theology, as, in fact, it was shallow and unseemly. In this, and in many other similar instances, we easily save his reputation, as a thoroughly honest disputant, by alleging his entire want of the deep reflective or analytic faculty. Almost a particle of that power of mind which looks through wordy propositions and examines the substance beneath, would have sufficed for enabling him to embrace that rudiment of the Christian system which the Seventeenth of the articles he had subscribed so wisely embodies. On this ground, if he could have taken it, Wesley might have repelled Antinomianism more successfully than he did; and might have placed the Wesleyan theology also on a broader and less precarious basis. This was not to be; for the time was not come, nor is yet come, when the harmony of truth can exist otherwise than as an abstraction painfully disentangled from antagonist dogmas.

LAY PREACHING, AND THE LAY PREACHERS.

RID at length of his friend, and standing clear, as he believed, of all implication with Calvinistic election and reprobation, and yet, as a preacher, strong, as well in the truths which he misunderstood, as in those which he proclaimed, Wesley took his position upon the field of the world the friend of man, the enemy of nothing but sin. On this ground he has a claim to be regarded with reverent affection and admiration, which is as valid as that of any of the worthies to whom a place has been assigned among the benefactors of mankind. The very inconsistencies that mark his progress (when properly considered) do but enhance his demand upon our sympathies. If, indeed, as heartless writers have affirmed, he had been nothing better than an ambitious plotter - the builder of a house in which he should rule and be worshipped-no such inconsistencies would ever have come to the surface, or would for a moment have made him halt on his path. Unquestionably it was from the want of a plot at the beginning, and from the lack of ambition, as he went on, that he found himself compelled to yield, once and again, to the instances of some who seem to have been deficient in neither.

As a field preacher, the courage, the self-possession, the temper, and the tact (and the same praise is due to his brother) which he displayed, places Wesley in a position inferior to none with whom it would be reasonable to compare him. After setting off from the account his constitutional intrepidity, his moral courage was that which is characteristic of a perfect benevolence, and

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which, in the height of danger, thinks only of the rescue of its objects. When encountering the ruffianism of mobs and of magistrates, he showed a firmness as well as a guileless skill, which, if the martyr's praise might admit of such an adjunct, was graced with the dignity and courtesy of the gentleman. In looking at the two brothers, while they are thus quietly bearing themselves in the midst of a furious rabble, a wish is generated, that they had been used to read their Bibles always in as calm a mood as that in which they pushed their way among wolves and tigers.

In making their assault upon the obtuse moral sense of men, the first Methodists enjoyed, and they well knew how to use it, an advantage of position which, perhaps, has not been duly considered. Wesley's own style of pulpit oratory was, in a remarkable degree, logically direct and conclusive: each blow was a blow straightforward, and was such as could scarcely be parried or resisted. And so it would have been under any circumstances; but he, as a preacher, stood, in relation to the human mind, close home upon the conscience; whereas others have had to make their way thither through a strong defence of inveterate error. The preachers of the Gospel, in the apostolic age, were thus disadvantageously placed, for they had to dispel several forms of misbelief, before they could assail unbelief, and they seldom found men in what might be called the rudimental condition of impenitence and impiety. As to the Jewish conscience, it could be reached only through a coating of national pride, and of Rabbinical evasions; so it was that in the synagogue, the evangelist was challenged to prove, from the Scriptures, that "Jesus was the Christ; " for, until this was done, he could get no hearing for that which was to move the conscience. And on the other hand, in proclaiming the Gospel among the Gentiles, a bulwark

of monstrous polytheism stood across the preacher's path. The host of divinities was to be driven from the ground, before men could at all be reasoned with as immortal and responsible beings. And thus, too, it was with the Reformation preachers, for they were led and indeed forced, to address men, not primarily, as "dead in sins," but incidentally, as blinded by superstition.

With a happy simplicity of purpose, Wesley, and so Whitefield and others, would know nothing in addressing the multitude but that which is equally true of all men, always, and everywhere: - he spoke of and to them as the "servants of Satan," amenable to Eternal Justice, yet embraced in the purposes of God's mercy through Christ. Well indeed it was that these preachers held themselves wholly clear, as they did, of the fatal error of making it a preliminary to their own ministrations to assail, and to endeavour to overthrow, the ecclesiastical system under which the people of England had lapsed into heathenism or a state scarcely to be distinguished

from it.

It was in following the better leading of this right view of human nature, and in thinking of men, not as the victims of a wrong guidance, but as the dupes of Satan, that these preachers lodged their arrow at once in the conscience of the impenitent. "I hold you fast as a rebel against God." In this challenge there was no flattery; but self-love finds much aliment in the argument that is to end in showing that another — a former guide has been the cause of whatever is blameworthy in the disciple.

The same simple intention, and the same vigorous grasp of the true purpose of his mission, carried Wesley well over the rough ground of his own ecclesiastical prejudices. These prejudices, if they had been permanently adhered to, as would have happened with