called City Road, is the celebrated Bunhill Fields, where are deposited the bones of the Dissenters, who, against king and court and bishops, boldly asserted their right to liberty of conscience and to worship God as the Holy Scriptures and the Holy Spirit seemed to them to teach. There lies all that is mortal of the great dreamer who described the Christian pilgrim's journey from this world to the celestial city; and there lies the body of Isaac Watts, the sweetest singer in Israel till Charles Wesley came, since death silenced forever royal David's tuneful harp. There many others, whose names to the lovers of religious liberty in both hemispheres are like fragrant and precious ointment, quietly sleep, waiting the trump of the archangel to arouse them from their graves. And there, too, rests the body of that "elect lady," so dear to the people called Methodists, Susanna Wesley, wife of the saintly rector of Epworth, and the mother of John Wesley, Methodism's great founder, and of Charles Wesley, Methodism's great lyric poet. As one enters the open court which leads to City Road Chapel, there, on the right, is the house of John Wesley, in which he gave back his life to God, and where, with his almost latest breath, he uttered those words which have been as a talisman to so many thousands in the dying hour, "The best of all is, God is with us." On the left, and in the rear of the house used as a parsonage by the preacher in charge of City Road Chapel Circuit, and directly facing the open court, is the room where Joseph Benson wrote his great commentary. In the chapel itself is the pulpit from which Wesley preached to the multitudes that hung upon his lips; and there, along its walls, are the marble tablets of many of Methodism's sainted dead. And in the humble grave-yard behind the chapel is the monument which tells us that the body of John Wesley lies beneath it; there the one which reminds us that we stand by the grave of Adam Clarke; and there are the tombs which hold the dust of many other illustrious Methodist worthies. There, in City Road Chapel, consecrated by so many precious memories of Methodism's earlier and later history, was most appropriately held the first Methodist Ecumenical Conference.

And the time for the Methodist hosts to gather in City Road Chapel was the most opportune. The fullness of time had come. An earlier date would have been too soon; if it had

been postponed to some future period it might have been too late. The Methodist world was ready for the Ecumenical gathering; the fatlings and the oxen were killed, and all were eager for the feast. What had gone before was the preparation before Methodism's greatest Sabbath; when that Sabbath came, Methodism awoke to the resurrection of even newer life, and of still brighter hopes for the future. Silently, but surely, through the long years past, God was preparing for the hour when he would show to his Church and to the world. what he had wrought for both through his servant, John Wesley, and the great Methodist movement of the eighteenth century.

Not without many a hard struggle, and many long years of patient waiting, has Methodism at last had assigned to it any thing like its true place in English and ecclesiastical history. It was at first caricatured and satirized by poets and painters; it was mimicked by the wits of London; it was besmirched by the "successors in scurrility of the comic dramatists of the Restoration." Archiepiscopal sees madly anathematized it; bishops hurled bitter invectives and wrote scurrilous things against it; parish priests and curates derided it and persecuted it; courtly lords and high-born ladies treated it to jibes and sneers; and an ignorant rabble and a besotted populace, urged on by them all, often pelted it with brickbats and with rotten eggs. High-Churchmen, like Warburton and Lavington, assailed Methodism and its saintly founder with bitterness and rage; evangelicals, like Toplady and Rowland Hill, inveighed against both in language more suited to fishmongers than to preachers of the Gospel of peace. The great Baptist preacher, Robert Hall, speaking of the abuse which Toplady heaped upon the devoted head of John Wesley "for things purely speculative and of very little importance," says that he would not have incurred the sin of that abuse for ten thousand worlds. But none of these things moved John Wesley. "The most extraordinary thing about the Methodist movement," writes Robert Hall, "was that while Wesley set all in motion, he himself was perfectly calm and phlegmatic; he was the quiescence of turbulence." When I entered Machinery Hall, at our Centennial, in 1876, I was greeted with the buzz of saws, the clatter of shuttles, the hum of spindles, and with

many other noises in that vast acreage of machinery. In the middle of the immense hall I saw that the huge wheel of a Corliss engine was connected by bands with every machine in the building, from the most ponderous, to the lightest performing the most delicate ladies' needle-work. Silently, noiselessly, without friction, it was setting all in motion, while all around was din and confusion. Then I could understand what Robert Hall meant by the "quiescence of turbulence." What was seen and heard in Machinery Hall was no mean illustration of Wesley and his work. Unmoved by the taunts and jibes of the malignant, the sneers and derision of scoffers, the indifferentism of careless Gallios, the invectives and anathemas of worldly prelates, and the peltings of brutal mobs, John Wesley, with unparalleled English manliness, with heroic faith in God and his promises to the faithful, and with love to God and love to man for God's sake as his sole controlling motive, went through the Three Kingdoms, every-where proclaiming the newly-revived and glad evangel, arousing the slumbering Established and Non-conformist Churches, reclaiming the backslidden, and saving the lost. And ere he closed his eyes in death, at his house in City Road, he lived to see thousands of happy, joyous Christians in his societies and in the Churches of the Establishment and Dissent, and to hear himself invited and welcomed back to pulpits from which he had been rudely shut out.

Before the eighteenth century ended, the evangelical work of Wesley began to be acknowledged, and the claim of Methodism as a new and great spiritual force to be confessed. But this acknowledgment and confession were slow in their growth, partial and circumscribed in their extent. The nineteenth century passed its meridian before, in the Old World, or in the New where it has had its largest development, Methodism came to be treated with any thing like fairness. Meanwhile, in both, and notably in the New more than in the Old, Methodism, by its unparalleled successes, was powerfully vindicating its rightful claim to be considered the greatest force that God, in these latter days, has set in motion for the revival of his work and the spread of his Gospel. A few advanced thinkers outside of Methodism began in a measure to comprehend and acknowledge the justice of this claim. Lord Macaulay recog

nized it, and to some extent acknowledged it, when he condemned "those books called Histories of England in the reign of George II. in which the rise of Methodism is not even mentioned." Mr. Buckle, the skeptical author of the "History of Civilization in England," saw the influence of John Wesleywhom he called "the first of theological statesmen "-upon the English Church, when he wrote that Wesley exerted as great an influence upon the Established Church of England as Luther exerted upon the Church of Rome. Robert Southey, once England's poet laureate, on whose head, when a mere child in Bristol, the hand of John Wesley was placed, and who felt that touch as a benediction through all his future life, in beautiful prose scarcely equaled in biographical literature, and with surprising fairness in one so little qualified to judge the spiritual side of the great Methodist revivalist, wrote a charming life of Wesley, whom, as he subsequently wrote, he considered "the most influential mind of the last century, the man who will have produced the greatest effects centuries, or perhaps millenniums, hence, if the present race of men should continue so long." Isaac Taylor, a very able and philosophic writer of the Church of England, though far from comprehending the true genius of Methodism, yet characterized the Methodist movement "as the starting-point of our modern religious polity, and the field-preaching of Wesley and Whitefield as the event whence the religious epoch now current must date its commencement," and saw that "the Methodism of the past age points forward to the next coming development of the powers of the Gospel." The name of Wesley had become such a household word in many British homes that Earl Stanhope, in his "History of England," wrote that "thousands who never heard of Fontenoy or Walpole continued to follow the precepts and to venerate the name of John Wesley." Sir James Stephen, in his "Essays on Ecclesiastical Biography," writing about the good men of Clapham who met at the princely mansion of the Thorntons, tells us that the whole evangelical party of the Church of England may trace their spiritual genealogy by regular descent from the Methodist George Whitefield, Mr. Wesley's disciple at Oxford, and the great pulpit orator of the Methodist movement. Nor at this day, however Wesley and his evangelical work may have been

caricatured and satirized by it, is English fiction without appreciation of the founder of Methodism. In "Adam Bede," he is "that man of God who spent his whole life in doing what our blessed Master did, preaching the Gospel to the poor." And in the "Diary of Mistress Kitty Trevylyan," he is the preacher who appeared "not so much to plead as to speak with authority, who by the force of his own conviction made his hearers feel that every word he said was true; and yet so moved were they that many would weep, some would sob as if their hearts would break, and many would gaze as if they would not weep, nor stir, lest they should lose a word.”

But it belongs to the last decade to have done much fuller justice to Mr. Wesley and the Methodist movement. Of late, there has been a wonderful revival of thought on the life and work of John Wesley. Mr. Curteis, in his Bampton Lectures before the University of Oxford, in 1871, calls Mr. Wesley "the purest, noblest, most saintly clergyman of the eighteenth century, whose whole life was passed in the sincere and loyal effort to do good." Mr. Green, Examiner in the School of Modern History, Oxford, in his "Short History of the English People," tells us that "the Methodists themselves were the least result of the Methodist revival;" that "its action upon the Church broke the lethargy of the clergy, and the Evangelical' movement, which found representatives like Newton and Cecil within the pale of the Establishment, made the foxhunting parson and the absentee rector at last impossible.' Mr. Perry, Canon of Lincoln and Rector of Waddington, in his "History of the Church of England," says that it was John Wesley who "brought out with great force the teachings of the Church on the doctrines of grace, and showed to many of the clergy the meaning of their formularies which they had not before apprehended." Dr. Stoughton, in his "Religion in England under Queen Anne and the Georges," calls Methodism "a fact in the history of England which develops into large and much larger dimensions as time rolls on," and says that "its rise and progress may be regarded as the most important ecclesiastical fact of modern times." In "The English Church in the Eighteenth Century," the joint work of Messrs. Abbey and Overton, both of the University of Oxford and distinguished presbyters of the Church of England, Mr. Abbey