negroes, calling upon an acquaintance of Coke's the same morning, said: “Do you know anything of a little fellow who calls himself Dr. Coke, and who is going about begging money for missionaries to be sent among the slaves?" "I know him well," was the reply. "He seems," replied the captain, "to be a heavenly-minded little devil. He coaxed me out of two guineas this morning." Dr. Coke was an active agent in the establishment of Methodist societies in the West Indies, where at the time of Wesley's death, in 1791, there were some six thousand persons, mostly negroes, enrolled in the connection.

It will be evident from what has gone before that Wesley worked with no cutand-dried scheme for setting up a compact, effective, and permanent religious polity such as the Methodist connection became. His friend Alexander Knox, who speaks with an intimate personal knowledge, expressed his strong personal

conviction that Wesley was totally incapable of preconceiving such a scheme.

This [he says] would have implied an exercise of forethought and politic contrivance, than which nothing could be more opposite to his whole mental constitution. Besides, from the specimens which I myself have had of his proceedings, I can even stake my veracity that the account which he gives on different occasions, of his adopting measures simply as they were required by sucessive emergencies, is unqualified and unimpeachable truth. That he had uncommon acuteness in fitting expedients to conjunctures is most certain: this, in fact, was his great talent.

The Wesleys, both John and Charles, foresaw that after their death the formal separation of the Methodists from the English Establishment would occur, and the idea was utterly repugnant to them. Of that there can be no question. "I am a Church of England man," wrote John Wesley at the age of eighty-five; "and, as I said fifty years ago, so I say still, in the Church I will live and die, unless I am thrust out." Again he

wrote in the same year, "Still, the more I reflect, the more I am convinced that the Methodists ought not to leave the Church." On December 11, 1789, he wrote, "I declare once more that I live and die a member of the Church of England, and that none who regard my judgment or advice will ever separate from it."

Among the external causes which worked for the separation of the Methodist connection from the English Church, three may be mentioned as important: first, the hostile attitude of the large body of the Anglican clergy towards the movement, and the closing of their pulpits against Mr. Wesley; secondly, the number of Methodists who joined from the Dissenting community; and, thirdly, the natural disinclination of men of the type of the early Methodist preachers to perpetuate the theory of their inferiority to the average Anglican curate.

Upon the whole [said Charles Wesley], I am fully persuaded almost all our preachers are corrupted already. More and more will give the Sacrament, and set up for themselves, before we die; and all except the few that get orders will turn Dissenters before or after our death.

Wesley was swept along by the movement; and it was only the respect and affection of his followers, their tenderness for what they would regard as the prejudices of his education and his early associations, which prevented an open separation during their founder's life.

IX.

IN Wales, Wesley was disabled from making much impression, owing to his ignorance of the Welsh language; and this difficulty was not to be overcome. "Oh," he cried, "what a heavy curse was the confusion of tongues, and how grievous are the effects of it!" This was the more disappointing to him as, on the occasion of his first journey into the principality, he had come to the conclusion that the inhabitants were "ripe for the gospel." In Scotland his difficulty was of another sort. His sermons left the Scotsmen, as a rule, perfectly unmoved. They heard him decorously, and that was all. Whitefield, on the other hand, was very popular, and expressed his pleasure at his success in characteristic fashion:

The good that has been done is inexpressible [said he on one occasion]. I am intimate with three noblemen and several ladies of quality, who have a great liking for the things of God. I