I.

THE great religious movement of the eighteenth century known as the Evangelical Revival has been largely identified in the popular mind with the person of John Wesley. Neither he nor Whitefield, with whom during his early career as a field preacher he was so intimately associated, was the creator of that movement, but they were certainly its two most impressive personalities; and the man who is not uncommonly alluded to as "the founder of Methodism" fills a universally recognised place of importance among the great figures in the historical development of the Anglo-Saxon character. The Evangelical Revival of the last century has exerted influence outside the separate religious organisations which were its direct outcome, and was indubitably the forerunner of that great movement

with which religiously the nineteenth century is associated, which made itself first manifest at Oxford some twenty years after the battle of Waterloo. The great communions of Methodists in this country, in the colonies, and in the United States, who still look to Wesley as their doctrinal teacher, must, if their merely nominal adherents are taken into account, number some millions at least. It is not necessary, therefore, to offer any apology for including so great a name in the biographies of this series.

To form a just appreciation of his work and of the incidents which marked its inception, it is important to know something of the moral condition of England at the early part of the eighteenth century. William III. died in 1702, and Wesley was born in the following year. Now Bishop Burnet, who was the Prince of Orange's companion in his successful entry into England in 1688, wrote as follows of clerical can

didates in 1713, when Wesley would be ten years old:

Our ember weeks are the burden and grief of my life. The much greater part of those who come to be ordained are ignorant to a degree not to be apprehended by those who are not obliged to know it. The easiest part of knowledge is that to which they are the greatest strangers: I mean the plainest parts of the Scriptures. They can give no account, or at least a very imperfect one, of the contents of the gospels or of the catechism itself.

Englishmen are, not without reason, proud of the general respect shown in this country at the present time to the first day of the week. Yet in the early part of the eighteenth century it was not so. Here, for instance, is the testimony of the Bishop of Lichfield, preaching in 1724 before the Society for the Reformation of Manners. He said:

The Lord's Day is now the devil's market day. More lewdness, more drunkenness, more quarrels and murders, more sin is contrived and committed on this day than on all the other

days of the week together. Strong liquors are become the epidemic of this great city. More of the common people die of consumptions, fevers, dropsies, cholics, palsies, and apoplexies, contracted by the immoderate use of brandies and distilled waters, than of all distempers besides arising from other causes. Sin in general is grown so hardened and rampant as that immoralities are defended, yea, justified on principle. Obscene, wanton, and profane books find so good a market as to encourage the trade of publishing them. Every kind of sin has found a writer to teach and vindicate it, and a book-seller and hawker to divulge and spread it.

If it may be thought that the bishops were professionally predisposed to accentuate the situation, we have the concurrent testimony of Montesquieu on his visit to England. "In the higher circles," said the French writer, "every one laughs if one talks of religion." Most of the prominent politicians of the time rejected Christianity altogether, while they were remarkable for coarseness and immorality. It affected Walpole's popularity not one whit that he