mind as regards himself after the 24th of May, of what he so assiduously preached. As to the Moravians under whose guidance he had arrived so far, whom he praised warmly to his brother Samuel, he wrote of them a little later as follows:

Their practice is agreeable to their principles. Lazy and proud themselves, bitter and censorious toward others, they trample upon the ordinances and despise the commands of Christ. I see no middle point wherein we can meet.

At first the Moravians and the first followers of Wesley were in this country closely associated; but their views were at root too diametrically opposed for them to get on long together, and therefore at an early stage they broke off all intimacy of relation. The Wesleys were not more fortunate in their intercourse with the French prophets, a sect which had been expelled from the Cevennes by the French government. Charles Wesley was introduced to one of them at

Wickham, where they slept in the same room. This man insisted that the French prophets were equal, if not superior, to the prophets of the Old Testament. When they were undressing, the Frenchman fell into violent agitations and gobbled like a turkey-cock. Charles Wesley says:

I was frightened, and began exorcising him with,-"Thou deaf and dumb devil!" He soon recovered from his fit of inspiration. I prayed, and went to bed, not half-liking my bedfellow; nor did I sleep very sound with Satan so near

me.

Charles had great trouble with the French prophets in London, and his brother John had to warn his female disciples especially against them; and at Bristol, where the prophets had come, he advised his followers "to avoid as fire all who do not speak according to the law and the testimony." We have now arrived at the point where Wesley practically set up as a teacher on his own account, though he still, as ever,

held himself to be a member of the English Establishment, and was ready to insist upon the carrying out of rubrics which had fallen into disuse in the English Church, such, for instance, as the rebaptising of Dissenters. The doctrine which aroused most criticism and hostility was that of the new birth as enunciated by Wesley, with which was bound up that of Justification and of the Witness of the Spirit. Wesley argued that it was a Scriptural, practical, and experimental doctrine. There is no space here for any adequate statement of his doctrinal arguments. Suffice it to say that in England they aroused much controversial and scurrilous hostility.

V.

THE most important and critical years in the Evangelical revival were the first four or five in the fifth decade of the eighteenth century. In 1740 Wesley separated from the Moravians. In the following year, 1741, occurred the breach between him and Whitefield. Till 1742 Wesley had confined his activities to the pastoral care of his little groups of followers in London, Bristol, and Wales; but in this year began those ceaseless itinerant journeys which included the whole of England, and practically did not cease till his death, while on June 25, 1744, assembled what may be looked upon as to all intents and purposes, if not in name, the first Methodist Conference. Although the body of Oxonians who gathered about the Wesleys before they went to Georgia was so small, their proceedings had made a great noise; and within four years of their return from

Georgia the great sensation which their preaching and that of Whitefield produced was in full swing. The impression made by their preaching was immediate and wide-spread; and all those circumstances occurred for which they were most hotly attacked, the preaching in the fields and those mysterious phenomena which one writer characterises as "the extravagances of the Methodists." The hostility of mobs and of the clergy of the Protestant Establishment was slower in declaring itself. The events of the subsequent years were less striking, because the great figures of the Revival had become familiarised to the public mind, and their prominence as important factors in the national life was fully recognised. Moreover, the division on the subject of predestination began in 1741; and the subsequent controversies between Lady Huntingdon's connection or the Calvinistic Methodists, who were the predecessors