out at the door and left her: then she immediately found her legs and walked off. Some very unstill sisters, who always took care to stand near me and tried who could cry loudest, since I have had them removed out of my sight, have been as quiet as lambs.

It does not seem easy to account for a large part of the phenomena of early Methodism on purely natural grounds. People were ready enough to do so then. Fits, hysterics, lunacy, were words very easily spoken, but scarcely carried absolute conviction to sincere and thoughtful people. Miss Julia Wedgwood, the author of one well-known Life of Wesley, puts forth the following theory :

Any one [she says] who studies the account with the same attention as he would give to that of any other strange event will be convinced that there was something in the personal influence of Wesley (for it certainly does not remain in his sermons) which had the power of impressing on a dull and lethargic world such a sense of the horror of evil, its mysterious closeness to the human soul, and the need of a miracle for the separation of the two, as no one perhaps could suddenly receive without some violent physical effect.

Whatever may have been the cause, there can be no question that these events excited a strong prejudice in the minds of many of Wesley's contemporaries, notably of the Anglican episcopate and clergy, and did not tend to lessen the breach which was opening between him and them. They were very marked during his stay in Bristol, which lasted two months; and, though they were of frequent recurrence, it will not be necessary to say more about them here.

VI.

I HAVE already alluded to the breach with the Moravians. This became final in 1740. Wesley accused them of being cruel and deceitful men. And in his journals he published charges made by others, which were of the foulest kind. One passage may be quoted as a specimen of the rest, and of Wesley's change of mood towards his teachers of but a brief while before :

Mr. Rimins has said nothing [he observes] to what might have been said concerning their marriage ceremony. I know a hundred times more than he has written, but the particulars are too shocking to relate. I believe no such things were ever practised before; no, not among the most barbarous heathens.

Count Zinzendorf and Wesley, it is plain, were quite incompatible with each other.

But, interesting as is this breach, it is of small importance as compared with that which declared itself between Wesley and Whitefield on the subject of pre

destination. The latter had returned to America, on a second visit; and Wesley had written to him to obtain his approval of his own doctrines of "perfection," and of the "free, full, and present salvation from all the guilt, all the power, and all the inbeing of sin" and his denial of the Calvinistic tenet of election and irreversible decrees. Whitefield, who was a man of great personal amiability, then and always sincerely attached to Wesley, was anxious to avoid the controversy.

The doctrine of election [he replied] and the final perseverance of those who are in Christ I am ten thousand times more convinced of, if possible, than when I saw you last. You think otherwise. Why, then, should we dispute, when there is no probability of convincing? Will it not, in the end, destroy brotherly love, and insensibly take from us that cordial union and sweetness of soul which I pray God may always subsist between us?

This, on the whole, is very kindly and sensibly put; but after an interval of

two months he writes again to Wesley,

and in another strain :

The more [he says] I examine the writings of the most experienced men, and the experiences of the most established Christians, the more I differ from your notion about not committing sin, and your denying the doctrines of election and the final perseverance of the saints. I dread coming to England, unless you are resolved to oppose those truths with less warmth than when I was there last. I dread your coming over to America, because the work of God is carried on here, and that in a most glorious manner, by doctrines quite opposite to those you hold.

There was much more to the same effect; but Wesley seems to have taken it all very calmly, and thanked Whitefield for his letter. In the course of his reply he made the following striking and suggestive observations:

The case is quite plain. There are bigots both for predestination and against it. God is sending a message to those on either side, but neither will receive it unless from one who is of

their own opinion. Therefore for a time you are suffered to be of one opinion and I of another.