seems to be a door opening for the nobility to hear the gospel, I will defer my journey, and, God willing, preach at your ladyship's. Oh that God may be with me, and make me humble! I am ashamed to think your ladyship will admit me under your roof. Much more am I amazed that the Lord Jesus will make use of such a creature as I am,— quite astonished at your ladyship's condescension, and the unmerited, superabounding grace of Him who has loved me and given Himself for me.

Wesley could not have written this. It would have choked him. But the tone and strain was acceptable, no doubt, to the countess and her friends; and the flavour of lusciousness in it has been a persistent characteristic of Whitefield's Calvinistic successors in the Establishment. Wesley, on the other hand, writing to an earl who was keenly interested in his work, says:

To speak rough truth, I do not desire any intercourse with any persons of quality in England. I mean for my own sake. They do me no good, and I fear I can do none to them.

And in another place he says:

In most genteel religious people there is so strange a mixture that I have seldom much confidence in them. But I love the poor: in many of them I find pure, genuine grace, unmixed with paint, folly, and affectation.

VII.

FROM a populace such as that of England in the middle of the eighteenth century, some turbulent hostility to such preaching as that of Wesley and Whitefield was to be expected. Yet Whitefield, at the beginning, had small cause for complaint. Both at Moorfields and Kennington Common he addressed enormous audiences, composed of all classes. As many as eighty carriages had been counted in one congregation, in addition to a large number of horsemen, and from thirty to forty thousand pedestrians. It was Whitefield who in London, no less than at Bristol, introduced Wesley to field preaching. The latter went down to Blackheath to hear his friend preach. There were twelve to fourteen thousand persons on the ground, when Whitefield asked Wesley to preach in his stead. This he did in compassion, he says, for the rich who were present. Many of

them, however, disappointed change of preachers, drove away. carriages. But at this time, be Predestinarian quarrel, we hear mob violence. As Wesley pr

with his work of an itineran preacher, it began to develop. It must be remembered that this was a time of political uneasiness. We were engaged in foreign war, and the Pretender might be expected any day. The most absurd lies were circulated about Wesley, with the intention, possibly, of stirring up the people against him; possibly, also, because men were ready to believe anything which seemed to be in prejudice of one whose proceedings they did not like. Some people said he was a Quaker, others an Anabaptist, and one man was bold enough to dub him a "Presbyterian Papist." It was averred that, having hanged himself, he was cut down just in time; that he was in receipt of large sums of money from the Spanish govern

ment, whose troops, when they landed, he was to join with twenty thousand men. They said he had been fined for selling gin, been in prison for high treason, and been seen with the Pretender in France. Charles Wesley was

haled before the Wakefield magistrates because he had been heard to pray that the Lord would "call home his banished ones"; and, of course, every one thought that he must mean the exiled house of Stuart. The magistrates, when Charles Wesley explained things to them, declared themselves perfectly satisfied with his innocence. The phenomena which have already been described excited antipathy. "Your preaching frightens people out of their wits," said Beau Nash, master of the ceremonies at Bath, who had interrupted one of Wesley's field preachings. "Sir," asked Wesley,

did you ever hear me preach?" "No," said Beau Nash. "How, then, can you judge of what you have never