'Full hard it is to read aright The course of heavenly cause, or understand That rules men's waies, and rules the thoughts of living wight.' The positive merits of John Wesley were distinguished, and will come in for discussion when we sum up his character; meanwhile we shall take occasion to dwell upon his comparative greatness. The incidents of history and the objects of nature derive much of their impressiveness from the circumstances surrounding both. Contrast is essential to grand effects. The massacre at Bethlehem gathers blackness from the infant age of the victims; and the frantic leap of Niagara contrasts finely with the oily smoothness of the river above the Fall. The voyager near earth's central line' -the region of perpetual sun and frequent calm; where the surface of the sea is unbroken with a billow, yet the bulk of the ocean moves together like some monster labouring under an oppressive load ' in torrid clime 6 6 Dark heaving, boundless, endless, and sublime ;'— marks the huge sweltering gambols of the whale, and hears the loud hiss and rush of the jet he projects into the air, best in the cool grey and death-like stillness of the early dawn. The level and the quiet of all around convey the most vivid and instantaneous impressions to the watcher's eye and ear; and There is that leviathan!' (Ps. civ. 26) bursts from the lips with an assurance and a rapture which its unwieldy pas seuls would not awaken amid the stirring activities of day and the distraction of stormier scenes and wilder moods. And having traversed under a burning summer sun the length of some Swiss valley, and encountered in your fatiguing march, knapsack on shoulder and staff in hand, the varieties of mid-winter temperature by the mer de glace, and the heat of the dog-days in deep, serene, and sheltered nooks, where air to breathe seems almost as great a rarity as wind to blow, where the fumes of the rank vegetation and the wild flowers are stifling and unhealthy, what think you is the fittest time and place to hear the thunder of the avalanche, and trace and tremble at its fall? It is just at that cool hour when, refreshed at your hostelry, your sense of weariness is removed, but sufficient languor remains to tame down your mind into harmony with the scene, and you wander out some half-mile from your temporary home, like the orphan patriarch of old, to meditate at eventide. The sun has just set over the Jungfrau or Schreckhorn, and, liberal of its cosmetics, has laid its red upon the dead cheek of the everlasting snow. There is not a breeze stirring. The brief twilight is just about to close in night. The wing of the last loitering bee has been folded in its hive. The beetle has droned his sonorous vesper hymn. All is silence, uninterrupted by a sound, except perchance at distant intervals the faint bleat of the goat on the rock high overhead, or the whistle of some shepherd-pipe in the hand of the rustic returning from his labour : 'for here the patriarchal days Are not a pastoral fable; pipes in the liberal air Then on the startled ear that has been learning wisdom at the feet of silence bursts a crack, like the sharp instantaneous report of a rifle, followed and drowned on the moment by a confused rustle, hoarse rumble, and afterwards a heavy thunderous sound of fall and concussion comparable to nothing so much as the cadence of ten thousand woolpacks dropped together upon a boarden floor. The danger is not near, but the vibrations of the air and the almost breathless hush of the evening make it seem so. A mountain of snow and commingled ice has fallen up some gorge that debouches into our valley, and a spray of snowy particles, which rises cloudwise into the darkening sky, shows the scene and the nature of the ruinous visitation. The tranquillity of the hour makes the crash more loud, the devastation more appalling. Amid lightning, tempest, and thunder, the chief effect had been lostthe avalanche had been unnoticed-the crown of majesty had fallen unheeded from the monarch mountain's head. A phenomenon with like effect appealing to a different sense will show itself in other scenes. As the traveller approaches Rome from the south, leaving Naples with its charms and its cheats, its lazzaroni and its liveliness, its exquisite sky and sea, with its execrable superstition, dirt, and frivolity behind; but notwithstanding all its drawbacks, where 6 'Simply to feel that we breathe, that we live, e? Is worth all the joys that life elsewhere can give,' and passing the sounding sea, and the dismal marish, lofty Terracina, and lowly Fondi, at length tops the range that encloses the Campagna southward, what object is it chiefly arrests the eye In that great ocean of a plain, a hundred miles by fifty, the seeming crater of some gigantic volcano with its sulphur streams and its noisome stenches, like a barque upon the waters floats imperial Rome, the object most conspicuous in the eternal city the wondrous cupola, which speaks her the queen of architectural grandeur, resting like a diadem upon her brow, and bearing no remote resemblance to the tiara of her pontiff ruler ;--nothing besides can arrest arrest the gaze. The eye takes in in its sweep the mountain line of the northern and eastern horizon, Soracte empurpled by distance with its sister ridges on the right, the silver sea with Ostia on the left. It marks the ruins that here and there stud the plain, the tombs, the towns, the towers, the arches, and the aqueducts, the long reaches of which last stretch in picturesque continuity here and there, like a caravan of mules winding over the sierras of Granada. We stand on the brow of Albano, sheltering ourselves from the midday sun under the shade of some broad planetree, or luxuriant elm, or embowering vine, and seee-we cannot but see-the tomb of Pompey, the ruins of Bovillæ, Frattochie, Torre di Mezza Via, perhaps even Metella's tomb, and catch glimpses now and then of the unequalled Via Appia, its geometrical rectitude in striking contrast with the serpentining Tiber; but above all, and beyond all, we look upon that group in the centre of the picture, that lone mother of dead empires, the Niobe of nations'-Rome. All objects besides are unattractive; the mountains too distant, the ruins too bare, the wild flowers of this huge prairie too minute and commonplace for special attention; all things near the soil, too, quiver in the dazzling light and burning heat of noon; but high above the undulating vapour, and towering in its Parian whiteness up into an angelic sky, rises the colossal creation of Buonarotti's genius. We glance at other objects; we gaze at this. It breaks the line of our northern horizon with a pomp and pretension that nothing besides can dare. It looms out of the bosom of the weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable' foreground, a pleasant and most exciting landmark, an ecclesiastical Eddystone, in the unbillowy sea of the Campagna. This greatest of man's works, which would be insignificant beside the works of God-the Alps or the nearer Apennines, is here great, comparatively so, just as a man of five feet stature would be a giant among Lilliputians of one. We speak not of its moral interest, that is superlative and enchaining, but of its material inches, whereby it overtops almost every object within a circuit of twenty miles. Look from any extremity of the Campagna to the centre, and St. Peter's, like a stone Saul, overmeasures all competing altitudes by the head and lofty shoulders. 6 And this brings us, by a roundabout way possibly, to the point at which we aim-a comparative estimate of the greatness of John Wesley by the littleness of the times in which he lived. Our purpose has been too obvious, we trust, to need the application of our figures. We mean simply to imply that Wesley was that waterspout and snowy spray-jet, roaring in the stillness of morning, and arched over the calm surface of the sea on the grey canvas of the horizon; -Wesley that ice-crash rasping down the mountain mountain-side, startling the ear of silence in Helvetian solitudes, upsetting the equilibrium of all things, shaking the earth and air and the listener's frame, like the spasm of an earthquake ;— Wesley, in fine, that dome, the vast and wondrous dome,' lofty in proportions, perfect in symmetry, suspended in mid-air, by the happy conception of him whose great thought, like all great thoughts, was manifestly inspired, a heavenly guest, a ray of immortality,' and which aërial pile, wander where we will within its range, is the attracting centre of vision, the cynosure of all eyes. In the particular field Wesley took upon him to cultivate, he stood alone, or almost alone, and his position adds magnitude to all his dimensions. He fills the picture. It were scarce exaggeration to travestie the Grand Lewis's terse egotism, The State! that is I,' and put it into our reformer's mouth at the commencement of his career-Religion! that is I.' The religious sensibility of England lay dead or chained in the breathless, hushed, and stony sleep' of the Princess Dormita and her retinue in the fairy tale. He alone seemed awake to the exigencies of the times, the responsibilities of the ministry, the corruption of manners, and the value of souls. This statement will of course be understood with all the qualification truth demands on behalf of some exemplary parish clergymen who sparsely enlightened the darkness around them, but who never passed into the broad sunshine of general reputation or extensive influence. There were those, we gladly own, who bowed not the knee to the prevailing dissoluteness or indifference; but, like angels' visits, these were few and far between. And it is not to be denied that in many non-conformist places of worship, under the combined influence of the persecutions of earlier years, general contempt, and their close-borough constitution and government which took them out of the healthful and conservative current of public opinion, vital religion was becoming a name, and the doctrine of the Cross passing into another Gospel' in which the Cross had no place. Arianism, with stealthy steps, was creeping in upon the fold of Presbyterianism for to steal, and to kill, and to destroy,' while Independency either withered into a cold protest against the established episcopacy, shot into seed in the unhealthy luxuriance of hyper-Calvinism, or was too insignificant to be of any account whatever in an ecclesiastical notice of the period. The general condition of the Church of England was deplorable. There was no lack of learning and respectability in many quarters, but as a whole its state could not satisfy a conscientious observer. The study of the Greek language and the introduction of the theology of the Greek school since the Reformation, together with various political causes, had combined to produce a latitudi narian and moderated style of preaching and acting amongst the clergy at large. The best men were most entirely under the influences we have named. Their learning, their enlightened hatred of the fanaticism under the Commonwealth, and an honourable sense of the advantages of their position, made them carefully shun the excesses of non-conforming zeal, and generously avoid giving offence to conscientious dissenters. The names of Tillotson and Tennison, Doctors Samuel Clark and Jortin, will tolerably fairly represent the reigning spirit of the better part of the clerical body about the commencement of the eighteenth century, while others were contented to be as devoid of evangelical unction as they, without their accomplishments and decent behaviour. But in the ministry of souls moderation is madness, and want of zeal death. Men betake themselves to a formal minister as they do to the gravedigger, an inevitable but unpleasant functionary, whose services they never relish, and whose inane moralities cannot edify. Such unfortunately was the ecclesiastical condition of England when the Wesleys arose, and it is no breach of charity to aver, that, weighed in the balances of heaven, the existing ministry throughout the country was found at that period, as to its most exalted aims and divine results, utterly wanting. We are not blind to the subordinate advantages a widely-established corporation of more or less educated men must entail upon a land, men by their profession the friends of order, decency, and humanity; but at the same time we cannot forget that the church is neither a police-court, a philosophical school, nor an almonry. Men may be mild magistrates, wise teachers, exemplary country gentlemen, without fear and without reproach on the score of morals and manners, and yet be destitute of the spirit of their office and ignorant of its claims. We draw the veil over anything worse which presents itself for comment in the clerical profession at that period. There was enough in the aspect of the times, even upon the most indulgent showing, to make the mission of some such agent as John Wesley a necessity as imperative as the mission of one of the judges in the straits and abjectness of Israel, or the requisitions of the economic law that the demand regulates the supply. 6 In such circumstances was Providence nurturing a man for the hour, while the hour was as divinely and obviously prepared for the man. And neither from kingly courts nor cloistered cells was the hero of this strange eventful history' to come-the man that was to work wider change upon the religious and social aspect of England than has ever been effected by any reformer since Christianity visited our shores. In truth, his sympathies were neither with the monk nor the monarch, but, a child of the people, as all great |