Jesus Christ just described. The Wesleyan
Church, the parent of the whole great Methodist movement, arose at the
end of the 18th century from somewhat similar reasons. There was never
anything schismatic in the spirit of John Wesley, but when he found that
the rigour and stiffness of Anglicanism made a free spiritual witness
almost impossible, he was driven, like the Nonconformists of the
Elizabethan times, to set up separate churches. While it is quite true
that the great principle for which English Nonconformity has stood is
now almost universally accepted, and that what may be called the
negative witness of the Free Churches is much less necessary than it
used to be, there is still room for their positive contribution to the
religious life of the country, for their witness to freedom,
spirituality, and the rights of the people in the Church. For a long
time, no doubt, they did rejoice in the dissidence of their dissent, and
they suffered, and still suffer, to some degree, from a Pharisaic
feeling of superiority to those whom they regard as bound by tradition
and State rule. The great majority among them, however, have long since
come to feel that they have more in common with one another and with
many in the Anglican Church than they have been hitherto prepared to
admit, and that existence in isolation from the rest of Christendom is
neither good for them nor helpful to the cause of Christ and His
Kingdom. This feeling first took definite shape about the year 1890 in
connexion with what are now known as the Grindelwald Conferences. For
three successive years informal parties of clergy and ministers were
arranged by Sir Henry Lunn, at Grindelwald and Lucerne, with the object
of getting representatives of the different churches together in order
to exchange views on the subject of union, and to create an atmosphere
of mutual knowledge, sympathy, and friendliness. Although no practical
steps directly followed them, these conferences undoubtedly did good by
removing misunderstandings and paving a way for further intercourse. To
many of the Free Churchmen who attended them they seem to have suggested
for the first time the evils of our unhappy divisions, and they
certainly created a desire for better relations. It became obvious that
one of the necessary first steps in this direction would be the setting
up of a closer cooperation among the Free Churches themselves, and of
breaking down the denominational isolation in whic