ght to repentance.

[Sidenote: 1738--An "archbishop of the slums"]

Things were still worse in the Established Church of Ireland. Hardly a
pastor of that Church could speak three words of the language of the
Irish people. Lord Stanhope, in his "History of England from the Peace
of Utrecht," writes as if the Irish clergymen--the clergymen, that is,
of the Established Church of Ireland--might have accomplished wonders
in the way of converting the Irish peasantry to Protestantism if they
only could have preached and controverted in the Irish language. We
are convinced that they could have done nothing of the kind. The Irish
Celtic population is in its very nature a Catholic population. Not all
the preaching since Adam {131} could have made them other than that.
Still it struck John Wesley very painfully later on that the effort was
never made, and that the men who could not talk to the Irish people in
their own tongue, and who did not take the trouble to learn the
language, were not in a promising condition for the conversion of
souls. The desire of Wesley and his brother, and Whitefield and the
rest, seems only at first to have been an awakening of the Church in
these islands to a sense of her duty. They do not appear to have had
any very far-reaching hopes or plans. They saw that the work was left
undone, and they labored to bring about a spirit which should lead men
to the doing of it. At first they only held their little meetings on
each succeeding Sunday; but they found themselves warming to the task,
and they began to meet and confer very often. Their one thought was
how to get at the people; how to get at the lowly, the ignorant, and
the poor. Soon they began to see that the lowly, the ignorant, and the
poor would not come to the Church, and that, therefore, the Church must
go out to them. In a day much nearer to our own a prelate of the
Established Church indulged in a very unlucky and unworthy sneer at the
expense of the first Roman Catholic Archbishop of Westminster. He
called him an "Archbishop of the slums." The retort was easy and
conclusive. It was an admission. "Exactly; that is just what I am. I
am an archbishop of the slums; that is my business; that is what I
desire to be. My ministry is among the hovels and the garrets and the
slums; yours, I admit, is something very different."

This illustrates to the life the central idea which was forming itself
gradually and slowly into shape in