the mind of John Wesley and in the
minds of his associates. They saw that archbishops of the slums were
the very prelates whom England needed. Their souls revolted against
the apparently accepted idea that the duties of a priest of the Church
of England were fulfilled by the preaching of a chill, formal, written
sermon once a week, and the attendance {132} on Court ceremonials, and
the dining at the houses of those who would then have been called "the
great." An institution which could do no more and strove to do no more
than the Church of England was then doing did not seem to them to
deserve the name of a Church. It was simply a branch of the Civil
Service of the State. But Wesley and his brother, and Whitefield and
the rest, fully believed at first that they could do something to
quicken the Church into a real, a beneficent, and a religions activity.
Most of them had for a long time a positive horror of open-air
preaching and of the co-operation of lay preachers. Most of them for a
long time clung to all the traditional forms and even formulas amid
which they had grown up. What Wesley and the others did not see at
first, or for long after, was that the Church of England was not then
equal to the work which ought to have been hers. A great change was
coming over the communities and the population of England. Small
hamlets were turning into large towns. Great new manufacturing
industries were creating new classes of working-men. Coal-mines were
gathering together vast encampments of people where a little time
before there had been idle heath or lonely hill-side. The Church of
England, with her then hide-bound constitution and her traditional
ways, was not equal to the new burdens which she was supposed to
undertake. She suffered also from that lack of competition which is
hurtful to so many institutions. The Church of Rome had been
suppressed for the time in this country, and the most urgent means had
been employed to keep the Dissenters down; therefore the Church of
England had grown contented, sleek, inert, and was no longer equal to
its work. This fact began after a while to impress itself more and
more on the minds of the little band who worked with John Wesley. They
resisted the idea to the very last; they hoped and believed and dreamed
that they might still be part of the Church of England. They found
themselves drawn outside the Church, and they found, too, that when
once they had gone even a ver