iter, the sweet singer, of the movement. The meetings began
to grow larger, more enthusiastic, more impassioned, every day. John
Wesley brought to his work "a frame of adamant" as well as "a soul of
fire." No danger frighted him, and no labor tired. Rain, hail, snow,
storm, were matters of indifference to him when he had any work to do.
One reads the account of the toil he could cheerfully bear, the
privations he could recklessly undergo, the physical obstacles he could
surmount, with what would be a feeling of incredulity were it possible
to doubt the unquestionable evidence of a whole cloud of {138}
heterogeneous witnesses. Not Mark Antony, not Charles the Twelfth, not
Napoleon, ever went through such physical suffering for the love of
war, or for the conqueror's ambition, as Wesley was accustomed to
undergo for the sake of preaching at the right time and in the right
place to some crowd of ignorant and obscure men, the conversion of whom
could bring him neither fame nor fortune.

All the phenomena with which we have been familiar in modern times of
what are called "revivalist" meetings were common among the
congregations to whom Wesley preached. Women especially were affected
in this way. They raved, shrieked, struggled, flung themselves on the
ground, fainted, cried out that they were possessed by evil spirits.
Wesley rather encouraged these manifestations, and indeed quite
believed in their genuineness. No doubt for the most part they were
genuine: that is, they were the birth of hysterical, highly strung
natures, stimulated into something like epilepsy or temporary insanity
by the unbearable oppression of a wholly novel excitement. No such
evidences of emotion were ever given in the parish church where the
worthy clergyman read his duly prepared or perhaps thoughtfully
purchased sermon. Sometimes a new form of hysteria possessed some of
Wesley's congregations, and irrepressible peals of laughter broke from
some of the brethren and sisters, who declared that they were forced to
it by Satan. Wesley quite accepted this explanation, and so did most
of his companions. Two ladies, however, refused to believe, and
insisted that "any one might help laughing if she would." But very
soon after these two sceptics were seized with the very same sort of
irrepressible laughter. They continued for two days laughing almost
without cessation, "a spectacle to all," as Wesley tells, "and were
then upon prayer made for