ligious vitality of the Wesleyan movement came
also a quickened philanthropic spirit; a zeal for the instruction, the
purification, and the better life of men and women. The common
instinct of humanity always is to strive for higher and better ways of
living, if only once the word of guidance is given and the soul of true
manhood is roused to the work. Indeed, there is not much about this
period of English history concerning which the modern Englishman can
feel really proud except that great religious revival which began with
the thoughts and the teachings of John Wesley. One turns in relief
from the partisan struggles in Parliament and out of it, from the
intrigues and counter-intrigues of selfish and perfidious statesmen,
and {145} the alcove conspiracies of worthless women, to Wesley and his
religious visions, to Whitefield and his colliers, to Charles Wesley
and his sweet devotional hymns. Many of us are unable to have any
manner of sympathy with the precise doctrines and the forms of faith
which Wesley taught. But the man must have no sympathy with faith or
religious feeling of any kind who does not recognize the unspeakable
value of that great reform which Wesley and Whitefield introduced to
the English people. They taught moral doctrines which we all accept in
common, but they did not teach them after the cold and barren way of
the plodding, mechanical instructor. They thundered them into the
opening ears of thousands who had never been roused to moral sentiment
before. They inspired the souls of poor and commonplace creatures with
all the zealot's fire and all the martyr's endurance. They brought
tears to penitent eyes which had never been moistened before by any but
the selfish sense of personal pain or grief. They pierced through the
dull, vulgar, contaminated hideousness of low and vicious life, and
sent streaming in upon it the light of a higher world and a better law.
Every new Wesleyan became a missionary of Wesleyanism. The son
converted the father, the daughter won over the heart of the mother.
There was much that was hard, much that was fierce, in the doctrine and
the discipline of Methodism, but that time was not one in which gentler
teachings could much prevail. Men and women had to be startled into a
sense of the need of their spiritual regeneration. Wesley and the
comrades who worked with him in the beginning, and with some of whom,
like Whitefield, he ceased after a while to work, were j