arge. In these societies the old Christian custom of love-feasts
was revived. The members sometimes passed almost the whole night in the
most passionate devotions, and voluntarily submitted to a spiritual
tyranny that could hardly be surpassed in a Catholic monastery. They
were to meet every week, to make an open and particular confession of
every frailty, to submit to be crossexamined on all their thoughts,
words, and deeds. The following among others were the questions asked at
every meeting: "What known sin have you committed since our last
meeting? What temptations have you met with? How were you delivered?
What have you thought, said, or done of which you doubt whether it be
sin or not? Have you nothing you desire to keep secret?"

Such rules could only have been accepted under the influence of an
overpowering religious enthusiasm, and there was much truth in the
judgment which the elder brother of John Wesley passed upon them in
1739. "Their societies," he wrote to their mother, "are sufficient to
dissolve all other societies but their own. Will any man of common sense
or spirit suffer any domestic to be in a band engaged to relate to five
or ten people everything without reserve that concerns the person's
conscience how much soever it may concern the family? Ought any married
persons to be there unless husband and wife be there together?"

From this time the leaders of the movement became the most active of
missionaries. Without any fixed parishes they wandered from place to
place, proclaiming their new doctrine in every pulpit to which they were
admitted, and they speedily awoke a passionate enthusiasm and a bitter
hostility in the Church.

We may blame, but we can hardly, I think, wonder at the hostility all
this aroused among the clergy. It is, indeed, certain that Wesley and
Whitefield were at this time doing more than any other contemporary
clergymen to kindle a living piety among the people. Yet before the end
of 1738 the Methodist leaders were excluded from most of the pulpits of
the Church, and were thus compelled, unless they consented to relinquish
what they considered a Divine mission, to take steps in the direction of
separation.

Two important measures of this nature were taken in 1739. One of them
was the creation of Methodist chapels, which were intended not to oppose
or replace, but to be supplemental and ancillary to, the churches, and
to secure that the doctrine of the new birth should be fai