er of enthusiasm was sustained.

But with all its divisions and defects the movement was unquestionably
effecting a great moral revolution in England. It was essentially a
popular movement, exercising its deepest influence over the lower and
middle classes. Some of its leaders were men of real genius, but in
general the Methodist teacher had little sympathy with the more educated
of his fellow-countrymen. To an ordinarily cultivated mind there was
something extremely repulsive in his tears and groans and amorous
ejaculations, in the coarse and anthropomorphic familiarity and the
unwavering dogmatism with which he dealt with the most sacred subjects,
in the narrowness of his theory of life and his utter insensibility to
many of the influences that expand and embellish it, in the mingled
credulity and self-confidence with which he imagined that the whole
course of nature was altered for his convenience. But the very qualities
that impaired his influence in one sphere enhanced it in another. His
impassioned prayers and exhortations stirred the hearts of multitudes
whom a more decorous teaching had left absolutely callous. The
supernatural atmosphere of miracles, judgments, and inspirations in
which he moved, invested the most prosaic life with a halo of romance.
The doctrines he taught, the theory of life he enforced, proved
themselves capable of arousing in great masses of men an enthusiasm of
piety which was hardly surpassed in the first days of Christianity, of
eradicating inveterate vice, of fixing and directing impulsive and
tempestuous natures that were rapidly hastening toward the abyss. Out of
the profligate slave-dealer, John Newton, Methodism formed one of the
purest and most unselfish of saints. It taught criminals in Newgate to
mount the gallows in an ecstasy of rapturous devotion. It planted a
fervid and enduring religious sentiment in the midst of the most brutal
and most neglected portions of the population, and whatever may have
been its vices or its defects, it undoubtedly emancipated great numbers
from the fear of death, and imparted a warmer tone to the devotion and a
greater energy to the philanthropy of every denomination both in England
and the colonies.

III. INVESTIGATIONS AND PROBLEMS

1. Social Unrest

The term collective behavior, which has been used elsewhere to include
all the facts of group life, has been limited for the purposes of this
chapter to those phenomena which exhibit in the