teadfastly
adhered to his one purpose of seeking God. Now he had found Him; and he
found that the grace which he had toiled to win by prayers and fasts, by
almsdeeds and self-abnegation, was a gift, "without money, and without
price."

Once established in the faith of Christ, his whole soul burned with the
desire to spread everywhere a knowledge of the glorious gospel of God's
free grace. "I look upon all the world as my parish," he said; "in
whatever part of it I am, I judge it meet, right, and my bounden duty, to
declare unto all that are willing to hear, the glad tidings of
salvation."(374)

He continued his strict and self-denying life, not now as the _ground_,
but the _result_ of faith; not the _root_, but the _fruit_ of holiness.
The grace of God in Christ is the foundation of the Christian's hope, and
that grace will be manifested in obedience. Wesley's life was devoted to
the preaching of the great truths which he had received,--justification
through faith in the atoning blood of Christ, and the renewing power of
the Holy Spirit upon the heart, bringing forth fruit in a life conformed
to the example of Christ.

Whitefield and the Wesleys had been prepared for their work by long and
sharp personal convictions of their own lost condition; and that they
might be able to endure hardness as good soldiers of Christ, they had been
subjected to the fiery ordeal of scorn, derision, and persecution, both in
the university and as they were entering the ministry. They and a few
others who sympathized with them were contemptuously called Methodists by
their ungodly fellow-students,--a name which is at the present time
regarded as honorable by one of the largest denominations in England and
America.

As members of the Church of England, they were strongly attached to her
forms of worship, but the Lord had presented before them in His word a
higher standard. The Holy Spirit urged them to preach Christ and Him
crucified. The power of the Highest attended their labors. Thousands were
convicted and truly converted. It was necessary that these sheep be
protected from ravening wolves. Wesley had no thought of forming a new
denomination, but he organized them under what was called the Methodist
Connection.

Mysterious and trying was the opposition which these preachers encountered
from the established church; yet God, in His wisdom, had overruled events
to cause the reform to begin within the church itself. Had it come wholly