took forms
at once grotesque and sublime. Charles Wesley, a Christ Church student,
came to add sweetness to this sudden and startling light. He was the
"sweet singer" of the movement. His hymns expressed the fiery conviction
of its converts in lines so chaste and beautiful that its more
extravagant features disappeared. The wild throes of hysteric enthusiasm
passed into a passion for hymn-singing, and a new musical impulse was
aroused in the people which gradually changed the face of public
devotion throughout England.

[Sidenote: John Wesley.]

But it was his elder brother, John Wesley, who embodied in himself not
this or that side of the new movement, but the movement itself. Even at
Oxford, where he resided as a fellow of Lincoln, he had been looked upon
as head of the group of Methodists, and after his return from a quixotic
mission to the Indians of Georgia he again took the lead of the little
society, which had removed in the interval to London. In power as a
preacher he stood next to Whitefield; as a hymn-writer he stood second
to his brother Charles. But while combining in some degree the
excellences of either, he possessed qualities in which both were utterly
deficient; an indefatigable industry, a cool judgement, a command over
others, a faculty of organization, a singular union of patience and
moderation with an imperious ambition, which marked him as a ruler of
men. He had besides a learning and skill in writing which no other of
the Methodists possessed; he was older than any of his colleagues at the
start of the movement, and he outlived them all. His life indeed almost
covers the century. He was born in 1703 and lived on till 1791, and the
Methodist body had passed through every phase of its history before he
sank into the grave at the age of eighty-eight. It would have been
impossible for Wesley to have wielded the power he did had he not shared
the follies and extravagance as well as the enthusiasm of his disciples.
Throughout his life his asceticism was that of a monk. At times he lived
on bread only, and he often slept on the bare boards. He lived in a
world of wonders and divine interpositions. It was a miracle if the rain
stopped and allowed him to set forward on a journey. It was a judgement
of heaven if a hailstorm burst over a town which had been deaf to his
preaching. One day, he tells us, when he was tired and his horse fell
lame, "I thought cannot God heal either man or beast by any means or