without any?--immediately my headache ceased and my horse's lameness in
the same instant." With a still more childish fanaticism he guided his
conduct, whether in ordinary events or in the great crises of his life,
by drawing lots or watching the particular texts at which his Bible
opened.

[Sidenote: His organization of Methodism.]

But with all this extravagance and superstition Wesley's mind was
essentially practical, orderly, and conservative. No man ever stood at
the head of a great revolution whose temper was so anti-revolutionary.
In his earlier days the bishops had been forced to rebuke him for the
narrowness and intolerance of his churchmanship. When Whitefield began
his sermons in the fields, Wesley "could not at first reconcile himself
to that strange way." He condemned and fought against the admission of
laymen as preachers till he found himself left with none but laymen to
preach. To the last he clung passionately to the Church of England, and
looked on the body he had formed as but a lay society in full communion
with it. He broke with the Moravians, who had been the earliest friends
of the new movement, when they endangered its safe conduct by their
contempt of religious forms. He broke with Whitefield when the great
preacher plunged into an extravagant Calvinism. But the same practical
temper of mind which led him to reject what was unmeasured, and to be
the last to adopt what was new, enabled him at once to grasp and
organize the novelties he adopted. He became himself the most unwearied
of field preachers, and his journal for half-a-century is little more
than a record of fresh journeys and fresh sermons. When once driven to
employ lay helpers in his ministry he made their work a new and
attractive feature in his system. His earlier asceticism only lingered
in a dread of social enjoyments and an aversion from the gayer and
sunnier side of life which links the Methodist movement with that of the
Puritans. As the fervour of his superstition died down into the calm of
age, his cool common sense discouraged in his followers the enthusiastic
outbursts which marked the opening of the revival. His powers were bent
to the building up of a great religious society which might give to the
new enthusiasm a lasting and practical form. The Methodists were grouped
into classes, gathered in love-feasts, purified by the expulsion of
unworthy members, and furnished with an alternation of settled ministers
and wanderin