racters and careers have been
briefly sketched were the chief promoters of what may be termed the
Methodist, as distinguished from the Evangelical, movement, in the
technical sense of that epithet. There were many others who would be
worthy of a place in a larger history. Thomas Walsh, Wesley's most
honoured friend; Dr. Coke ('a second Walsh,' Wesley called him), who
sacrificed a good position and a considerable fortune entirely to the
Methodist cause; Mr. Perronet, the excellent Vicar of Shoreham, to whom
both the brothers Wesley had recourse in every important crisis, and who
was called by Charles Wesley 'the Archbishop of Methodism;' Sir John
Thorold, a pious Lincolnshire baronet; John Nelson, the worthy
stonemason of Birstal, who was pressed as a soldier simply because he
was a Methodist, and whose death John Wesley thus records in his
Journal: 'This day died John Nelson, and left a wig and half-a-crown--as
much as any unmarried minister ought to leave;' Sampson Stainforth, Mark
Bond, and John Haine, the Methodist soldiers who infused a spirit of
Methodism in the British Army; Howell Harris, the life and soul of Welsh
Methodism; Thomas Olivers, the converted reprobate, who rode one hundred
thousand miles on one horse in the cause of Methodism, and who was
considered by John Wesley as a strong enough man to be pitted against
the ablest champions of Calvinism; John Pawson, Alexander Mather and
other worthy men--of humble birth, it may be, and scanty acquirements,
but earnest, devoted Christians--would all deserve to be noticed in a
professed history of Methodism. In a brief sketch, like the present, all
that can be said of them is, 'Cum tales essent, utinam nostri fuissent.'

(2) THE CALVINISTIC CONTROVERSY.

The Methodists met with a vast amount of opposition; but, after all,
there was a more formidable enemy to the progress of the Evangelical
revival than any from without. The good men who made so bold and
effectual a stand against vice and irreligion in the last century might
have been still more successful had they presented a united front to the
common foe; but, unfortunately, a spirit of discord within their ranks
wasted their strength and diverted them from work for which they were
admirably adapted to work for which they were by no means fitted.
Hitherto our attention has been mainly directed to the strength of the
movement. The pure lives and disinterested motives of the founders of
Methodism, their ceasel