guage which they borrowed from men of such noble and holy life as
Eckhart[603] and Tauler, and Nicolas of Basle, so the flagitious
conduct, at Bedford and elsewhere, of some who called themselves
Moravians threw scandal and odium on the tenets of the pure and
simple-minded community of Herrnhut. This was a danger to which Wesley
was, without doubt, all the more sensitive, because he lived among
hostile critics who were only too ready to discredit his teaching by
similar imputations on its tendencies. The truth is that Methodism, in
its different aspects, had so many points of contact with the essential
characteristics of mysticism, both in its highest and more
spiritualised, and in its grosser and more fanatical forms, that Wesley
was exceedingly anxious his system should not be confused with any such
'enthusiasm,' and dwelt with jealous care upon its more distinctive
features.

It has been already observed that a French historian of Christianity
speaks of Quakerism and Methodism as the two chief forms of English
mysticism.[604] To an educated man of ordinary observation in the
eighteenth century, especially if he regarded the new movement with
distrust, the analogy between this and different or earlier varieties of
'enthusiasm' appeared still more complete. Lord Lyttelton, for example,
in discussing a favourite theological topic of that age--namely, the
absence of enthusiasm in St. Paul, and his constant appeals to the
evidence of reason and the senses--contrasts with the life and writings
of the Apostles the extravagant imaginations, and the pretensions to
Divine illumination, of 'mystics, ancient and modern,' mediaeval saints,
'Protestant sectaries of the last age, and some of the Methodists
now.'[605] Montanus and Dionysius, St. Francis and Ignatius Loyola,
Madame Bourignon, George Fox, and Whitefield are all ranked together in
the same general category. Methodists, Moravians, and Hutchinsonians are
classed as all nearly-related members of one family. Just in the same
way[606] Bishop Lavington, in his 'Enthusiasm of Methodists and
Papists,' has entered into an elaborate comparison between what he finds
in Wesley's journals and in the lives and writings of saints and mystics
of the Roman Church.[607] Nor does he fail to discover similar
resemblances to Methodist experiences among the old mystic philosophers,
Montanists, Quakers, French Quietists, French prophets, and Moravians.
The argumentative value of Lavington's