book may be taken for what it was
worth. To his own contemporaries it appeared the achievement of a great
triumph if he could prove in frequent cases an almost identical tone of
thought in Wesley and in Francis of Assisi or Francis de Sales. To most
minds in our own days it will rather seem as if he were constantly
dealing blows which only rebounded upon himself, in comparing his
opponent to men whose deep piety and self-denying virtues, however much
tinged by the errors of their time and order, worked wonders in the
revival of earnest faith. On the whole Lavington proved his case
successfully, but he only proved by what easy transitions the purest and
most exalted faith may pass into extravagances, and, above all, the
folly of his own Church in not endeavouring to find scope for her
enthusiasts and mystics, as Rome had done for a Loyola and a St.
Theresa. He himself was a typical example of the tone of thought out of
which this infatuation grew. What other views could be looked for from a
bishop who, though himself an awakening preacher and a good man, whose
dying words[608] were an ascription of glory to God ([Greek: doxa to
theo]), was yet so wholly blind to the more intense manifestations of
religious fervour that he could see nothing to admire, nothing even to
approve, in the burning zeal of the founders of the Franciscans and of
the Jesuits? Of the first he had nothing more to say than that he was
'at first only a well-minded but weak enthusiast, afterwards a mere
hypocrite and impostor;' of the other he spoke with a certain compassion
as 'that errant, shatter-brained, visionary fanatic.'[609] And the
Methodist, he thought, had a somewhat 'similar texture of brain.'

The Methodist leaders were wholly free from some dangerous tendencies
which mysticism has been apt to develop. They never disparaged any of
the external aids to religion; their meaning is never hidden under a
haze of dim conceptions; above all, they never showed the slightest
inclination to the vague and unpractical pantheistic opinions which are
often nurtured by a too exclusive insistance on the indwelling and
pervading operations of the Divine Spirit. In the two latter points they
resembled the Quietist and Port-Royal mystics of the French school, who
always aimed at lucidity of thought and language, rather than those of
German origin. From mystics generally they differed, most of all, in
adopting the Pauline rather than the Johannine phraseology.