But, with some important differences, there can be no question that
Methodism rose and prospered under the same influences which in every
age of Christianity, or rather in every age of the world, have attended
all the most notable outbursts of mystic revivalism. Its causes were the
same; its higher manifestations were much the same; its degenerate and
exaggerated forms were the same; its primary and most essential
principle was the same. As the religious brotherhoods of the
Pythagoreans rose in spiritual revolt against the lax mythology and
careless living of the Sybarites in Sicily;[610] as in the third century
of the Christian era Neoplatonism concentrated within itself whatever
remains of faith and piety lingered in the creeds and philosophies of
paganism;[611] as in the Middle Ages devout men, wearied with forms and
controversies, and scholastic reasoners seeking refuge from the logical
and metaphysical problems with which they had perplexed theology, sought
more direct communion with God in the mystic devotion of Anselm and
Bernard, of Hugo and Bonaventura;[612] as Bertholdt and Nicolas, Eckhart
and Tauler,[613] organised their new societies throughout Germany to
meet great spiritual needs which established systems had wholly ceased
to satisfy; as Arndt and Spener and Francke in the seventeenth century
breathed new life into the Lutheran Church, and set on foot their
'collegia pietatis,' their systematised prayer-meetings, to supplement
the deficiencies of the time[614]--so in the England of the eighteenth
century, when the force of religion was chilled by drowsiness and
indifference in some quarters, by stiffness and formality and
over-cautious orthodoxy in others, when the aspirations of the soul were
being ever bidden rest satisfied with the calculations of sober reason,
when proofs and evidences and demonstrations were offered, and still
offered, to meet the cry of those who called for light, how else should
religion stem the swelling tide of profligacy but by some such inward
spiritual revival as those by which it had heretofore renewed its
strength? If Wesley and Whitefield and their fellow-workers had not come
to the rescue, no doubt other reformers of a somewhat kindred spirit
would have risen in their stead. How or whence it is useless to
speculate. Perhaps Quakerism, or something nearly akin to it, might have
assumed the dimensions to which a half-century before it had seemed not
unlikely to grow. The way