ed feelings. 'From their inward travail, while the darkness
seeks to obscure the light and the light breaks through the darkness ...
there will be such a painful travail found in the soul that will even
work upon the outward man, so that oftentimes through the working
thereof the body will be greatly shaken, and many groans, and sighs, and
tears, will lay hold upon it.'[623]

Wesley himself was protected both by disposition and training from
falling deeply into some of the dangers to which enthusiastic and
mystical religion is very liable. He was credulous, and even
superstitious, but he checked his followers in the credence which many
of them were inclined to give to stories of ecstasies, and visions, and
revelations. He spoke slightingly of orthodoxy, and held that 'right
opinions were a very slender part of religion;'[624] but, far from
countenancing anything like a vague undogmatic Pietism, his opinions
went almost to the opposite extreme of precise definition. Neither could
it be said of him that he spiritualised away the plain meaning of
Scripture--a charge to which the old Quakers were constantly liable, and
which was sometimes alleged against the later Methodists. He himself
never spoke contemptuously--as the mystics have been so apt to do--of
the value of learning; and of reason he said, in the true spirit of
Henry More, 'I believe and reason too, for I find no inconsistency
between them. And I would as soon put out my eyes to secure my faith, as
lay aside my reason.'[625] But the Methodists, as a body, were far less
inclined to act on this principle. Without disparagement to the
conspicuous ability of some individual members of their communion, both
in the present and in the past, it may be certainly said that they have
always utterly failed to attract the intellect of the country at large.
Great, therefore, as was its moral and spiritual power among large
classes of the people, Methodism was never able to take rank among great
national reformations.

Neither Wesley nor the Wesleyans have ever yielded to a mischievous
tendency which has beset most forms of mysticism. They have never, in
comparison with the inward worship of the soul, spoken slightingly of
'temples made of stones,'[626] or of any of the chief outward ordinances
of religion. Their opponents often attempted to make it a charge against
them, and thought, no doubt, they would be sure to prove it. But they
never did so. Wesley was always able to an