y to sacrifice
many predilections, and thereby to lay himself open to the charge of
changeableness and inconsistency.

As an illustration let us take the somewhat complicated question of John
Wesley's Churchmanship. That he was most sincerely and heartily attached
to the Church of England is undeniable. In the language of one of his
most ardent but not undiscriminating admirers, 'he was a Church of
England man even in circumstantials; there was not a service or a
ceremony, a gesture or a habit, for which he had not an unfeigned
predilection.'[710] He was, in fact, a distinctly High Churchman, but a
High Churchman in a far nobler sense than that in which the term was
generally used in the eighteenth century. Indeed, in this latter sense
John Wesley hardly falls under the denomination at all. As a staunch
supporter of the British Constitution, both in Church and State, he was
no doubt in favour of the establishment of the National Church as an
essential part of that Constitution. But it was not this view of the
Church which was uppermost in his mind. On several occasions he spoke
and wrote of the Church as a national establishment in terms which would
have shocked the political High Churchmen of his day. He 'can find no
trace of a national Church in the New Testament;'--it is 'a mere
political institution;'[711] the establishment by Constantine was a
gigantic evil:' 'the King and the Parliament have no right to prescribe
to him what pastor he shall use;'[712] he does not care to discuss the
question as to whether all outward establishments are a Babel. But does
it follow from this and similar language that he taught, as the
historians of the Dissenters contend, the principles and language of
Dissent?[713] Very far from it. The fact is, John Wesley in his
conception of the Church was both before and behind his age. He would
have found abundance of sympathisers with his views in the seventeenth,
and abundance after the first thirty years of the nineteenth, century.
But in the eighteenth century they were quite out of date. Here and
there a man like Jones of Nayland or Bishop Horsley[714] might express
High Church views of the same kind as those of John Wesley, but they
were quite out of harmony with the general spirit of the times. Wesley's
idea of the Church was not like that of high and dry Churchmen of his
day; that Church which was always 'in danger' was not what he meant;
neither was it, like that of the later Evangeli