private memoranda, quoted by Mr. Urlin,[719] we find that he believed it
to be a duty to observe so far as he could the following rules:--(1) to
baptize by immersion; (2) to use the mixed chalice; (3) to pray for the
faithful departed; (4) to pray standing on the Sunday in Pentecost. He
thought it prudent (1) to observe the stations [Wednesday and Friday],
(2) to keep Lent and especially Holy Week, (3) to turn to the east at
the Creed. It is useless to speculate upon what might have been; but can
it be doubted that if John Wesley's lot had been cast in the nineteenth
instead of the eighteenth century, he would have found much to fascinate
him in another revival, which, like his own, began at Oxford?

But how was it that if John Wesley showed this strong appreciation of
the aesthetic and the symbolical in public worship, this desire to bring
everything to the model of the Primitive Church, he never impressed
these views upon his followers? How is it that so few traces of these
predilections are to be found in his printed sermons? John Wesley had so
immense an influence over his disciples that he could have led them to
almost anything. How was it that he infused into them nothing whatever
of that spirit which was in him?

The answer to these questions is to be found in the fact which, it may
be remembered, led to these remarks. There is but one clue to the right
understanding of Wesley's career. It is this: that his one great object
was to promote the love of God and the love of man for God's sake.
Everything must give way to this object of paramount importance. His
tastes led him in one direction, but it was a direction in which very
few could follow him. Not only was there absolutely nothing congenial to
this taste either inside or outside the Church in the eighteenth
century, but it would have been simply unintelligible. If he had
followed out this taste, he would have been isolated.

Moreover, it is fully admitted that Wesley was essentially a many-sided
man. Look at him from another point of view, and he stands in precisely
the same attitude in which his contemporaries and successors of the
Evangelical school stood--as the _homo unius libri_, referring
everything to Scripture, and to Scripture alone. There would be in his
mind no inconsistency whatever between the one position and the other;
but he felt he could do more practical good by simply standing upon
Scriptural ground, and therefore he was quite content to