oor; in many of them I find pure,
genuine grace, unmixed with paint, folly, and affectation.' And again,
'Tis well a few of the rich and noble are called. May God increase the
number. But I should rejoice, were it the will of God, if it were done
by the ministry of others. If I might choose, I would still, as
hitherto, preach the Gospel to the poor.' He had the lowest opinion both
of the intellectual and moral character of the higher classes. 'Oh! how
hard it is,' he once exclaimed, 'to be shallow enough for a polite
audience!' And on another occasion he records with some bitterness of a
rich congregation to which he had preached at Whitehaven, 'They all
behaved with as much decency as if they had been colliers.' 'I have
found,' he says again, 'some of the uneducated poor who have exquisite
taste and sentiment, and many, very many, of the rich who have scarcely
any at all.' He wrote to Fletcher, in what one must call an unprovoked
strain of rudeness, on the danger of his conversing with the 'genteel
Methodists.' Indeed, the leading members of the Evangelical school--Lady
Huntingdon, Sir Richard and Rowland Hill, Venn, Romaine, and
others--were, quite apart from their Calvinism, never cordially in
harmony with John Wesley. As years went on Wesley must have felt himself
more and more a lonely man so far as his equals were concerned, for in
point of breeding and culture he was fully the equal of the very best.
It must not be supposed that Wesley did not feel this isolation. There
is a sadness about the strain in which he wrote to Benson in 1770.
'Whatever I say, it will be all one. They will find fault because I say
it. There is implicit envy at my power (so called) and jealousy
therefrom.' Wesley was not demonstrative, but he was a man of strong
affections and acute feelings, and he felt his loneliness, and more so
than ever after the death of his brother Charles. There is a touching
story that a fortnight after the death of the latter Wesley was giving
out in chapel his dead brother's magnificent hymn,

Come, O thou traveller unknown,

and when he came to the lines,

My company before is gone,
And I am left alone with thee,

the old man (then in his eighty-fourth year) burst into tears and hid
his face in his hands.

One feature in Wesley's character must be carefully noted by all who
would form a fair estimate of him. If it was a weakness, and one which
frequently led him into serious practical mista