read from the very ground. She is the defier of God. She also is the mother of lunacies, and the suggestress of suicides. Deep lie the roots of her power; but narrow is the nation that she rules. For she can approach only those in whom a profound nature has been upheaved by central convulsions; in whom the heart trembles and the brain rocks under conspiracies of tempest from without and tempest from within. Madonna moves with uncertain steps, fast or slow, but still with tragic grace. Our Lady of Sighs creeps timidly and stealthily. But this youngest sister moves with incalculable motions, bounding, and with a tiger's leaps. She carries no key; for though coming rarely amongst men, she storms all doors at which she is permitted to enter at all. And her name is Mater Tenebrarum-Our Lady of Darkness."1

We shall have occasion to recur to this weird Spirit of Unbelief in commenting upon some of the most characteristic utterances of the latter half of the century. De Quincey limned her features with strange foresight, as though in the light of her eyes he had caught a prophetic glimpse of Thomson's "City of Dreadful Night," Tennyson's "Despair," and John Davidson's "Ballad in Blank Verse," each in its way the epic of such as find themselves without hope and without God in the world. He witnesses anew to the interdependence of literature and religion, and the fact that for the purposes of the former "Gods are needed, if only to be defied."

1 De Quincey's Works, Riverside Edition, vol. i, pp. 244–245.

CHAPTER VI

CLAPHAM AND OXFORD

1

"You seem a very temperate people here," said Mr. Birrell to a Cornishman, when on a walking tour in that delectable duchy; "how did it happen?" The miner raised his hat reverently as he made answer, “There came a man amongst us once, and his name was John Wesley." The smoke of sectarian battle is still too thick for men to see quite clearly how much that is most substantial, wholesome, and therefore permanently influential in her life, England owes to the Wesleys and the revival of religion which they did so much to promote. The profit of their work is somewhat more freely acknowledged in America than in England, though even there Methodism is too often known by its accidents rather than its essence. Mr. Kipling's verses upon a great national celebration are of no less telling application to periods of religious awakening:

It is a little difficult for the plain man to see why tumult and shouting should be counted so essential to political and patriotic rejoicing that their absence throws doubt upon its sincerity, while at the same time their presence in the case of widespread and deeply stirred religious feeling is reckoned equally suspicious. In point of fact they represent but the expression of a passing mood in either case—a mood which moreover is often the creature of something close akin to the mob-spirit, and marked by its epidemic character and liability to quick revulsion. The fire and the earthquake having passed, the attentiveness with which the still, small voice of genuine revelation is heard and heeded determines the value of the whole experience. That is measured in terms of humility, contrition, and service.

In attempting to reckon up the account in the case of Wesley, the Anglican is still prone to be supercilious and the Methodist bumptious. The mismanagement of the whole matter by those in ecclesiastical authority in Wesley's day was as expensive to the Church of England as the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes proved to France. Both resulted in the practical banishment, in one case from the Church and in the other from the nation, of great numbers in whom the hope of the future dwelt. Institutions, like trees, receive their most substantial sustenance from beneath; they cannot afford to ignore or oppose these agitations in the

earth about their roots, which, while they often disturb the accustomed order and form of mere circumstance, and sometimes threaten the rootlets of the upper soil, always give more than they take by bringing air, light, and moisture to the roots themselves.

There is of course a sense in which the Church of England is the mother of Methodism. The Wesleys belonged to her by birth, training, conviction, and affection. They were loath to quit her ministry: but they had their vocation; the day's work must needs be done; and when church doors were closed they had necessary recourse to fields and commons. That which is barred from the door, however, sometimes makes its entrance through the window, and Methodism did its work upon the Church. The zeal of Anglican writers to prove that the Evangelical movement was not of Methodist or Wesleyan origin is a little hard to understand. The Wesleys and Whitefield were men of whose work any church and any university might well be covetous; but for my present purpose I am content to allow the disclaimer. The fact seems to be that the Wesleyan influence upon life and thought in the Anglican communion was similar to that which an electrical current induces in an adjacent coil. The induced current is not an integral part of the original movement; but none the less the latter is accountable for it. So, while the Evangelicals may not look to the great Itinerants as to their spiritual fathers,

still, the new life which began to appear in the establishment toward the close of the eighteenth century was a phase of the same awakening. In so far as this awakening was theological, the Evangelicals within the English Church generally sided with the Calvinism of Whitefield and Toplady as opposed to the Arminianism of the Wesleys. So far forth the Evangelicals may be said to have carried on the great Puritan tradition; so far forth, too, they may seem to represent the sterner and less lovely aspects of the revival.

Certain reservations must, however, be made at this point. With singular unanimity it seems to have been admitted that the Puritans were not only deficient in a sense of humour, but lacked it altogether. Deficient they may have been in some degree; though I incline to believe the deficiency to have been apparent rather than real. That they were without the sense of humour altogether is not for a moment to be admitted by any one who looks beneath the surface of their life or studies the characteristics of their descendants. It is entirely true that the Puritans of the seventeenth century and the Evangelicals of the nineteenth lived in a world of tremendous realities upon which their thoughts were trained to dwell, and about which they spoke and wrote. All their public utterances were pitched to this key. Life was too great a business to afford much scope for levity. The eye of the Great Taskmaster, the Atonement through which appeared