ordained with a like ordination, having the unction of the Holy One, and charged with the same divine mission, "to seek and to save that which was lost," freely receiving from Heaven, and freely giving in return. Language and imagery would fail us in depicting, sooner than our soul cease from admiring, the purity and sublimity of the object these compassionate men sought by their personal consecration, their visits of mercy, and their prayers:

"I can't describe it though so much it strike,
Nor liken it; I never saw the like."

Looking down, like the divine humanity of the Son of God from the height of his priestly throne, far above every feeling save that of sorrow for the sufferings and sins of men, their eyes suffused with pitiful tears, and they resolved to do what they could. Suffice it to say that, baptized in such a laver as this, the Methodist church which has since attained a respectable maturity, has never renounced the principles that hallowed its early dedication,-has kept the whiteness of its garments unsullied by the pollutions of the world,--has raised visibly everywhere the banner of mercy to the bodies and souls of men, and can say still, as it professed then, "I am free from the blood of all men."

John Wesley will be found to have given currency by his course of action to a set of divine ideas easily acted upon, but not always clearly apprehended, which make up the sum of personal religion, and without which, it may be added, personal religion cannot exist. This is the philosophy of his career, perhaps very imperfectly understood by himself,

probably never drawn out by him in a systematic form, yet sufficiently obvious to us who look back upon his completed life, and live amid the results of his labours. Immersed in the complexities of the game, the turmoil of the storm in which his busy life was cast, the unceasing struggle of his soul with the gigantic evils of the world, he could neither observe nor analyse, as we can do, the elements arrayed against him, nor the principles evolved in the conflict that were ministrant to his success. As we are in the habit of raising instinctively the arm, or lowering the eyelid to repel or shun danger, so he adopted measures and evolved truths by force of circumstances more than by forethought, those truths and measures so adapted to his position as a preacher of righteousness amid an opposing generation, that we recognize in their adaptation and natural evolution proof of their divineness. They are the same truths which were exhibited in the first struggles of an infant Christianity with the serpent of Paganism, and when exhibited again upon a like arena seventeen centuries afterwards, with similar success, are thus proved to be everywhere and always the same, eternal as abstract truth, and essential as the existence of God.

The first grand truth thrown up upon the surface of John Wesley's career, we take to be THE ABSOLUTE

NECESSITY OF PERSONAL AND INDIVIDUAL RELIGION.

To the yoke of this necessity he himself bowed at every period of his history: never even when most completely astray as to the ground of the sinner's justification before God, did he fail to recognize the necessity of conversion and individual subjection to the laws of the Most High. What he required of

others, and constantly taught, he cheerfully observed himself. Very soon after starting upon his course did he learn that the laver of baptism was unavailing to wash from the stain of human defilement, the Supper of the Lord to secure admission to the marriage supper of the Lamb, and church organization to draft men collectively to heaven by simple virtue of its corporate existence. These delusions, whereby souls are beguiled to their eternal wrong, soon ceased to juggle him, for his eye, kindled to intelligence by the Spirit of God, pierced the transparent cheat. He ascertained at a very early period that the church had no delegated power to ticket men in companies for a celestial journey, and sweep them railroad-wise in multitudes to their goal; consequently that this power, where claimed or conceded, was usurpation on the one hand, and a compound of credulousness and servility on the other, insulting to God and degrading to man. But he began with himself. We suppose he never knew the hour in which he did not feel the need of personal religion to secure the salvation of the soul. He was happily circumstanced in being the son of pious and intelligent parents, who would carefully guard him against the prevalent errors on these points. He never could have believed presentation at the font to be salvation, nor the vicarious vow of sponsors a substitute for personal renunciation of the world, the flesh, and the devil: and he early showed this. When the time of his ordination drew nigh, and he was about to be inducted into the cure of souls, he was visited with great searchings of heart.. His views of the mode of the sinner's acceptance with God were confused indeed; but on the subject of

personal consecration they may be said never to have varied. Fighting his way, as he was called to do, through a lengthened period of experimental obscurity, "working out his salvation with fear and trembling,' we nevertheless cannot point to any moment in his spiritual history in which he was not a child of God. What an incomparable mother must he have had! what a hold must she have established upon his esteem and confidence, to whom this Fellow of a college referred his scruples and difficulties in view of his ordination, and whom his scholarly father bade him consult when his own studious habits and abundant occupations forbade correspondence with himself! Animated to religious feeling about this time, he made a surrender of himself to God, made in partial ignorance, but never revoked. "I resolved, he says, "to dedicate ALL my life to God, ALL my thoughts, and words, and actions; being thoroughly convinced there was no medium; but that EVERY PART of my life (not soME only) must either be a sacrifice to God or myself,—that is, in effect, to the devil.” And his pious father, seconding his son's resolve, replies: "God fit you for your great work! fast, watch, and pray! believe, love, endure, and be happy!" And so he did according to his knowledge, for a more conscientious clergyman and teacher, for space of ten years, never lived than the Rev. John Wesley, fellow and tutor of Lincoln.

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But there was a whole world of spiritual experience yet untrodden by him amid the round of his college duties, ascetic practices, and abounding charities. His heart told him, and books told him, and the little godly company who met in his rooms all told him, in tones more or

less distinct, that he had not yet attained-that he was still short of the mark-that the joys of religion escaped his reach, though its duties were unexceptionably performed. His course of reading, the mystic and ascetic writers, together with the dry* scholastic divinity that furnishes the understanding but often drains the heart, tended to this result, to fill the life with holy exercises rather than to overflow the soul with sacred pleasure. Of the simple, ardent, gladsome, gracious piety of the poor, he yet knew next to nothing. But God was leading him through the wilderness of such an experience as this by a right way to a city of habitation, doubtless that he might be a wise instructor to others who should be involved hereafter in mazes like his own. He looked upon religion as a debt due by the creature to the Creator, and he paid it with the same sense of constraint with which one pays a debt, instead of regarding it as the ready service of a child of God. A child of God could not be other than religious; but, more than this, he would not if he could; religion is his "Vital breath,

It is his native air."

* Our censure of the scholastic divinity only reaches to the case in hand, as amongst our favourite authors we reckon Thomas Aquinas, and the Master of the Sentences. We are glad to be able to justify our partiality by such respectable authority as that of Luther. In his book "De Conciliis (tom. vii. p. 237), he writes thus of Peter Lombard:-"Nullis in conciliis, nullo in patre tantum reperies, quam in libro sententiarum Lombardi. Nam patres et concilia quosdam tantum articulos tractant, Lombardus autem omnes; sed in præcipuis illis articulis de Fide et Justificatione nimis est jejunus, quanquam Dei gratiam magnopere prædicat."

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