brow, direct and searching gaze, the compressed lips, and the resolute determination of the reformer and revivalist. A marked change must have come upon the outer man between the dates of his first Presidency and his second (1820, 1828), judging from the portraits of the periods. At the later date he stands before us in all the strong maturity of middle manhood. His forelocks have been mowed off by the gentle scythe of time, leaving bare his large development of benevolence, humour, veneration, and comparison. The vivid eagerness and sternness of the juvenile reformer have sobered down perceptibly.

The portrait of Dr. Bunting as he was in his fourth Presidency, given in "Wesley and his Successors," is most felicitously faithful. There he sits, the picture of an ideal President of the Wesleyan Methodist Conference. The public and posterity can seek no more from the portrait painter's art. It does one good to look at him once more as one used to see him on "the platform," in the Chair of a public meeting, or as the listener in the social gatherings of his later years. There you have him in his mature and well-developed, and as yet unfading, manhood, with his smooth, broad, bare brow, a Methodist Preacher unmistakably, still Jabez Bunting, Preacher of the Gospel.

Jabez Bunting's great greatness has never yet received its due of recognition and of reverence. He has no place in such a work as Leaders of the Church Universal, wherein much smaller men are being honoured with an ample record. In the folios of Schaff's "Herzog," a fragment of a column is literally all that is accorded to the greatest Wesleyan since Wesley, in that necropolis of Church celebrities, Herzog's "Encyclopædia." Yet in a sterling Christian Plutarch Jabez Bunting would stand out a massive and majestic figure. I have elsewhere shown the points of correspondence between him and Pitt, but the resemblance between Dr. Bunting and the great Greek statesman Pericles is still more striking. Each of them began his public life as an ardent advocate of popular reform, yet each of them full soon became a stout and staunch Conservative. Yet no candid student of men, career, and character can for a moment doubt that each of them was actuated from the very first by the purest personal conviction. Their eloquence was also wonderfully alike in simplicity and force, in weight and impact. Their elocution, too, seems to have been marvellously similar in modulation and distinctness. They

were alike also in dignity of bearing and in their resolute, commanding air. They were akin, too, in disinterestedness and sublime unselfishness, and in strenuous and sedulous devotion to the public service. They were alike, also, in the choice of able coadjutors. As the first triumph of the Grecian statesman was the restricting greatly the authority of the Areopagus, so that of the great Wesleyan Methodist was the limiting of the power of the Legal Conference; and the great Jabez, like his Grecian analogue, full soon became Conservative, and therefore anti-popular. As Pericles was a most eager advocate of one all-including Hellenic race, so Dr. Bunting was the presiding genius of the Evangelical Alliance.

But such was the greatness of the Methodist Leader that it requires the two great ancient heroes, Pericles and his Roman parallel in Plutarch, Fabius Maximus, to make one Jabez Bunting. The policy of Jabez Bunting in its later stages was distinctly Fabian. Dr. Bunting was four times President, and Fabius but five times held the Consulship. The description Mommsen gives of Fabius would, mutatis mutandis, serve as well for Dr. Bunting: "Zealous in his reverence for the good old times, for the political (ecclesiastical) omnipotence of the senate (Conference), and for the command of the burgomasters (selected laymen); one who looked, next to sacrifice and prayer, to a methodical prosecution of defensive and aggressive warfare as the main of the salvation of the commonwealth." And the parallel extends just one step further; it was only when the dictatorship was grasped by other and less skilful and experienced hands that the crash came on.

And the record of this fact is but bare justice to the memory of our very greatest man. To anyone who reads the "Life of Dr. Bunting" with sufficient care, it is apparent that his control of the Connexion closed with the Conference of 1848, whilst he was in his seventieth year. "In the growing strife Dr. Bunting was scarcely seen or heard. . . . His strength was broken." To one of his children he writes: "I have great weakness and loss of voice." "In the most painful and often greatly excited proceedings which led to the adoption of this measure (the expulsions of 1849) Dr. Bunting took no prominent part. He seldom spoke except to points of order" (pp. 703-7).

This testimony is true. But fancy a Conference at which

Dr. Bunting was present and yet took no prominent part in its most critical proceedings! Assuredly this was the first Conference for forty years of which that statement could be made. Does it not demonstrate that the predominance of Dr. Bunting had determined, and that the forty years of his practical Premiership must be counted from 1808 to 1848? Of the critical Conference of 1850 it is recorded: "Dr. Bunting can scarcely be said to have exercised all his usual influence in guiding his brethren. . . He was in bad health and depressed by much bodily weakness, as well as much harassed by private cares and anxieties. He was therefore indisposed to consider any modification of the Church system of Methodism. . . . Afterwards he came to acknowledge the wisdom of these measures."

To the same effect was his conspicuous absence in the spring of 1849 from the Meetings of the Book Committee and the London ministers, during which the Papers on Wesleyan Matters were discussed-the only instances I can recall in which he was not the very foremost in discussion. In the like spirit was his grave rebuke in the Conference of 1849 of the discreditable want of the calmness and decorum befitting a solemn and most anxious council of our Church when the ministerial life or death of three well-known ministers was trembling in the balance; and in the same direction was his expressed wish that the sentence on Mr. Everett himself might leave unbolted the door for his return. In full accord with this was the whole tone and spirit of his converse when I met him in Southampton shortly after the Conference of 1851, when he came down with a band of missionaries ready to embark.

In his advice to the consultative meeting assembled in London in 1852, he warned the brethren against "ultraism -love of change for change's or for theory's sake."

Little did I think when, in 1848, I took the whole service in the Conference chapel, Hull, except the sermon-one of his most celebrated homilies-little did I think that this would be his last sermon in a Conference chapel in connection with a Conference, and that it marked the ending of a Premiership of forty years.

J J

44

CHAPTER XI.

DIRECT CAUSES OF THE DISRUPTION OF 1849.

The disruption of 1849 was a gigantic blunder on both sides."-SIR HENRY FOWLER.

"In our unnatural war none, I hope, is so weak and wilful as to deny many good men, though misled, on both sides. Behold how heaven is hard-grating one diamond with another. As for all those who uncharitably deny any good in that party which they dislike, such show themselves diamonds indeed in their hardness and cruel censures, but none in any commendable quality."-THOMAS FULLER, Good Thoughts in Bad Times.

Do you confess so much? Give me your hand." "Ay, and my heart too!"

-SHAKESPEARE.

IN inquiring into the causes of the disruption of 1849, it will be best to take them chronologically. In this way their historical concatenation will be the most apparent.

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The first of these, then, was, as we have seen, the growing up within the Conference itself of a vague, definite, unappointed, irresponsive, irremovable Government or Cabinet, which, never having been called in, could not be voted out-not even if out-voted. This consisted of the unnominated Premiership of one surpassing personality and of a circle or a cincture of some very able men, who with him constituted the perennial administration whoever might come into office or go out of it. Thus the real, active, working policy of Methodism had become in its main. feature an impalpable bureaucracy.

This fact is rendered undeniable not only by the Conference discussions recorded in Mr. Fowler's Journals, but also by the affirmations and admissions of such competent authorities as Dr. Smith's "History of Methodism" and Mr. T. P. Bunting's "Life of Dr. Bunting." The question is no longer, "Was that so?" but "How did the system work?"

The answer to this question may readily be gathered

from the Conference discussions. All that seems now necessary is just to indicate the proximate occasions of the mischief. The first of these, as we have seen, was the forcing back into the itinerancy of Mr. Everett, who had evidently lost all heart for it, and the presenting him with a grievance and a grudge which he well knew how to capitalise and make the most of.

He had to give up a prospering business. He implicitly forewarned the Conference of the sequel by telling them that though fourteen years of shop life, with preaching when and where he pleased, had banished his bronchitis, yet the resumption of Circuit work now that he was on the downward slope of life would be a risk of which the Conference must take the responsibility. As a shrewd brother showed the Conference, this practically meant the extreme likelihood of Mr. Everett's speedy return to the supernumerary list, with no business to fall back upon. Mr. Everett was the one man allowed to choose his own Circuit, and his selection of Newcastle upon Tyne did indicate much terror of bronchitis.

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The companion blunder to this was the readmitting Mr. Griffith into the ministry after he had demonstrated the unsuitability of such a step by a series of most warning escapades and insubordinations, and despite the solemn and sagacious demur of men like Richard Reece and Dr. Beaumont. It was and is to me a mystery how anyone who had heard the two future dividers of the Body preach and talk could fail to see in each a perpetual peril to the peace and unity of the Connexion, and that in proportion to their popularity.

The next false step was the irritating course which was resorted to in dealing with the "Takings." Assuredly the course suggested by Mr. Fowler and by Dr. Beaumont would have been much wiser and more dignified than the walking into the trap prepared by Everett. In order to baffle and divert the scent, he had, in his Preface to his third edition, thrown out certain names of ministers whom some wiseacre here or there might have hazarded as the imaginable authors. Thereupon the London District Meeting, with Dr. Bunting in the Chair, despatched to the five different District Meetings, then in session, to which these brethren belonged, laying it upon their loyalty to Methodism