good taste than of devout feeling, and those whose eminent good taste cannot cover their want of devout feeling.

It may be remarked, in regard both to the derisive tone and the sceptical reasoning by which Mr. Southey so often intimates that he thinks the feelings, the sufferings, and the labours of the Methodists worthy of nearly as much contempt as respect,-that he has evidently written under the guidance of a vague notion, very commonly entertained by persons of his class, the true nature of which we must here beg leave to expose. To this end, we premise the observation, that it will be found, in by far the greater number of instances, in the work before us, as well as in that current mass of contumelious liberality' of which it is a sort of digest and manual,-that the unquestioned peculiarities of Methodism, or, if the term will be preferred, the personal, local, or temporary oddities which may have been its adjuncts and accidents, are not the subjects brought forward for ridicule or curious philosophizing, but rather those circumstances in the language or conduct of the people in question, which are the most plainly analogous to the language or conduct recorded in the Christian Scriptures. Individual quaintnesses, or characteristic vulgarities, may, here and there, be lightly adverted to; but there is a deeper sarcasm, and a more anxious recurrence to the physiological hypothesis, just in proportion as the subject is more nearly identified with New Testament terms or examples. That such and such individuals, the immediate predecessors of those who are still within the range of our private aversions, our neighbours or contemporaries, "whose brethren and sisters we know,"-should think, speak, or act, as though they presumed themselves to be moved by the same Spirit, actuated by the same motives, and placed in (essentially) the same circumstances, with the primitive Christians; or, that the simple narrative of their lives should obviously bear a close comparison with the memorials of the primitive Church; this is that occult point of contact with our pride, which exposes the objects of it to the utmost rigours of mockery, or to the heartless scrutiny of a pretended philosophy. Almost any page of the "Life of Wesley" will furnish an example in illustration of our meaning. If the reader should choose to employ a vacant hour in verifying our assertion, especially if he examines that part of the work which relates to Wesley's lay preachers, he will find it a rule, with few exceptions, that when the Author affects to be either jocose or philosophical, it is in instances where a parallel most readily suggests itself to the raseology or narratives of the Bible. The examples now under the reader's eye, though not selected with the view to support the present remark, might indeed suffice for the purpose of specification. The simple circumstance, for instance, to which Mr. Southey

applies a phrase containing an offensive implication, is nothing more than this,-that a youth, who could not, as it seems, literally follow our Lord's injunction, and hide his devotions from observation in his "Closet," retired into a Barn, to perform freely,' Under the same latent impulse, the epithet, the enthusiasts,' is applied to the Methodists, precisely on those occasions when there seems most hazard of their conduct being identified in the reader's mind with that of the first Christians. The enthusiasts (the lay preachers) who offered themselves to the work, literally took no thought for the morrow what they should eat, nor what they should drink, nor yet for the body, what they should put on.'

Let the reader say, why the following passage would be less applicable to the earliest, than to the latest Christian evangelists.

Men were not deterred from entering upon this course of life by a knowledge of the fatigue, the privations, and the poverty to which they devoted themselves; still less by the serious danger they incurred before the people were made to understand that the Metho dists were under the protection of the law. There is a stage of enthusiasm in which these things operate as incitements; but this effect ceases as the spirit sinks to its natural level.'

Again:

Never was any man in a state of higher enthusiasm than Oliver at this time. He says, that in every thought, intention, or desire, his constant inquiry was, whether it was to the glory of God; and that if he could not answer in the affirmative, he dared not indulge it: that he received his daily food nearly in the same manner as he did the sacrament; that he used mental prayer daily and hourly; and for a while his rule was, in this manner, to employ five minutes out of every quarter of an hour. "Upon the whole," he pursues, "I truly lived by faith. I saw God in every thing the heavens, the earth, and all therein, showed me something of him; yea, even from a drop of water, a blade of grass, or a grain of sand, I often received instruction." p. 113.

:

The above passages are worthy of the reader's especial attention. But let a single instance (that which we have referred to on the foregoing page) be submitted to a moment's examination.

John Nelson, on no other account, by Mr. Southey's own admission, than because he had been carrying among a dissolute populace the great and simple proclamation of the Gospel, Repent, and call upon the name of the Lord," was violently seized and dragged to prison, and, in Mr. Southey's significant phrase, 'to his heart's content.' He will not profess to have inserted these words with no intention to give a sarcastic or contemptuous air to the narrative. We challenge him then to dismiss vague generalities and evasions unworthy of his discern

ment and candour, and to shew, rigidly, in what respects, except such as are obviously immaterial to the argument, the case of John Nelson, on this occasion, differed from that of Paul, when "beset by certain lewd fellows of the baser sort," or when, by the command of magistrates, he was "thrust into the "inner prison, and his feet made fast in the stocks ;"-differed, we say, so widely, that the one sufferer is a fair object of a supercilious taunt, and the other of entire admiration. We press the question, What is the precise and essential difference between these two cases? Is it, that the Methodist was, in Mr. Southey's account, preaching a false religion, or a doctrine in important respects untrue? Or, that his zeal in warning men 'to repent and escape from the wrath to come,' was superfluous, presumptuous, and uncharitable, seeing that he was addressing, not heathens, but baptized Christians? Or, that this zeal was apparently hypocritical, and directed to some sinister or sordid object? Or, that this ignorant artizan' had received no commission from those who alone have the keys of the kingdom of heaven, with power to give men licence to preach the Gospel? We can hardly suppose that Mr. Southey would insist upon this high claim. Or, is the difference this, That, in the ardour, and heroism, and patience, of the Methodist, there may be imagined to have been some mixture or imperfection of motive; so that the whole scene is brought down within the scope of justifiable banter, because the sentiments of our hero under ill-treatment, were not as absolutely faultless as those of Him whose cross he bore? But is Mr. Southey sure, that all the faithful' of the first church at Jerusalem were so pure in their motives, so absolutely free from the tarnish of partial ignorance or self-will, that they might none of them be liable to the like occasion of contempt? Now, if he were narrating the history of that first persecution by which the believers were scattered over the Roman Empire, he would feel, that, though where any symptom of such alloy of motive were obvious, it might be proper to make a candid, yet respectful admission of the fact,no one but a writer whose heart had been hardened by long infidelity, would, merely on the ground of such a supposed alloy, and where no proof of its actual existence was to be found, by an insidious and sarcastic phrase at once dissolve the reader's sympathy in the story, and destroy his confidence in the good faith of the narrator.

But there remains one supposable point of difference between the cases in question, which, rather than any we have mentioned, would, in fact, we believe, be pleaded as a circumstance of essential dissimilarity. To this point, more than once hinted at by Mr. Southey, we beg to direct our reader's attention. This point of difference between the situation of primitive and modern

Christians, may be thus stated: Our present faith (it may be said) in the truth of Christianity, and the consequent assurance and sensible impression of an unseen system about us, and of a life to come, such as the New Testament describes, inasmuch as it must now rest upon the cold result of ratiocination, and (considered as a practical feeling) as it rarely goes beyond the evanescent conviction of our better moments,-is in its very nature insufficient, without the aid of some extrinsic and arti ficial stimulants, to support the breadth and weight of motive implied in this rate of exorbitant feeling and action. Whereas, on the contrary, the faith of the first Christians—a faith which might with some propriety be called knowledge, resting as it did upon the immediate evidence of miracles,-rendered those very same feelings and actions spontaneous and reasonable, which must now be deemed artificial, enthusiastic, and fanatical. Now it is manifest, that this doctrine, though its latent influence may every where be traced in the sentiments and conduct of men of Mr. Southey's class, when any of the forms of Methodism are in question, would hardly admit of being explicitly advanced. And in fact, it is the unacknowledged and half perceived source of confusion in the ideas, and of inconsistency in the opinions of such persons, rather than the formal reason of their objurgatory or sarcastic language. They would not choose that the propositions of which it consists, should be regularly induced, and burthened with their obvious inferences. Nor would they thank the disputant who should press them with the following plain question: On the supposition of your receiving an immediate knowledge (using the term in its proper sense) of the vast objects now surrounding us or awaiting us in futurity, as they are indicated in the New Testament, would you not find a rate of feeling and consequent conduct, incomparably higher than those which your present convictions produce, become perfectly spontaneous; and must you not deem such higher tone of feeling and conduct then strictly reasonable? A question of this kind would be evaded by saying, that, under our actual want of such immediate knowledge, this excessive rate of feeling and action must be condemned as unreasonable, or, in other words, enthusiastical and fanatical, because it can flow from no other source than a fever in the imagination and affections, produced and maintained by violent and artificial excitements.

Here, then, we ascertain the true nature of the difference between the class of philosophical Christians, and those whom they designate as enthusiasts. The question, it seems, is not so much relative to that actual measure of feeling, or that degree of exertion, in matters of religion, which may be granted to be hypothetically proportionate to the infinite relations of the present probationary state; but it relates rather to the degree of religious

emotion, and the measure of exertion to which our faith, under its present circumstances, can spontaneously supply motive, without the aid of artificial stimulants. This question, we must say, involves the determination of a hundred vague and fruitless discussions, often started on the subject of practical religion.

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It is very true, and sufficiently apparent also, that a faith 'which results from mere ratiocination, or a 'faith that has grown gradually and involuntarily out of an indistinct, uninvited, but irresistible impression of the supernatural majesty of the Christian Records, a faith which, when it is laboriously pursued, seems to elude the grasp of the mind, and has the force of reality only when it makes a sudden and unwelcome intrusion upon more pleasurable trains of thought,-a faith which leaves us to the uncomfortable sensations of hypocrisy in the moment of our public professions, but which suggests the more uncomfortable suspicion of a fearful insecurity in our solitary hours, a faith which is making a daily and insatiable demand for evidence, and which never seems to say, It is enough,-or a faith which permits us still to stand so near the verge of Christianity, that, on the first appearance of difficulties, offences, or reproaches, we find a quick way of escape into the free fields of infidelity, a faith which never corrects in our speech the accent of scepticism, which admires Christianity as an abstraction, but spurns the proffered acquaintance when it comes embodied to challenge an avowal,or a faith which consists with an idolatrous devotion to present good, and which seems not to contain even the germs of an absolute taste for the expected good of a future life;-such a faith, we say, proves and professes itself to be wholly insufficient to give a natural support to those feelings, and to that course of action, which, it is not denied, would seem simply reasonable if the objects of our now flitting fears and lifeless hopes were to become, not indeed present and sensible realities, but the objects of constant and irresistible conviction.

But is there, then, to be attained no higher and more efficient persuasion of the reality of these objects, which as truly exist when they are doubted, as when they are immediately, perceived? And is this opinion-imperfect, inconstant, wavering, sullen, quiescent, powerless, to be received and rested in, as that Faith which the bountiful "Giver of all Grace" bestows upon his true disciples? Will he not grant to those who," though they

have not seen, bave yet believed," a nearer, a more sensible, a more habitual contact with the spiritual world by which they are surrounded, and for which they are under education? Yes, that faith which is "the gift of God," brings with it a specific confidence, a perception,-vos-a full persuasion "of things "looked for." And, as it is not less well founded, nor more indirectly derived from above, than the faith of the first ChrisVol. XV. N.S. C