Never was the author of a great and lasting popular movement further removed than Wesley from all revolutionary tendency. The spirit of government and organization, attachment to ancient and venerated forms, a lofty and calm judgment united to an ascetic nature, a slight leaning towards mysticism--such were the characteristic and necessary traits of a reformer and religious founder in the eighteenth century. Wesley was tenderly attached to the Anglican Church; he only separated himself from it with regret, constrained by the ecclesiastical dislike which closed the pulpits to him, and compelled, little by little, and against his inclination, to accept the vault of heaven for his temple, and the laity for his fellow laborers, as Whitefield had done since the beginning. During his long apostolate, which lasted from 1729 to 1791, from the prayer-meetings in his room at Oxford to the complete and strong organization of the sect he had founded, Wesley exercised an absolute authority over his numerous subjects. "If you mean by an arbitrary power, a power which I alone exercise," he said, with a tranquil simplicity, "it is certainly true; but I see no harm in it." However, in courageously accomplishing his work, Wesley did more than he intended; he had founded a religious society; he had not had the intention of founding a sect. {227} A minister of the Anglican Church, and a witness of its shortcomings, he had felt that in order to awaken the parish clergy it was necessary to create a kind of regular clergy; that in order to announce the Gospel to those who did not go to church, or who only heard these cold exhortations, it was necessary to organize an army of ardent missionaries; that in order to touch the heart of the masses it was necessary to seek them in the fields, the markets, and the byways, and to address them in their own common language. Wesley was forced to separate himself from the Anglican Church, but his disciples have constantly remained respectful to her, and as an intermediate body between her and dissenters, they have, from without, rendered her most important services. Wesley and Whitefield have reawakened religious life in England, and no religious society has profited by it so much as the Anglican Church herself. Movements of various kinds, all serious and sincere, have manifested themselves in her wide bosom. She has sufficed to foster much warmth, to satisfy minds and hearts widely dissimilar, but all beset by veritable religious needs; she has united herself to the most noble attempts of modern philanthropy, the worthy fruits of awakened and revived Christian faith. It is to the great religious movement created in the eighteenth century by Wesley and Whitefield that England has owed the glorious efforts of Clarkson and Wilberforce for the emancipation of slaves, and the prison reform of John Howard. {228}