The inference from all this has already been drawn for us by a candid Churchman. Mr. Johnes, in his 'Essay on the Causes of Dissent in Wales,' says that he is irresistibly led to the conclusion 'that before the rise of Methodism in Wales the churches were as little attended by the great mass of people as they are now: and that indifference to all religion prevailed as widely then as dissent in the present day.' Of the early Methodists in Wales, as indeed of the early Nonconformists, it may be said most truly that they did not leave the Church of their own accord. Most of them clung to it with a most touching fidelity, in spite of incessant persecution and obloquy from those within its pale, and were at last thrust out of it, for no offence but the excess of their zeal for the moral and spiritual improvement of their countrymen. It is not necessary now to put in any defence for these men; for it has become the fashion of late among our Church friends in Wales, while denouncing modern Nonconformity as schismatic, turbulent, self-seeking, and other choice epithets with which we are so familiar in this connection, to speak with great tenderness and respect of the founders of Welsh dissent, and especially the early Methodists. Retaining, of course, that _de haut en bas_ air of extreme candour and condescension which any Churchman, however small, thinks it right to assume when referring to any Dissenter, however illustrious for capacity and service, they do nevertheless admit that the men in question were admirable men, full of genuine zeal for evangelical truth and the salvation of souls. Nor do they scruple to deplore and censure the perverse policy which persecuted such men and drove them from the Church. Nay, in some cases, clergymen have even become their admiring and eulogistic biographers. But this is the old thing over again. 'Ye build the tombs of the prophets and garnish the sepulchres of the righteous, and say, if we had been in the days of our fathers, we would not have been partakers with them in the blood of the prophets.' But then, unhappily, by displaying the same spirit towards the successors of these men, and branding them with the same epithets of contumely and reproach as their fathers applied to _their_ fathers, and that for doing precisely the same work, they are witnesses unto themselves that they are the genuine children of them which persecuted the prophets.