[Picture: Decorative header] LETTER IV. WESLEYAN METHODISTS. Towards the beginning of the last century, two young men at Oxford, the one a fellow of Lincoln College, struck by the thoughtlessness or lukewarmness of those about them, resolved to devote themselves to closer and more profitable study. They were brothers, by name John and Charles Wesley; and two other students joined them in their evening readings of the New Testament in the Greek: the elder of the brothers was at this time about twenty-six. {52} After a year of this kind of life, they admitted two or three of the pupils of the elder brother, and one of those of the younger, to their meetings; and the following year, being joined by yet more of the students, the regularity of their lives obtained for them the title of _Methodists_ from those who were not inclined to follow their example. In 1735 another name was added to their number, which has also become celebrated: this was George Whitfield of Pembroke College, then in his eighteenth year; but of him I shall have occasion to speak by and by. I shall therefore confine myself to the Wesleys. A difference of opinion on the subjects of Freewill and Predestination separated them from their younger coadjutor in 1741, and their respective friends, adopting strongly the distinctive opinions of the two, the grand division of the sect, which sprung up from their preaching, into Wesleyan or Arminian, and Whitfieldian or Calvinistic Methodists, ensued. All three received holy orders according to the ceremonial of the Church of England, and Wesley never ceased to hold his spiritual mother in high estimation. “The Church of England,” he says in one place, “is the purest in Christendom.” But the singularity of their proceedings raised suspicion, and though both brothers continued to profess the fullest assent to the articles and liturgy of the established church, yet their manner of preaching and form of worship had something in it which led the bishops and clergy in general to consider them as verging on Sectarianism. In many places they were refused the use of the pulpit; and then, in the perhaps enthusiastic belief that they were the appointed instruments of rekindling religion in hearts where it had been dead hitherto, they began a system of field preaching.