“Wesley and Whitfield,” says Mr. Sidney in his life of Rowland Hill, “were men of widely different characters, both in respect to their natural dispositions as well as the discipline of their minds; and painful frailties were visible in the midst of their true greatness. An ambitious love of power was evidently the besetting weakness of John Wesley; aspiration to the _honours_ when he had no prospect of the _suffering_ of martyrdom, was that of Whitfield.” In his letters to Rowland Hill, it is evident how he courted and enjoyed persecution; and whenever “_the fire_ (to use his own expression) was kindled in the country;” he was not satisfied unless “honoured” by being scorched a little in its flame. This was a wrong spirit, and did injury to his own mind, and to his followers, by encouraging a morose and morbid carriage towards the world, giving needless offence, and provoking animosity in those who might have been attracted and endeared to truth by the lovely graces of pure Christianity.” At the time when he, and his early friends the Wesleys began their ministry, the piety of all classes was at a very low ebb. The earnestness of these men gave a new impulse to religious feeling, and after a time a considerable number of other episcopally ordained ministers of the church, together with a portion of the laity, became influenced by the same sentiments. Without seceding, they formed a party in the church, leaning to Calvinism to the extent they thought justified by the XXXIX Articles; and this party soon became designated by several distinguishing terms. They called themselves _Evangelical_ first, afterwards when that became a cant term of misapplied reproach, they took the title of _Serious_ Christians, and by others were called _Low Church_, and _Methodistical_. Besides distinguishing themselves by an especial name, they avoided public amusements, used a peculiar phraseology, and seemed to delight in wearing their religion externally in the sight of all men, thinking perhaps to reform the thoughtless by the example of their greater strictness. But herein, in my opinion, they made a net for their own feet, for that very aspiration after greater exaltation which is implanted in us as a spur to strive after glory and immortality, is soon by mismanagement perverted into a love of earthly distinction. Hence comes ambition; but the ambition for worldly honours has in it this alleviation, that the man who toils after a title or a fortune, knows that he is, after all, seeking but a mean object; and if ever his mind is awakened at all to a sense of the world to come, the soul springs back to its true ambition, and launches into the career natural to it: but the man who seeks to be distinguished among his brethren for superior holiness, and wears it externally, that it may be seen and honoured by men, blinds his better nature, and fetters it to earth by chains forged in heaven; he sees not that he is ambitious; he is