It is a temptation to me to multiply examples of how the great preacher illustrates the country, every way of which was familiar to him. After his long journeyings no man of his time could have known England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland better. Few, with all our facilities of travel, know it half as well. Much of it was wild and almost uninhabited. Some of the roads were enough to daunt the hardiest of travellers. On one occasion the road to Ely for a mile and a half was under water. The chaise found the roads impassable near St. Ives, so Wesley borrowed a horse and rode forward till the ground was completely under water. Then he borrowed a boat “full twice as large as a kneading-trough.” He was seventy two years old at this time! So wild were parts of the island that John Haine, a disciple of Wesley, relates that he once saw what he supposed to be a supernatural appearance in the clear sky, “a creature like a swan, but much larger, part black and part brown, which flew at him, went just over his head, and lighting on the ground stood staring upon him.” This was undoubtedly a great bustard, and Southey in his “Life of Wesley” quotes the _Gentleman’s Magazine_ to shew that one was seen as late as 1801. As we have seen, the very people of this time seem almost as unfamiliar to us as the scenery would have been. But is it not strange that with a guide whose thoughts were almost entirely in the world to come we should have seen so much and could see so much more, if only we could study him more closely? He lays bare to us England during the very long and active life of a man born just after the death of William III, who saw George III thirty years and more upon the throne. Wesley might have heard of the peace of Utrecht in 1713 as a boy, of the South Sea Bubble in 1720 as a youth, and he lived to hear of the French Revolution in 1789 and the fall of the Bastille. And throughout this long period of time the remarkable thing is his amazing vitality. He says he never felt low spirited: a sleepless night is so unusual that it is specially commented on. Till his 85th year he never acknowledged that he felt old: his youthfulness surprised him when recording his eighty eighth and following birthdays. No man had therefore a greater opportunity for seeing what England was like; and Wesley used it to the full. Yet it is a strange and perhaps an original guide whom we have used and it may be that the impression he leaves upon your minds is not quite what I had designed. Suppose my lecture should have been to some of you like the sermon of which George Herbert writes, “Where all lack sense, God takes the text and preaches patience;” and, my listeners, you have surrendered yourselves to your own thoughts and dreams. You may have pictured in the England of the eighteenth century a moorland on a windy winter evening, and on the near horizon the glare of an ill-lit manufacturing town, and a single figure small and slight, his