It was considered to show a want of taste, and even a want of good manners, to mention religion out of church, and any man who showed the least earnestness on the subject was at once dubbed an enthusiast, or suspected of being a dissenter. Of course, there were honorable exceptions, as I said, among clergy and laity, and there were many humble souls who fed on the sincere milk of the word, and were comforted by those wonderful and glorious prayers which no indifference on the part of the reader could quite spoil. Into the midst of this state of things descended the Wesleys, preaching the plain unvarnished truths of the Gospel, declaring all men lost sinners, with no way of escape but by personal repentance, and a personal acceptance of the salvation offered to all alike. Preaching to the poor colliers and miners and others, who had been suffered to live like the brutes and perish like them, teaching them that they, even they, might and ought to sustain personal relations to the God who made them, and setting before them a wonderful ideal of personal purity and holiness, attainable to every one who would seek it in the right way. They did indeed preach deliverance to the captive, and opening the eyes to them that were blind. Doubtless there were among the converts many cases of delusion, many of mere animal excitement, and some of sheer hypocrisy, but no one who knows what was the state of such places as Kingswood and the mining villages in Cornwall, before and after the preaching of the Methodists, can doubt that the good done was greatly in excess of the evil. Mr. Wesley had already been preaching for several years, and people had become in some degree used to his erratic course. But when Mr. Cheriton, the rector of St. Anne's, son of one of the best families in the country, and probable heir to a title—when he took to preaching faith and repentance, and "all that sort of thing," as Mrs. Cropsey said—his course caused a great sensation. Still more, when he took to holding week-day services, giving lectures and teaching classes in the poorer parts of the parish, when he talked to the very children in the parish school about loving their Saviour. At first, the novelty of the thing brought many of the genteel people of the town to hear him, but they soon fell off. As the sexton said, they were willing to call them miserable sinners in the way of business, but it was another thing to hear themselves proved so, and to have plainly held up before them, in the clearest Scripture language, the consequences of continuing in such a course. So by degrees, the fine people fell off, and their pews stood empty Sunday after Sunday, while the free seats and those of the trades-people were always crowded.