The English clergy as a body gathered up their garments and shrunk from all contact with the Methodists as from a pestilence. What could be done? Something must be done to prevent them from falling back into the world. Piety needs habit, and must become habitual to be safe, even as the fine-twined linen of the veil, and the ark of the covenant, and the cherubim shadowing the mercy-seat, were shut in and all their glory defended by the rude coverings of badger-skins. John Wesley knew that the safety of the converted would be in frequent meetings for singing and prayer and conversation. Reciprocation is the soul of Methodism; so they assembled in each others’ houses, in rude and lonely but convenient rooms, by farm-house ingles, in lone hamlets. Thus was created a homely piety, often rugged enough, no doubt, but full of beautiful and pathetic instincts. So grew what came to be called band-meetings, class-meetings, love-feasts, and all the innumerable means by which the Methodist Society worked, until it became like a wheel within a wheel; simple enough, however, in the days to which we are referring. “Look to the Lord, and faithfully attend all the means of grace appointed in the Society.” Such was, practically, the whole of Methodism. So that famous old lady, whose bright example has so often been held up on Methodist platforms, when called upon to state the items of her creed, did so very sufficiently when she summed it up in the four particulars of “repentance towards God; faith in the Lord Jesus Christ; a penny a week; and a shilling a quarter.” Wesley seems to have summed the Methodist creed more simply still: “Belief in the Lord Jesus Christ, and an earnest desire to flee from the wrath to come.” This was his condition of Church fellowship. When the faith became more consciously objective, it too was seized by the passionate instinct, the desire t o save souls. This drove the early Methodists out on great occasions to call vast multitudes together on heaths, on moors. Perhaps—but this was at a later time—some country gentleman threw open his old hall to the preachers; though the more aristocratic phase of the Methodist movement fell into the Calvinistic rather than into the Wesleyan ranks, and subsided into the organisation of the Countess of Huntingdon, which was, in fact, a kind of Free Church of England. The followers of Wesley sought the sequestration of nature, or in cities and towns they took to the streets or the broad ways and outlying fields. In some neighbourhoods a little room was built, containing the germ of what in a few years became a large Wesleyan Society. The burden of all these meetings, and all their intercourse, whether in speech or song, was the sweetness and fulness of Jesus. They had intense faith in the love of God shed abroad in the heart; and their great interest was in souls on the brink of perdition. They knew little of spiritual difficulties or speculative despair; their