They must soon have become very well known, for so early as 1748, when a sad cluster of convicts, horse-stealers, highway robbers, burglars, smugglers, and thieves, were led forth to execution, the turnkey of the prison said he had never seen such people before. The Methodists had been among them; they had all yielded themselves to the power of “the truth as it is in Jesus,” and on their way to Tyburn they all sang together, “Lamb of God! whose bleeding love We now recall to mind, Send the answer from above, And let us mercy find; Think on us, who think of Thee, And every struggling soul release; Oh! remember Calvary, And let us go in peace!” The hymns found their way to sick beds. The old Earl of Derby, the grandfather of the present peer, was dying at Knowsley. He had for his housekeeper there a Mrs. Brass, a good and faithful Methodist; the old Earl was fond of talking with her upon religious matters, and one day she read to him the well-known hymn, “All ye that pass by, to Jesus draw nigh.” When she came to the lines, “The Lord in the day of His anger did lay Our sins on the Lamb, and he bore them away,” the Earl looked up and said, “Stop! don’t you think, Mrs. Brass, that ought to be, ‘The Lord in the day of his _mercy_ did lay’?” The old lady did not admit the validity of his lordship’s theology; but it very abundantly showed that his experience had passed through the verse, and reached to the true meaning of the hymn. An old blind woman was hearing Peter McOwan preach. He quoted these lines: “The Lord pours eyesight on the blind; The Lord supports the fainting mind.” The poor old woman was not happy until she met the preacher, and she said, “But are there really such sweet verses? Are you sure the book contains such a hymn?” and he read the whole to her. It is one by Watts: “I’ll praise my Maker while I’ve breath.” Innumerable are the anecdotes of these hymns; they inaugurated really the rise of English hymnology; and it is not too much to say that, as compared with them, many more recent hymns are as tinsel compared with gold. A writer truly says: “They sob, they swell, they meet the spirit in its most hushed and plaintive mood. They roll and bear it aloft, in its most inspired and prophetic moods, as on the surge of more than a mighty organ swell; among the mines and quarries, and wild moors of Cornwall, among the factories of Lancashire and Yorkshire, in chambers of death, in the most joyous assemblages of the household, they have relieved the hard lot, and sweetened the pleasant one; and even in other lands soldiers and sailors, slaves and prisoners, have recited with what joy these words have entered into their life.”