“Scarcely is the form of godliness seen among us. Take any one you meet; take a second, a third, a fourth, or the twentieth. Not one of them has even the appearance of a saint, any more than of an angel. Is there no needless visiting on the sabbath day? no trifling, no impertinence of conversation? And, on other days, are not the best of our conversing hours spent in foolish talking and jesting, nay, perhaps, in wanton talking too? Are there not many among us found to eat and drink with the drunken? Are not even the hours assigned for study too commonly employed in reading plays, novels, and idle tales? How many voluntary blockheads there are among us, whose ignorance is not owing to incapacity, but to mere laziness! How few, of the vast number, who have it in their power, are truly learned men! Who is there that can be said to understand Hebrew? Might I not say, or even Greek? O what is so scarce as learning, save religion!”[424] The remainder of this remarkable sermon is in the same strain. Its allegations, we are afraid, were true; but the sermon was far too personal to be prudent, and Wesley exercised a wise discretion in exchanging it for the other. During the year 1741, while in Wales, Wesley was seized with a serious illness. Hastening to Bristol, he was ordered, by Dr. Middleton, to go to bed,—“a strange thing to me,” he writes, “who have not kept my bed a day for five-and-thirty years.” A dangerous fever followed, and the Bristol society held a fast and offered prayer. For eight days, he hung between life and death; and, for three weeks, he was kept a prisoner, when, contrary to the advice given him, he resumed his work, and began to preach daily. This was a long interval of enforced retirement for a man of Wesley’s active temperament; but it was not unprofitably spent. As soon as he could, he began to read, and during his convalescence devoured half-a-dozen works. He read “the life of that truly good and great man, Mr. Philip Henry;” and “the life of Mr. Matthew Henry,—a man not to be despised, either as a scholar or a Christian, though not equal to his father.” He read “Mr. Laval’s ‘History of the Reformed Churches in France;’ full of the most amazing instances of the wickedness of men, and of the goodness and power of God.” He likewise read “Turretin’s ‘History of the Church,’ a dry, heavy, barren treatise.” He gave a second perusal to “Theologia Germanica,” and asks, “O, how was it that I could ever so admire the affected obscurity of this unscriptural writer?” He also “read again, with great surprise, part of the ‘Ecclesiastical History of Eusebius,’” and says, “so weak, credulous, thoroughly injudicious a writer have I seldom found.”