became the dignity of a Christian marriage.” A stranger said, it looked more like a funeral than a wedding; but Charles remarks, “We were cheerful without mirth, serious without sadness; and my brother seemed the happiest person among us.”[9] A few days after the conference was closed, Wesley and his brother proceeded to Bristol for the purpose of opening Kingswood school. Kingswood school! a sacred spot, surrounded with unequalled Methodistic memories; once one of the homes of the Wesleys and their friends; the place of not a few remarkable revivals of religion; an academic grove, whose scenery was at first beautiful and inviting, and from which have issued many of the most distinguished ministers that Methodism has ever had, and not a few highly accomplished scholars, whose names stand honourably associated with the legal and other high professions, and with England’s chief seats of learning; an upretending edifice, with associations to which no other Methodist building (except the Broadmead meeting-house in Bristol) can make pretensions; for above half a century Methodism’s only college; to the end of life one of Wesley’s favourite haunts; the _alma mater_ of scores still living, who will always love its memory; a homestead in which Methodism lingered perhaps as long as was expedient; and which, when Methodism left it, in 1852, became a place of discipline for young thieves and vagabonds, a reformatory for youthful criminals, whose presence in public society was a nuisance and a curse, and yet whose minds and morals were most likely to be improved, not in a prison, but in a school. We have already seen, that Wesley built a school at Kingswood in 1740. Myles, in his Chronological History, says, that the school opened in 1748 was the old school “enlarged;”[10] and that, though the school commenced in 1740 was intended for the children of colliers, yet, for some years, several of the Methodists in other places had sent their children to be educated here.[11] This was an encroachment upon Wesley’s original design, but one which he had no disposition to resist. Besides this, he found it necessary to make some provision for the education of the children of his preachers. Their fathers were almost constantly from home. Their mothers, in many cases, were unequal to their management. Funds did not exist to send them to a boarding school. And hence Wesley found it imperative to provide a school himself.