surely are well worth a study. In an exhaustive work by Mr. Pierce we have, as it were, the inner life of Wesleyan Methodism, methodically arranged and placed in chronological order. “The attempt,” says the Rev. G. Osborn, D.D., in his Introductory Preface, “is made in honesty and candour; and has required a large amount of labour on the part of the compiler, which, however, his love and admiration of the system have made, if not absolutely pleasant, yet far less irksome than under other circumstances it would have been.” We must, in fairness, add that Mr. Pierce has certainly exhausted his theme, and his non-Wesleyan readers. A catechism of 800 large pages of small type is more trying than even that of the Assembly of Divines. Surely it was possible to do what Mr. Pierce has done in a more readable form. Still, however, his work is invaluable as a cyclopædia of Wesleyan faith, and organization, and practice. Mr. Wesley had originally no intention of seceding from the Church of England. Dr. Stevens, in his very interesting work, has shown how, step by step, he was forced into secession, and was compelled, by the force of circumstances—the irresistible logic of events—to abandon his very strong Church principles. In this respect Conference has rigidly adhered to Wesley’s teaching. “What we are,” it stated in 1824, “as a religious body we have become both in doctrine and discipline by the leadings of the providence of God. But for the special invitation of the Holy Spirit that great work of which we are all the subjects, and which bears upon it marks so unequivocal of an eminent work of God, could not have existed. In that form of discipline and government which it has assumed it was adapted to no preconceived plan of man. Our venerable founder kept only one end in view—the diffusion of Scriptural authority through the land, and the preservation of all who had believed through grace in the simplicity of the Gospel. This guiding principle he steadily followed, and to that he surrendered cautiously but faithfully whatever in his preconceived opinions he discovered to be contrary to the indications of Him whose the work was, and to whom he had yielded up himself implicitly as His servant and instrument. In the further growth of the societies the same guidance of Providential circumstances, the same signs of the times, led to that full provision for the direction of the societies, and for their being supplied with all the ordinances of the Christian Church, and to that more perfect pastoral care which the number of the members and the vastness of the congregations (collected not out of the spoils of other churches, but out of the world which lieth in wickedness) imperatively required.” Thus, practically abhorring the name of Dissent, Methodists became Dissenters themselves, and certainly as a sect put forth, as the above extract teaches, the strongest claims to a Divine origin and sanction.