HAD the immense labors of John Wesley noted in a former chapter been performed under public patronage, cheered on by all, they would have seemed less arduous. Men may prosecute a reform when public opinion favors it with comparative ease, but with less entitlement to honor than he has a right to claim who does it in the face of passion and interest. The labors of John Wesley were prosecuted in the teeth of opposition such as seldom falls to the lot of man to endure. And what made it more dastardly and cruel was the fact that it was instigated and principally conducted by the officials of that Church of which he was a worthy member and ordained minister to the day of his death. It is a sad fact, but nevertheless true, that most of the opposition and persecution encountered by reformers and revivalists have come from the churchmen of the times. It has been the Church opposing those who were honestly seeking her own reformation. When the Church substitutes forms for godliness, and devotes herself to ecclesiasticism instead of soul-saving, and place-seeking takes the place of piety, she is ready to resist all efforts for her restoration to spirituality as irregular and offensive. No sooner had Wesley exposed the sins of the Church, especially those of the pulpit, than the pulpit denounced him; and the press, taking its keynote from the pulpit, thundered as though the "abomination of desolation" had actually "taken possession of the holy place." Then the idle rabble rushed to the front, and mob violence and mob law were the order of the hour. The flaming denunciations of the pulpits of the Establishment against Mr. Wesley and his people have never been surpassed in the history of the English nation. Wesley says: "We were everywhere represented as mad dogs, and treated accordingly. In sermons, newspapers, and pamphlets of all kinds we were painted as unheard-of monsters. But this moved us not; we went on testifying salvation by faith both to small and great, and not counting our lives dear to ourselves, so we might finish our course with peace." The Wesleys were represented as "bold movers of sedition and ringleaders of the rabble, to the disgrace of their order." They were denounced by learned divines as "restless deceivers of the people," "babblers," "insolent pretenders," "men of spiritual sleight and cunning craftiness." They were guilty of "indecent, false, and unchristian reflections on the clergy." They were "new-fangled teachers," "rash, uncharitable censurers," "intruding into other men's labors," and running "into wild fancies until the pale of the Church is too strait for them." They were "half dissenters _in_ the Church, and more dangerous _to_ the Church than those who were total dissenters from it."