At another place a crowd assembled, arrested a number of Methodists, and dragged them before a magistrate, who inquired, "What have the Methodists done?" "Why, your worship," said one, "these people profess to be better than anybody else. They pray all the time, by day and by night." "Is that all they have done?" asked the magistrate. "No, sir," answered an old man, "may it please your worship, they have converted my wife. Till she went with them she had such a tongue! Now she is as quiet as a lamb." "Carry them back, carry them back," said the magistrate, "and let them convert all the scolds in town!" At Bristol the mob cursed and swore and shouted while the preacher declared the Gospel. A Catholic priest in the congregation shouted, "Thou art a hypocrite, a devil, an enemy to the Church." These are a few examples of what occurred almost daily, and that for many years. At Poole, at Lichfield, at St. Ives, at Grimsby, at Cork, at Wenlock, at Athlone, at Dudley, and at many other places he encountered similar opposition, until the presence of a Methodist preacher was the signal for a mob. Many of the preachers were impressed into the army on the pretense that their occupation was irregular and their lives vagabondish. But wherever they went they were true to God and to the faith as they felt it in their hearts. The cause of all this opposition was the preaching of justification by faith, entire sanctification, and the urging of clergy and laity to a holy life. Thomas Olivers tells Richard Hill that the man he had maligned was one who had published a hundred volumes, who had traveled yearly five thousand miles, preached yearly about one thousand sermons, visited as many sick beds as he had preached sermons, and written twice as many letters; and who, though now between seventy and eighty years of age, absolutely refused to abate in the smallest degree these mighty labors; but might be seen at this very time, with his silver locks about his ears, and with a meager, worn-out, skeleton body, smiling at storms and tempests, at such difficulties and dangers as "I believe would be absolutely intolerable to _you_, sir, in conjunction with any _four_ of your most flaming ministers." Such is John Wesley in his persecutions. We who claim to be followers of Wesley, and who glory in the rich fruit of these unexampled labors, sufferings, and sacrifices, might with propriety inquire whether we would be willing to endure such toil and "despise such shame," that we might transmit to the children of a future generation the rich inheritance which we enjoy. The Church needs such men in these times--genuine reformers, men who will dare to proclaim the whole counsel of God, though for doing so they may be maligned, traduced, misrepresented, and their names even cast out as evil; men who will lovingly but unflinchingly face the incoming tide of worldliness with the old Wesleyan weapons of faith and prayer until holiness triumphs.