And yet, in this long and splendid catalogue, we have not mentioned his greatest and most distinctive work, which was that through him to the poor the Gospel was again preached. Let Whitefield have the credit of having been the first to make the green grass his pulpit and the heaven his sounding-board; but Wesley instantly followed, at all costs, the then daring example, and through all evil report and all furious opposition he continued it until at last at Kingswood, at the age of eighty-one, he preached in the open air, under the shade of trees which he himself had planted, and surrounded by the children and children's children of his old disciples, who had long since passed away. Overwhelming evidence exists to show what preaching was before and in his day; overwhelming evidence exists to show what the Church and people of England were before and in his day--how dull, how vapid, how soulless, how Christless was the preaching; how torpid, how Laodicean was the Church; how godless, how steeped in immorality was the land. To Wesley was mainly granted the task, for which he was set apart by the hands of invisible consecration--the task which even an archangel might have envied him--of awakening a mighty revival of the religious life in those dead pulpits, in that slumbering Church, in that corrupt society. His was the religious sincerity which not only founded the Wesleyan community, but, working through the heart of the very Church which had despised him, flashed fire into her whitening embers. Changing its outward forms, the work of John Wesley caused, first, the evangelical movement, then the high church movement, and, in its enthusiasm of humanity, has even reappeared in all that is best in the humble Salvationists, who learned from the example of Wesley what Bishop Lightfoot called "that lost secret of Christianity, the compulsion of human souls." Recognizing no utterance of authority as equally supreme with that which came to him from the Sinai of conscience, Wesley did the thing and scorned the consequence. His was the voice which offered hope to the despairing and welcome to the outcast.... The poet says: "Of those three hundred grant but three To make a new Thermopylæ." And when I think of John Wesley, the organizer, of Charles Wesley, the poet, of George Whitefield, the orator, of this mighty movement, I feel inclined to say of those three self-sacrificing and holy men, Grant but even one to help in the mighty work which yet remains to be accomplished! Had we but three such now, [Illustration: JOHN WESLEY'S GRAVE.]