"Hoary-headed selfishness would feel His deathblow, and would totter to his grave; A brighter light attend the human day, When every transfer of earth's natural gift Should be a commerce of good words and works." We have, it is true, hundreds of faithful workers in the Church of England and in other religious communities. But for the slaying of dragons, the rekindlement of irresistible enthusiasm, the redress of intolerable wrongs, a Church needs many Pentecosts and many resurrections. And these, in the providence of God, are brought about, not by committees and conferences and common workers, but by men who escape the average; by men who come forth from the multitude; by men who, not content to trudge on in the beaten paths of commonplace and the cart-ruts of routine, go forth, according to their Lord's command, into the highways and hedges; by men in whom the love of God burns like a consuming flame upon the altar of the heart; by men who have become electric to make myriads of other souls thrill with their own holy zeal. Such men are necessarily rare, but God's richest boon to any nation, to any society, to any Church, is the presence and work of such a man--and such a man was John Wesley. CHAPTER XX. THE GREATER WESLEY OF THE OPENING CENTURY. WHEN on March 2, 1791, John Wesley closed his eyes to earth and opened them in heaven the visible results of his life were already great. At the opening of this new century they are greater. Only a few rods from where he his "body with his charge laid down, and ceased at once to work and live," is Wesley's Chapel, City Road, the head center of universal Methodism. Standing on the walls of this Zion in 1791 and looking around, what would we see? Confining our vision within the bounds of Great Britain and Ireland, we would see this chapel surrounded by 644 others, "wholly appropriate to the worship of God." These chapels are ministered unto by 294 itinerant preachers, and have an enrollment of 71,668 members of the societies. Extending our vision to the regions beyond, in the Wesleyan Methodist missions in France, the West Indies, Nova Scotia, and Newfoundland, we would see in 1791 an enrolled membership of 5,300, looked after by 19 ministers; giving as the total of Wesleyan Methodists at that time 76,968, and 313 ministers. In addition to the home and foreign work of which John Wesley was the head, and City Road Chapel the center, was the Methodism of the United States, which in 1790 reported 43,265 members and 198 ministers, and which was known as "The Methodist Episcopal Church of America." So that we would see as the total of Methodists in the world at Wesley's last Conference, in 1790, 120,233 members, and 511 ministers. Besides these, a great number who, from 1739 to 1790, saved by Methodist agency, had been transferred to the Church above.