Walter Sellon occupies a rather unique position in Methodistic annals. He died in 1792, at the age of seventy-seven; and yet of the first thirty, and the last twenty-two years of his life, hardly anything is known. Dr. Abel Stevens, in his “History of Methodism,” says Sellon was originally a baker; but I know of no authority for this, except Toplady’s, whose hatred and abuse of Sellon were such as to justify a hesitancy in believing a statement concerning his stout antagonist, which he intended to be injurious to his fame. Sellon was born in the year 1715; but up to the year 1745 he had not been introduced to Wesley. In a letter to Wesley, dated December 31, 1744, he states, that, until recently, he had condemned him as “an innovator,” and had “pitied those who followed” him. But, having heard Wesley preach, and having read his sermon on “Scriptural Christianity,” delivered before the Oxford University on August 24, 1744, his opinions concerning him and his followers were entirely changed; and he now requested Wesley, when he had an opportunity, to preach at Maidenhead, “where drunkenness, adultery, profaneness, gaming, and almost every abominable vice, were not only committed with greediness, but gloried in, and boasted of.”[185] Whether Wesley went to Maidenhead, which seems to have been Sellon’s place of residence, is not known; but, three years and a half afterwards, when he opened his famous Kingswood School, Walter Sellon was appointed the Headmaster “for the Classics.”[186] About the year 1754, Sellon received episcopal ordination, and became curate of the churches of Smisby, near Ashby-de-la-Zouch, and of Breedon, where vast multitudes flocked to hear him, “not only from adjacent towns and villages, but frequently from places ten, fifteen, and twenty miles distant.” “He was a real Methodist,” wrote Jonathan Edmondson, “and hundreds were turned to God through his instrumentality.”[187] Sellon enjoyed the confidential friendship of Wesley, and especially of Wesley’s brother Charles; and, about the time of his appointment to his curacies, stood faithfully by them in their contentions with the most able and prominent of their itinerant preachers, concerning the separation of the Methodists from the Established Church. All his publications were controversial; and all, except his first, were written specially in defence of the anti-Calvinian doctrines Wesley taught. This is not the place to review Walter Sellon as an author. Suffice it to say, that he was always powerful, rather than polite; and that, after his first publication, in 1765, which was levelled at Socinianism, he prepared a second in 1768, which was entitled, “Arguments against the Doctrine of General Redemption considered.” Without noticing, at present, the subsequent writings of Sellon, it is enough to add, that, about the year 1770, he was presented by the Earl of Huntingdon to the Vicarage of Ledsham, in Yorkshire, where he lived and laboured until his