3 All my good works were nothing worth, My soul, as hating God from birth, My torment drove me to despair, Death closed me round to slay me there; 4 The Eternal God, He looked on me, He could not brook my misery, He turned to me His Father Heart; 6 Hastened the Son with willing feet. 7 He spake me thus: 'Hold fast to Me, Thy wrongs shall soon be righted; IO I give My very Self for thee, For thee My Life is plighted. For I am thine, and thou art Mine, Close round My Love thy faith shall twine; Whatever I have done and taught, Be thou still doing, teaching; Therewith God's kingdom shall be brought In praise to hearts beseeching. But guard thee well from man's device, Which I trust to thy keeping.' I SOME PREPARATORY CONDITIONS OF THE EXPERIENCE OF WESLEY RELIGIOUS JOHN WESLEY'S wonderful Journal,' besides being a record of almost unparalleled religious activity, and a transcript of the life of the English people, for the greater part of a century, such as is nowhere else to be found, may also be called the autobiography of an intimate spiritual experience, presented so fully and frankly, as to constitute it a rich mine for study on the part of those who would learn the secret of joyous spiritual freedom, resulting in self-forgetting devotion to the service of man and the glory of God. It begins on Oct. 14, 1735. Oxford Methodism was on the move. John and Charles Wesley, with two comrades, sailed down the Thames to Gravesend, with some others, who there took leave of the little party. Wesley says, "Our end in leaving our native country was not to avoid want, God having given us plenty of temporal blessings, nor to gain riches or honour, which we trust He will ever enable us to look on as no other than dung and dross, but singly this to save our souls, to live wholly to the glory of God." At present his horizon was circumscribed. A few years later, and for the rest of his long life, he was actuated by an insatiable yearning for the salvation of his fellow-men. But a true instinct taught him that, until he himself was right, he was not likely to do much towards helping others to become right. His sojourn in America was a part of the discipline that was to teach him his own helplessness, and thus prepare him for God's better way. He had been trying for years to save his soul; he was still trying; he might try for ever, and be no nearer than at the beginning. It was the old history repeating itself-salvation by effort. His utter failure left him ready to learn, like Paul, like Luther, that salvation is of grace, through faith. To understand the nature of the crisis at which Wesley had arrived when the ' Journal' begins, we must go back some years. He came of a strangely blended lineage. His grandfather, the first John Wesley (or Westley), and his great-grandfather, Bartholomew, were Puritans holding appointment in the Anglican Church, who were among the ejected 2,000 of St. Bartholomew's Day, 1662. The wife of the first John Wesley was daughter of a celebrated Puritan, John White, the Patriarch of Dorchester. Wesley's grandfather on his mother's side was another distinguished Puritan, Samuel Annesley, whose wife was daughter of another John White, an eminent Puritan lawyer. Though the father and mother of the Wesleys, deriving from such an ancestry, became convinced and ardent Anglicans, yet there probably remained a subconscious instinct and sympathy on the side of Puritanism, more especially in the case of John Wesley, which goes far to explain the strange dualism of his character. To the very end he tried to believe that he was a loyal Churchman, though he certainly was not regarded as such by the bishops and clergy. Loyal he was, in theory; practically |