The mystical tinge of this passage, and the total absence of all regard to what Christ has done for us, as well as the apparent ignorance of that divine inAluence, which must put us in possession of the blessings of his redemption, will not appear wonderful, when it is known that the two Wesleys, during the latter part of their stay at Oxford, maintained a close intimacy with the celebrated mystic Law, the author of Christian Perfection, and the Call to a devout and holy Life. Two or three times in a year, these young seekers travelled about sixty miles (on foot, that they might save their money for the poor), to visit this oracle, and listen to its responses. At one time, Mr. Law said to John Wesley, "you would have a philosophical religion, but there can be no such thing. Religion is the most simple thing, it is only, we love him because he first loved us.' With an affectation of luminous simplicity, this dictatorial sentence is as ambiguous as any response which was ever delivered from the delphic tripod: for the text of Scripture, as it is here quoted, may signify two opposite sentiments; either that our only motive for loving God is, because he loved us, which is the selfishness of arminianism; or that the true reason, why we are brought to love God is, because he, in love for us, gave the disposition, which is the humble and generous acknowledgment of calvinism. But these young methodists were not sufficiently acute divines to see through the the amphibologies of their oracle. It was, however, a melancholy circumstance, that, looking around them on every hand for tutors and guides in the way to heaven, writing and travelling to those who were most famed for theological eminence, they could discover no better luminary than this ignis fatuus.

If such was the light, what must the darkness have been? What Mr. Wesley himself afterwards thought of the system which he then adopted, the reader may judge from his own words. "In this

refined way of trusting to my own works, and my own righteousness, by pursuing inward holiness, or an union of soul with God, so zealously inculcated by the mystic writers, whom I declare in my cool judgment, and in the presence of the most high God, I believe to be one great antichrist, I dragged on heavily till the time of leaving England'." Yet, as Horace observes, that the cask long retains a smatch of the liquor with which it was first imbued; so it has been deplored that Mr. Wesley's religion was not thoroughly purged from the leaven of this great antichrist all his days. Pursuing, however, this mistaken course with great diligence, their economy and self-denial enabled them to devote eighty pounds per annum to charitable objects, and their zeal urged them to invent various schemes of usefulness. This roused the true Oxonian spirit to fierce opposition. It was reported, that the college censors, were going to blow up the godly club; and a gentleman, whom Mr. Wesley pronounces famed for piety, seized his nephew by the throat to compel him to desist from weekly communion. Lying fame used all her mouths to spread abroad evil reports, which compelled John Wesley to write to his elder brother Samuel, a clergyman at Westminster, to remove the unfavourable impressions which he had received concerning the methodists. But as Samuel seems to have been a worldly priest, who hated all pretence to more religion than our neighbours, as an infallible mark of a dissenter, the f Wesley's Journals, vol. I. p. 27.

correspondence, between the two brothers, left each of them confirmed in his first impressions. Mr. Wesley's father, however, approved of the conduct of his methodistical sons, and the bishop of Oxford sanctioned their visits to the prisoners at the castle.

But about the year one thousand seven hundred and thirty-five, their societies at Oxford were broken up; for John and Charles Wesley, Mr. Ingham, and Mr. Delamotte, the son of a merchant in London, in the October of that year, embarked for Georgia, in America. It may be enquired, how Mr. Wesley, who had obstinately refused his father's living of Epworth, that he might enjoy the society at Oxford, should forsake this beloved spot for a desart. William Law and the mystics had crazed him with the imagination, that he was literally to go forth into the wilderness to follow Christ; though Jesus himself had warned him that if they should say, " lo! Christ is in the desart go not forth.” "Our end in leaving our native country," says Mr. Wesley, " was not to avoid want, God having given us plenty of temporal blessings, nor to gain the dung and dross of riches and honour, but singly this, to save our souls, and to live wholly to the glory of God." The ignorance of religion, betrayed in this account of their object, would lead us to augur ill of the success of their mission; and accordingly it seems to have produced no other effect than, as Mr. Wesley says, that of leading him into the desart to be tempted and humbled, and shewn what was in his heart. O that it had effectually accomplished the object! This would have made ample atonement for every other failure.

The circumstance, which opened the way for the operation of these ascetic views, was the death of his

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father, in the spring of the year one thousand seven hundred and thirty-five, which called him to London, where he met with Dr. Burton; one of the trustees for the new colony of Georgia, who requested him to go thither to preach to the Indians. Mr. Wesley having consulted his mother, she gave her consent in language which spoke her a genuine daughter of an old puritan : "had I twenty sons, I should rejoice that they were all so employed, though I should never see them more." During the voyage, the company of missionaries employed their time with scrupulous exactness and laborious diligence, in acts of devotion, in the study of the Scriptures, and in the instruction of those who were willing to learn. But if we judge of their instruction from a hint which Mr. Wesley gives, it was the blind conducting the foolish. "A woman desired to receive the sacrament, but I thought it necessary, to instruct her first in the nature of Christianity, and therefore read to her every day out of Mr. Law's Christian Perfection." Thus he instructed her in the nature of Christianity, by the lessons of one of those whom he himself afterwards pronounced the great antichrist. For the best intentions, without just principles, only make a man industriously wrong.

There were, however, on board the vessel, several Germans who were missionaries from the Moravian brethren, and in these Mr. Wesley saw a meekness, purity, and benevolence, an air of heartfelt satisfaction and joy, a superiority to the ills of life, and a victory over the fears of death, to which he was conscious he had never attained. The storms, which shook him with dread of eternity, only filled them with joy in the prospect of speedily beholding the unveiled face of a reconciled God, and thus displayed

the vast, essential difference between their religion and that of a man whose zeal and self-denial had led him across the Atlantic, to exchange the comforts of England for the horrors of a desart, in the vain hope of procuring that acceptance with God by his own performances, which they had obtained" by faith in him who justifieth the ungodly." Hence, even his biographers who, attached to his communion, were ardent admirers of their leader, acknowledge that,' "though he gave all his goods to feed the poor, and sacrificed ease, and honour, and every other temporal gratification to follow Christ, yet it is certain that he was very little acquainted with true experimental religion. This the Lord began now to shew him, first, by the fear of death, which notwithstanding all his efforts, brought him into bondage, whenever danger was apparent, which made him say, I plainly felt I was unfit, because I was unwilling to die; secondly, the lively victorious faith he evidently perceived in his fellow passengers, the moravians, still more convinced him that he possessed not the power of religion." Yet these biographers, with a strange confusion of ideas, and perversion of language, speak of him at this time, as having a single eye, as being a man of God, as entitled to the regards due to a minister of Christ, while he was, as Paul describes the Jews, ignorant of God's righteousness, and going about to establish his own, and not submitting himself to the righteousness of God; so that he was at enmity with God, under his wrath, and destitute of true virtue or holiness, which is the inseparable companion of the faith of God's elect. The very passage of Scripture, to which the authors of Mr. * Coke and Moore's life, p. 97.