XII. JOHN WESLEY. A. D. 1703-1791. THE power of the Gospel to create anew has been its standing miracle in all the Christian ages. It is its highest and most divine authentication. Celsus was right, looking from his own point of view. No mere human culture can change the nature of man. It can only cover over, civilize, and adorn. But those in whom sin has become a second nature are the very persons in whom the Gospel has wrought its most wondrous transformations, from Paul and Augustine down to the Wesleyan revivals of the last century and the most remarkable conversions of to-day. — E. H. SEARS, Sermons and Songs. 19 JOHN WESLEY. A. D. 1703-1791. THE eighteenth century was but three years old when John Wesley was born, and his life extended into its last decade. The eighty-eight years of that life embraced eleven of the twelve that Anne was upon the throne, the thirteen years of the reign of George I., the thirty-three of that of George II., and something more than thirty of that of George III. The latest biographer of Wesley1 has quoted a writer in the "North British Review," who says, "Never has a century risen in Christian England so void of soul and faith. It rose as a sunless dawn following upon a dewless night. There was no freshness in the past and no promise in the future. The Puritans were buried and the Methodists were not born. The philosopher of the age was Bolingbroke, the moralist was Addison, the minstrel was Pope, and the preacher was Atterbury. The world had the idle, discontented look of the morning after some mad holiday; and like rocket-sticks, and the singed paper from last night's squibs, the spent jokes of Charles and Rochester lay all about, and people yawned to look at them. The reign of buffoonery was past, but the reign of faith and earnestness had not commenced." This sharp in Tyerman, Life and Times of John Wesley, vol. i., p. 61. dictment of the age is true, but it does not go far enough; it does not express the full enormity of the fact. If the reign of buffoonery was past, it was only because all that was worst in the buffoonery of the Restoration period had been adopted into society that claimed for itself the perfection of respectability and propriety. The buffoon was still there; only the paint had been washed from his face, his party-colored garb exchanged for decent clothes, and his indecent tumblings laid aside for a gait that was curbed into a stilted and uneasy dignity. The reign of Queen Anne still claims to have been the golden age of English literature, and it shows a polished surface, to be sure, to the eye which gives but a cursory glance at its records. There are Steele, and Addison, and Pope, and Bishop Berkeley, and Samuel Clarke, walking in the garments of literary and social chastity, and Young with his vast religious pretentiousness; but Swift, greater intellectually than any of them, and a high church dignitary to boot, would have disgraced the license of the Merry Monarch's court and outdone it in profanity. Etherege, and Wycherley, and Buckingham, and Aphra Behn, and even Dryden, made the literature of Charles II.'s age infamous for all time. Anne's reign produced no such numerous spawn of indecency; but neither did it give birth to any such pure lights of heavenly radiance as Milton, and Izaak Walton, and Bishop Burnett, and Isaac Barrow, and John Bunyan. It was as cold and spiritually lifeless as it was elegant. Licentiousness was the open and shameless profession of the higher classes in the days of Charles; in the time of Anne it festered under the surface. On my lady's table is lying a volume of Bishop Jeremy Taylor's "Sermons," or his "Holy STATE OF MORALS AND RELIGION. 293 Living and Dying." But lift the book, and underneath you will be likely to find the licentious comedies of Etherege showing evidences of more frequent perusal. It was an age of unbounded extravagance and worldliness. Material splendor was a grand passion, and next to that, indulgence in gross animal pleasure. In order to obtain money for vain display, and to command the greatest amount of vicious pleasures, all means were resorted to, and the discrimination between honesty and dishonesty was well-nigh obliterated. Gambling was an almost universal practice, among men and women alike. Lords and ladies were skilled in knavery; disgrace was not in cheating, but in being cheated. Both sexes were given to profanity and to drunkenness. Sarah Jennings, Duchess of Marlborough, could swear more bravely than her husband could fight. Gin had been introduced just at the close of the last century; before the middle of this its annual consumption in England rose to seven million gallons. And as all fashions, good and bad, work downwards, hardly ever in the opposite direction, the middle classes ran the same race of corruption, and the lowest were eager to follow. Tradesmen and shopkeepers aped the follies of the Court, with their “long wigs and swords, velvet breeches and hunting-caps.' The wages of the poor were spent in guzzling beer at merry-makings; in wakes and fairs, badger-baitings and cock-fights. Matters were running in very much the same course as they were in France at the same time, a course which in the latter country had its terrific outcome in the Revolution, near the close of the century. And the only thing which in all probability saved England from a similar social earthquake was the sudden rise of Methodism, which laid hold of the |