world, therefore I lay hold on the present time to give free vent to those sad thoughts that lie on my mind both day and night, and are the subject of many secret mournings." He declares, he "cannot look on, without the deepest concern, when he sees the imminent ruin which hangs over the church; and this ruin,” he asserts, "threatens the whole reformation.” "The out

ward state of things is bleak enough, God knows; but that which heightens my fears rises chiefly from the inward state into which we are unhappily fallen!"

Archbishop Secker says, " In this we cannot be mistaken, that an open and professed disregard is become, through a variety of unhappy causes, the distinguishing character of the present age." "Such," he declares, “are the dissoluteness and contempt of principle in the higher part of the world, and the profligacy, intemperance, and fearlessness of committing crimes, in the lower, as must, if this torrent of impiety stop not, become absolutely fatal." He further asserts that "Christianity is ridiculed and railed at with very little reserve, and the teachers of it without any at all;" and this testimony was made but one year before that which is commemorated as the original year of Methodism. About this same time Butler published

his unparalleled work on the Analogy between Religion and the Constitution and Course of Nature. In his preface he gives a deplorable description of the religious world. He concurs with the preceding authorities in representing it in the very extreme of decline. "It has come to be taken for granted that Christianity is no longer a subject of inquiry; but that it is now at length discovered to be fictitious. And accordingly it is treated as if, in the present age, this were an agreed point among all persons of discernment, and nothing remained but to set it up a principal subject for mirth and ridicule."

I have been the more minute on this subject because, as a church, we have been accused of arrogance in ascribing too much importance to the influence of Methodism. When it is considered that it found the Christian world in this perilous extremity, and that the contrast which the present state of Protestant Christendom exhibits has been subsequently effected, perhaps the liability of exaggeration will not be so strongly suspected.

The rise of Methodism, under these circumstances, presents a most sublime instance of moral triumph, and of the deathless energy of those great principles which Christianity has set in operation for the regeneration of the

world; and which prophecy, through many weary ages, and in many dark intervals, when their radiance has seemed almost extinguished and their efficacy exhausted, has still, with unfaltering emphasis, pronounced to be invincible. Let good men learn not to despair, and the foes of Christianity not to hope, in the hour of her trial. The sun, when his rays are intercepted by clouds, is not annihilated, but still wheels on in his chariot of fire above the darkness and the storm, and, when they have subsided, bursts with but greater splendor on the world. The whole history of religion teaches the lesson of confidence to its friends, and of failure to its enemies. Its triumphant delivery in its patriarchal form, in Egypt; its extraordinary and victorious struggle with classic Polytheism, throughout the Roman empire; its successful conflict with the stupendous superstitions of Popery, when it dissipated the darkness of ten centuries; and its renovation under Wesley, when it combated and overcame polished skepticism, learned heterodoxy, and general irreligion, -all show that, however dark its occasional obscuration may be, it possesses an inherent power of self-renovation which allows no final hope to its opposers. At the very moment when Bishop Butler penned the above fearful description of

the English Church, and skeptics were congratulating themselves with the thought that Christianity was expiring in its dotage, the "holy club," at Oxford, were kindling a fire which, in the words of an English reformer to his fellowmartyr, at the stake, was to "put all England in a blaze;" and which is still extending, like flame in stubble, through the length and breadth of the world. God was preparing, at this time, Wesley, Whitefield, and their coadjutors, to meet the crisis; and, on the clouds of that dark period he wrote, as with their own lightning, the date of a new epoch in the history of the church. Protestant Christendom has been partially regenerated since that period; and nearly the whole series of benevolent institutions which are now redeeming the world sprang up from its darkness.

2

BISHOP ASBURY AND BLACK PUNCH.

"A word in season."-Isaiah.

ONE of the greatest misfortunes of our deno minational literature is that we have no biography of Bishop Asbury. What a life was his! What a diversified delineation would his history be! And yet it is not the great deeds of that great man-his vast journeyings, incessant preaching, and executive plans-that illustrate fully his character; he that would write a genuine biography of Asbury must gather from all the wide-spread country the numerous incidents of his more personal life, the anecdotes and sayings that exhibit characteristically the

man.

One of these, an affecting fact in itself, as well as an illustration of the bishop's character, occurred, in 1798, on his journey to Charleston, S. C. He passed a creek, in the parish of St. on the bank of which sat a slave fishing and humming a ditty; his name was Punch. He was notorious for his vicious character. The good bishop, on riding toward him, bethought himself that under that squalid exterior lived an immortal spirit for whom Christ had died, and the salvation of which would be a