opinion is that the much-injured Scots Queen appears to have been far the greatest woman of that age, exquisitely beautiful in her person, of a fine address, of a deep unaffected piety, and of a stronger understanding, even in youth, than Queen Elizabeth had at threescore. By way of contrast to this enthusiasm there is his reflection after reading the celebrated life of St. Catherine of Genoa, a biography which is now discovered to have been clogged with legend. "Mr. Leslie calls one, a devil of a saint.' I am sure this was 'a fool of a saint'; that is, if it was not the folly of her historian, who has aggrandized her into a mere idiot."1

V

WESLEY'S "JOURNAL"

ALTHOUGH We are dealing with a master who chose holiness before humanism, the fact need not be lost upon us that Wesley has come to recognition for his achievements as a man of letters. Just as it was at one time a surprise to evangelical worshippers at the shrine of Bunyan to be told that their favourite author was a foremost writer of English prose, so it was left to the more detached outsider-such as Edward FitzGerald, the translator of Omar Khayyám -to bespeak attention for the Journal of Wesley as one of the masterpieces of English literature. Mr. Thomas Seccombe, in his handbook The Age of Johnson, devotes a

page or two to the Journal, as being "a work of literary power inspired by religion and permeated by a force that is almost superhuman." He adds: "The name of Wesley is venerated wherever English is spoken, but his Journal is not enough read. It is a great book in every way. . Not only is it a monument of incredible exertions. It is itself a piece of prodigious penmanship, for it contains over seven hundred thousand words. The first entry is dated October 14, 1735, when Wesley is thirty-two years old, and the last on October 24, 1790, when he is in his eightyseventh year. My own attention to this treasure was aroused one Sunday evening when I was with Sir William Robertson Nicoll, in his library at Frognal at Hampstead. The volumes happened to be in sight, for Sir William had just been writing for The British Weekly an article on John Wesley's three saints-Lopez, de Renty,

and John Fletcher. On returning to wonted scenes I promptly borrowed from a clergyman in the neighbourhood what proved to be a non-indexed and rather ugly edition of the Journal. Since then the work has been issued in more manageable forms, particularly in the all-sufficing Curnock edition.

The giving of oneself to this human document might well reward a reader with exhilarations such as came to Keats on first looking into Chapman's Homer, or as came to Hazlitt on his first acquaintance with Coleridge. Mr. Seccombe recalls the saying of the Wesleys' kinsman, Thomas Fuller, about some person who had "drunk more of Jordan than of Helicon." It is surely part of the charm of the Journal that he who reads it has access to both streams. remember that as Sir William was so kindly giving me impressions from his recent reading, the outstanding thing was the

I

stark loneliness of Wesley in England in the hour of his spiritual accolade.

One man against a stone-walled city of sin.

"There is hardly any book like it," writes this accomplished critic. "Its shrewdness, its wit, its wisdom, its knowledge are bordered with a pale edge of fire, the spiritual passion of the great apostle's soul." And again: "There is no book, I humbly think, in all the world like John Wesley's Journal. It is pre-eminently the book of the resurrection life lived in this world. . . . Indeed, it stands out solitary in all Christian literature, clear, detached, columnar.'