gone askew. Coming to a crossing at the Menai Straits and finding the tide adverse, Wesley "sat down in a little cottage for three or four hours, and translated Aldrich's Logic." The treatise was for the use of the lay preachers who by this time had become numerous in the Methodist societies. Kept indoors at another place, with a sprained ankle, he takes the opportunity to write a book of lessons for children, and also a Hebrew grammar for his preachers. An entry for January 6, 1754, Sunday, says: I began writing Notes on the New Testament, a work which I should scarce ever have attempted had I not been so ill as not to be able to travel or preach, and yet so well as to be able to read and write. "Eia age, rumpe moras !" he exclaims, as he reminds his brother how they are getting on in years. Idleness could hardly be the foible of a gentleman who was capable of saying, "At least we can walk twenty miles a day with our horses in our hands." For a man uninstructed in "New Thought" he managed well to combine economy of time with an absence of strain. When the worst comes to the worst in the matter of ship-sailing delays, he can recall and adapt the cheerful lines— There are, if rightly I methink, Five causes why a man should drink. With a little alteration he gets something suitable for the sea-captains who with their lame excuses are less sea-going than they should be: There are, unless my memory fail, Five causes why we should not sail : 1 Journal, ii. p. 49. IX METHODISM: A PERSONAL FAITH WITH SOCIAL CONSEQUENCES Of the far-reaching consequences of the apostolate of Wesley and his company the world has long had proofs. As individuals were converted, that is to say as they exchanged the faith of a servant for the faith of a son, the first results apparent were in terms of personal experience, in the love, joy, peace, which in St. Paul's categories are the prelude to righteousness and long-suffering. At the outset Wesley had observed among the Moravians what he called "this terrible abuse" of preaching "Christ given for us." So, said he, "we began to insist more than ever upon 'Christ In living in us.' Crisis was an almost indispensable element in the conversions, although there are responses to Wesley's preaching on the part of the "once-born as well as on the part of those "twice-born' for whom conquest is achieved by means of self-despair and self-surrender. their demand for the clear, if not instantaneous experience of conversion, the societies were, as Professor William James put it, following "on the whole the profounder spiritual instinct. The individual models . . . set up as typical and worthy of imitation are not only the more interesting dramatically, but psychologically they have been the more complete." Inevitably, as the men and women. reached by the Evangel came into the transforming consciousness of communion with God, homes and communities reflected the change. At one place men are con 1 William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, p. 227. verted whose business has been the buying and selling of uncustomed goods. The preaching to which they listened left no doubt that unless they ceased to do evil they could not learn to do well. Speaking of another region where men had previously been making a living by "robbing the king," Wesley reports, "Since they have cut off the right hand, the work of God sinks deep into their hearts." An increase of scrupulosity, of moral sensitiveness, was a steady accompaniment of the spiritual awakening. Always the preachers were facing the question of sin in the concrete, anti-social reality. In a Cornwall village two persons belonging to the society had been discovered selling their votes at election time. The manner of dealing with the evil was of a sort that went to the root of the trouble. To the jibe of the Westminster Journal that the minds of the vulgar had been darkened to a total |