was the day of my espousals, a day to be had in ever. lasting remembrance. At first my joys were like a spring tide, and, as it were, overflowed the banks; go where I would I could not avoid the singing of psalms almost aloud; afterward they became more settled, and blessed be God, saving a few casual intervals, have abode and increased in my soul ever since."

Such was George Whitefield's initiation into the "Holy Club," the Methodistic band at Oxford. He was to pioneer their public career in England and all along the British colonies of North America, the most eloquent, the most flaming preacher that the Christian Church has known since its apostolic age; a man whose native genius for oratory, heightened by saintly piety, was to shake with an unprecedented sensation, and awaken, as in a moral resurrection, nearly the whole British empire; to extort unwonted admiration, and compliments from Hume, Bolingbroke, Garrick, Walpole, and Chesterfield; to attract in his private ministrations at the mansion of the Countess of Huntington, the nobility of the Court, while it swept like a hurricane over throngs, ten, twenty, forty thousand strong, on the hillsides, and in the market-places of England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland, and North America, startling them to tears, sobs, and irrepressible cries of anguish and penitence. He seems indeed the providential man for the approach

ing religious crisis. His moral struggles, even the superstitious rigors which came so near destroying him, prepared him to meet and counsel similar cases, in the general religious agitation which was about to set in, to appreciate and assert the true Christian life as "the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free." With a heart incandescent with divine fire, palpitating with those generous sympathies that render all the world kin and give to the orator irresistible control of the popular mind, he combined an imagination as sublime as that of the Hebraic prophets, and the most extraordinary oratorical aptitudes of voice and gesture. Garrick said he could make his hearers weep or shout with exultation, merely by his varied pronunciation of the word Mesopotamia; Hume said he would go twenty miles to hear him; Chesterfield opened for him his own chapel at Bretby Hall, and theatrical actors resorted to his preaching to study the secret of his unrivaled power. A peasant hearer best characterized perhaps that indescribable power when he declared that Whitefield "preached like a lion."

The Wesleys had a longer preparatory moral struggle. Failing to find rest to their souls in their religious observances and painful self-discipline at Oxford, they resolved to seek it in entire self-sacrifice as missionaries in the ends of the earth. They went in 1735 to Georgia, to preach to the Indians and the

colonists of Oglethorpe. On their passage they found that their faith could not sustain them in the perils of storms; though their Moravian fellow-passengers— humble peasants and artisans-sang hymns of hope and joy in the expectation of sudden death. John Wesley conversed with them, and saw clearly that he had not yet attained similar piety. On reaching Georgia he was hospitably received by its little Moravian community; Spangenberg, one of their pastors, put to him a searching question: "Does the Spirit of God bear witness with your spirit that you are a child of God?" Wesley was arrested by the inquiry and knew not how to answer it. "Do you know Jesus Christ?" continued Spangenberg. "I know he is the Saviour of the world," responded Wesley. "True," replied Spangenberg, "but do you know that he has saved you?" died to save me," rejoined Wesley. added, "Do you know yourself?" Wesley, "but I fear," he writes, "they were mere words." He lodged with these devout men, and was much impressed with the singular simplicity and purity of their daily life. He witnessed with admiration their ecclesiastical counsels, the election and ordination of a bishop, and writes that as he sat in their little but dignified synod, he forgot the seventeen centuries which had passed since the days of the apostles, and seemed to be in one of those

"I hope he has Spangenberg only "I do," answered

assemblies where form and state were unknown, but where Paul the tentmaker, and Peter the fisherman, presided with the demonstration of the spirit and of power.

Yet even here, amid the pure light of the primitive faith, which these good men had kindled in the wilderness, "he comprehended it not," but sought peace to his troubled soul in ascetic self-denial and the "merit of works." He read daily prayers at five o'clock in the morning, preached and administered the communion at eleven, and read the evening service at three. He refused all food but bread and water, slept on the ground, taught the children in a school, and went barefooted that he might encourage his poor scholars. He was severe to others as well as to himself; his rigors broke down the patience of the people, and he at last retreated from the field discomfited and in despair. His brother had failed in a similar manner, and had returned to England. John followed him about fifteen months later. As he came in sight of Land's End, England, he wrote in his journal: "I went to America to convert the Indians, but O! who shall convert me? Who, what is he that will deliver me from this evil heart of unbelief? I have a fair summer religion; I can talk well, nay, and believe myself, while no danger is near; but let death look me in the face and my spirit is troubled, nor can I say, to die is gain. I think verily, if the Gos

pel be true, I am safe; for I not only have given and do give all my goods to feed the poor-I not only give my body to be burned, drowned, or whatever else God shall appoint for me, but I follow after charity-though not as I ought, yet as I can—if haply I may attain it. I now believe the Gospel true. I show my faith by my works, by staking my all upon it. I would do so again and again a thousand times, if the choice were still to make. Whoever sees me, sees I would be a Christian. Therefore are my ways not like other men's ways; therefore I have been, I am, I am content to be, a by-word, a proverb of reproach. But in a storm I think, What if the Gospel be not true? Then thou art of all men most foolish. For what hast thou given thy goods, thy ease, thy friends, thy reputation, thy country, thy life? For what art thou wandering over the face of the earth? a dream? a cunningly-devised fable? deliver me from this fear of death?

O! who will

What shall I

Should I fight

do? Where shall I fly from it? against it by thinking, or by not thinking of it? A wise man advised me some time since, 'Be still, and go on.' Perhaps this is the best; to look upon it as my cross; when it comes to let it humble me, and quicken all my good resolutions, especially that of praying without ceasing; and at other times to take no thought about it, but quietly to go on in the work of the Lord." On the 1st of February, 1738, he was