worse than their superstition. A clergyman dies suddenly at the I card table; and they record his death as an instance of the judgment of God against card playing. A dancing master drops down dead in the streets; and this is by the judgment of God against dancing! But the most detestable instance of this presumptuous, uncharitable, and unchristian spirit, is the story of a man, who on a Sunday evening was guilty of walking with his own family round his own fields; he stept incautiously upon a lime-kiln, sunk in, and was consumed in the sight of his wife and children. And these hard-hearted and brutal bigots relate this story under the head of the Providence of God asserted! That men of these feelings, this temper, and these principles, I would persecute, if they had the power, no reasonable man can doubt. That day we trust is distant; but it must not be dissembled that they are becoming formidable by their numbers, and that they increase with alarming rapidity. Of the one branch, we happen to possess a statistical account. Seven years ago a chronological History of the Wesleyan Methodists was published by one of the Conference. At that time, there were in the United Kingdoms 940 chapels, 436 itinerant preachers, about 2000 local preachers, and 128,732 members. When the British transAtlantic possessions, and the United States were included, the returns of population for the year amounted to 222,327. The rapidity with which they have increased is shown by the comparative statement of four years at ten years interval between each. - 71,568 Their increase continues with the same accelerating progression. The Conference of last year reported an addition of 6700 to their numbers in Great Britain and Ireland; that of the present of 7777. How long will it be before these people begin to count hands with the Establishment? And these are not all; the members of the New Itinerancy are to be added, who have already nineteen circuits, and who have the same principle of increase in their system. And there is the whole body of Calvinistic Methodists, who are, probably, little inferior in number to the Wesleyans, and who, with the orthodox dissenters, act in provincial associations, and have their general congregational meeting in London. William Shepherd of Banbury, the writer of this account, is fully persuaded that he and his wife worked a miracle; and the editors of the Methodist Magazine sanction this persuasion, and publish the story under the title of The Providence and Grace of God Manifested. It is no light evil for a state to have within its bosom so numer ous and active and increasing a party, whose whole system tends to cut them off from all common sympathy with their countrymen, and who are separatists not in religious worship alone, but in all the ordinary observances of life. Not satisfied with exclusive salvation, they must have every thing exclusive, and accommodations for the Methodists are to be found in every place, and of every possible kind. They have not only their own chapels, their own schools, their own mad-houses, and their own Magazine, but they have their own Bible, their newspaper, their review,* their pocket-book, their cyclopædia, their Margate-hoys, and their lodging-house at Harrogate, next door to the chapel, and with a bath in the house. The sectarian spirit which is thus formed and fostered, is nourished at the expense of national spirit, and their growth is like that of an incysted tumour in the body politic. Their hopes and feelings are concentrated in the interests of the connexion; not in those of the country. They look at every object through the discolouring and distorting glass of their superstition, and see nothing in its natural hue and proportion.-Hence their political opinions are made up from the Apocalypse; and, instead of regarding Buonaparte as the sworn enemy of England, who, in his hatred of this country, aims at the destruction of all commerce, all freedom of thought, word, and deed, and who has actually destroyed the peace and prosperity and happiness of the Continent, and every where, except in Spain and Portugal, crushed its independence-instead of remembering these things, they tell us that he has deposed the Pope and destroyed the Inquisition! Instead of regarding him as a barbarian, a tyrant, and a murderer; a bloody and implacable foe, against whom there is no safety but in vigorous and determined war; they consider him as the man upon the white horse, to whom a crown has been given, and who goes forth conquering and to conquer. They, forsooth, perceive that Providence has great purposes to fulfil by his agency, and they do not perceive that there are great purposes for us to fulfil also. Even when they partake so far of common feelings and of common sense as to acknowledge, that he not only produces evil, but is himself evil, still their superstition predominates. Then he becomes the beast who has risen up out of the sea, having seven heads and ten horns. They discover the mystical number in his name, and though they do not actually fall down and worship him, yet they wonder after the beast, and say, Who is like unto him? Who is able to make war with him? We have a handbill, with this numerical calculation of his name, before us; it concludes with predicting that George, the son of George, shall put an end to all, * The Eclectic Review is sold at the book-room of the Conference. and that a young new set of men, of virtuous manners, shall come, who shall prosper, and make a flourishing church for two hundred years.' In this burthen of the song, the ultimate object of methodism is sufficiently avowed. It is, indeed, apparent that, with whatever feelings Wesley began his career, it soon became the scope of his ambition to lay the foundations of a church which should rival and finally supersede the Establishment. There are many, very many, good and pious members of the sect who dream of no such consequence; many, even of the preachers, perhaps all of them, in the commencement of their labours look to nothing but the saving of souls by the immediate effects of their ministry; but that the governing heads are driving to this goal seems unquestionable. With some, the love of power may be the ruling impulse, felt and selfacknowledged. The greater part are, probably, self-deceived; they know the good which they do, and are blind to the evil, and they regard both the end at which they aim, and the means by which they pursue it, as unexceptionable. We impute no evil motives to idividuals; we condemn no man who acts conscientiously upon fallacious principles; but we do condemn the principle of separation upon which the united Methodists are acting, and we warn those individuals among them who have not considered the question in all its bearings, against its most erroneous and most dangerous tendency. To plead that the preacher is dull, or that you have a dispute concerning tythes with the vicar, is not a sufficient reason for leaving the Church, and going over to the Tabernacle. They, indeed, who dissent from the faith of the Church, and can find peace with the Unitarians or the Quakers, are bound to withdraw themselves; for conformity in them would be sinful: but such persons as adhere to the articles and established creed of the coun try, have no excuse for schism. And we call upon those persons who hold, with Jonathan Reeves and the Conference, that all (whatever their lives may be) who have not received the methodistical peace of God, are in a state of damnation, to examine the consequence of such a tenet; for to use the language of that good old divine the worthy Fuller, be it affirmed, for a certain truth, that we have, in our Church, all truths necessary to salvation. Of such as deny this, I ask Joseph's question to his brethren, Is your father well; the old man, is he yet alive? So, how fare the souls of their sires, and the ghosts of their grandfathers? Are they yet alive do they still survive in bliss, in happiness? Oh, no! they are dead! dead in soul, dead in body, dead temporally, dead eternally, dead and damned; if-so be, we had not all truth, necessary to salvation, before this time.' ⚫ Sermon preached on his Majesty's Inauguration. In examing the institutions and the tendency of methodism, we have brought forward no false and libellous accusations; nor have we assailed it with scurrilous buffoonery. With the same sincerity we have endeavoured to point out its good and its evil, and have been careful not to exasperate, however we may fail to convince.To the Methodists themselves we point out the evil, and call upon the educated and rational part of them to consider the effects of their watch-nights, their yearly covenant, above all, of their prac tice of confession; to our own clergy we hold up, for example, the good which is affected by their zeal, and by the manner in which they appeal to the foundations of religion as existing in the human mind. Of the evils which, at present, characterize methodism, the Establishment, assuredly, does not partake; it may partake of the good, and, in the already increased zeal of our clergy, it may be perceived that they have derived, in some degree, the same kind of benefit from this formidable opposition which the Roman Catholic Church derived from the Reformation. One observation more and we shall conclude. There is one branch of information in which the people are lamentably deficient since the old church copies of the Book of Martyrs have been worn out; this is the history of their own church: which of all things would attach them to it the most strongly. The Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge circulates many excellent books, but they are elementary, or doctrinal, or controversial; highly use ful when read; but for the most part such as can only be read as a duty. The Cheap Repository Tracts are often good; but we have picked up papers from this manufactory in the high road, (scattered there by some godly travellers as seed by the way side,) and have found among them baser* trash than ever contributed to line the old wall at Privy Garden. It is folly to suppose that the poor do not love reading, if works which are of a nature to interest them be published in such a form as to come within their reach. Let them have the lives of the founders and fathers of the English Church; let them be informed of all that has been done for them, and all that has been suffered for them in winning and establishing that inheritance of pure religion which they enjoy. The names of Wickliff and Tindal, and Latimer and Ridley, ought not to be less popular in England than those of Blake and Marlborough, and our own great We allude in particular to a poem called the Fatal Choice,' showing how God's judgment fell upon a young man for going as waiter to a tavern. In a Bacchanal frolic, it pro all in joke, He met with a kick unawares, By which his left arm and his right leg were broke, Nelson-they are the heroes of our religion, and we owe as much of our intellectual pre-eminency, as much of our peculiar happiness, to the constitution of our church as of our government. Of this source of interest the methodists are well aware, and the biographies of their distinguished members are regularly issued from the book-room. The papists also have understood it, and mingled as their legends are with the most outrageous falsehoods and absurdities, still they lay strong hold on the heart, and the imagination. But if neither the vapid tautology of a modern experience-journal, nor the extravagant fables of a romance of saintship are sufficient to counteract the effects which they are designed to produce, with how much better reason, and to how much greater advantage might the Church of England hold up the history of her fathers to the people? a history wherein, without any such alloy, the most solemn and important lessons are enforced by the finest and most affecting circumstances. There it would be seen how Bilney who, through the fear of death, had recanted with his lips the doctrines which he believed in his heart, found that fear intolerable to him, and continued in such agony of mind that his friends were fain to be with him day and night, endeavouring with all wordly reasons, and with texts of Scripture to comfort him, who could receive no comfort so long as his own conscience was his accuser. But when this man took his resolution, and went forth, and spake openly in favour of reformation, and was on that account condemned to the fire from which he had formerly sunk, he ate his last supper with a quiet mind and cheerful countenance; and when one of his friends, thinking to encourage him, told him how short the pain of the fire would prove, enduring but for a moment-he put his finger in the candle which burnt before them in the prison, and said, 'I find by experience, and have long known by philosophy, that fire is naturally hot; yet I am persuaded by God's holy word, and by the experience of some saints of God therein recorded, that in the flames we may feel no heat and I constantly believe, that however the stubble of this my body shall be wasted by the fire, yet my soul and spirit shall be purged thereby.' There the people might see, how Latimer, at the age of fourscore, and bow-bent with years, walked to the stake in his prison garb, and when he reached the scene of his triumph, threw off that gown, and stood bolt upright in his shroud, and calling to his fellow-sufferer, when the fire was laid to the pile, said to him, Be of good comfort, Master Ridley, and play the man; we shall this day light such a candle, by God's grace, in England, as I trust shall never be put out!' There they might see how Rogers, the protomartyr, in the days of the bloody Mary; refused the pardon that was proffered him at the stake, when his wife with nine small children, and the tenth sucking at her breast, came |