After a sermon from Hebrews vi. 12, we sang one of your hymns, which, if I remember right, was the 140th in the second book ("Give me the wings of faith to rise"), and in that part of the worship I had the satisfaction to observe tears in the eyes of several of the auditory; and after the service was over several of them told me that they were not able to sing, so deeply were their minds affected by it; and the clerk in particular told me that he could hardly utter the words of it. These were most of them poor people who work for their living. I found that your hymns and psalms were almost their daily entertainment.1

It was fortunate for Watts that his natural inclination to solitary reverie was checked by the public duties imposed on him by his pastoral office; it was still more fortunate for the character of English hymnology that the popular impulses in religion, which prevailed through the eighteenth century, were directed and controlled by men whose taste had been formed by the study of classical models. Hora Lyrica the style is somewhat too consciously literary.

In

It is my opinion (says Watts, in his Preface,) that the free and unconfined numbers of Pindar, or the noble measures of Milton without rhyme, would best maintain the dignity of the theme, as well as give a loose to the devout soul, nor check the raptures of her faith and love.

But it is not in his so-called Pindaric odes, or in his meditations in blank verse, that Watts contrives to touch the heart. His real artistic successes are attained when he is obliged to express for the use of a simple congregation a universal feeling, within the limits of some common national metre. His efforts are very unequal, and in respect of correct versification, especially in regard to accuracy of rhyming, his hymns leave much to be desired; the ungainliness of the doctrine is often reflected in the But in such compositions as "O God, our help in ages past"; "When I survey the wondrous cross "; "There is a land of pure delight"; and many others, the style of English hymnology reaches its highest level. The complete absence of affectation; the manly strength and

verse.

1 Milner's Life and Times of Dr. Isaac Watts, p. 493.

simplicity of the thought; the purity of the diction, in which every word is rightly chosen, and not one is superfluous; are all marks of correct classical taste.

Apart from Nonconformist theology, the exclusive Whig policy embodied in the Test Act, supported as it was by the dominant "Low" section of the Church of England, may be set down as indirectly one of the prime causes of the great development of Hymnody in the eighteenth century; since by it the interests and aspirations of a large body of the people were withdrawn from politics and concentrated solely on religion. But the same policy produced yet wider results by turning the tide of religious emotion into a new channel within the borders of the Church of England itself. Most of the extreme High-Churchmen were also extreme Tories, who, being unable to take the Oath of Allegiance, either in the reign of William and Mary or under George I., were cut off from participation in the active work of society, and naturally turned their thoughts to the cultivation of inward and spiritual religion. From the study of the mystical divinity of the Nonjurors sprang, quite in the order of consequence, the Methodist movement. The Wesleys carried on the practice of congregational hymn-singing on the lines that Watts had begun; but they gave it a vast extension. Watts was an hereditary Nonconformist; John and Charles Wesley remained to the end of their lives members of the Church of England. They did not, however, limit their action by the local boundaries of congregation or parish; nor was their preaching intended to illustrate any form of scholastic theology. Their object was to awaken a sense of personal religion in any who would associate themselves with the discipline of the "people called Methodists." They would never, in their field-meetings, have said with Watts, " Hence, ye profane!" All were invited to listen :

There is no other religious society under heaven (writes John Wesley), which requires nothing of men in order to their admission into it, but a desire to save their souls. Look all around you;

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you cannot be admitted into the Church, or Society, of the Presbyterians, Anabaptists, Quakers, or any others, unless you hold the same opinion, and adhere to the same mode of worship. The Methodists alone do not insist on your holding this or that opinion; but they think, and let think. Neither do they impose any particular mode of worship; but you may continue to worship in your former manner, be it what it may. Now I do not know any other religious society, either ancient or modern, wherein such liberty of conscience is now allowed, or has been allowed since the days of the Apostles. Here is our glorying, and a glorying peculiar to us. What Society shares it with us? 1

1

A mode of religion thus completely internalised necessarily found for itself a lyrical form of expression. Charles Wesley was the poet of the movement; but his thoughts and sentiments were so closely identified with those of his brother John, that the two must be considered as joint-authors of the Methodist hymnology.

Both, as the sons of Samuel Wesley, Rector of Epworth, in Lincolnshire, and Susanna Annesley, his wife, were, by father and mother, of gentle blood. John was born on the 17th of June 1703, and was educated first at Charterhouse, and afterwards at Christ Church, Oxford, from which he took his B.A. degreee in 1725 and became M.A. in 1727. On 17th March 1726 he was elected Fellow of Lincoln College, and remained (with some breaks) at Oxford till 1735, in which year he went as a "missioner" among the Indians in Georgia. Charles, who was born on 18th December 1707, was educated at Westminster, from which school he was elected student of Christ Church, and graduated as B.A. in 1729 and M.A. in 1733. He it was who, with some of his undergraduate friends, was first called "Methodist," "because of their strict conformity to the method of study prescribed by the statutes of the University," which led them to the disciplined practice of religious exercises. He accompanied his brother to Georgia in 1735. John Wesley, on his return to England, in 1738 fell completely under the influence of the Moravians, which had begun to work upon him while he was in America; and in the same year 1 John Wesley, by J. H. Overton, p. 211.

he associated himself with George Whitefield, who had already commenced the Evangelical Revival. From this date onwards, for more than fifty years, his life was mainly occupied with itinerant preaching, and with establishing Societies of Methodists in different parts of the country. He died on the 2nd of March 1791. Charles, who for a long time accompanied his brother on his various journeys, died on the 29th of March 1788. Their religious poems are mainly contained in a great number of Hymn-Books, of which the following are the most important: Hymn-Book published at Charlestown in America, 1737; Hymns and Sacred Poems, by John and Charles Wesley, 1739; HymnBook, 1740 (containing hymns on Christian Perfection); A Collection of Moral and Sacred Poems, dedicated to Lady Huntingdon, 1744; Hymns on the Lord's Supper, by John and Charles Wesley, 1745.

The inward spiritual development of the Wesleys that led them to itinerant preaching is complex and curious, but as it has a strong bearing on the general movement of the national imagination, it is worth while attempting to follow its windings. As far as I understand it, the brothers during their period of Oxford self-discipline were unqualified Arminians. John Wesley in 1777 said that the books by which he was then most influenced were Thomas à Kempis' Imitatio Christi, and Jeremy Taylor's Rules of Holy Living and Dying. It is certain also that he was immensely impressed by the teaching of the celebrated William Law's Christian Perfection. Now Law's fundamental idea of Christianity was this:

It (Revelation) teaches us that the world in which we live is also in a disordered irregular state, and cursed for the sake of man; that it is no longer the paradise that God made it, but the remains of a drowned world, full of marks of God's displeasure, and the sin of its inhabitants.

That it is a mere wilderness, a state of darkness, a vale of misery, where vice and madness, dreams and shadows, variously please, agitate, and torment the short miserable lives of men.

This is the true point of view in which every Christian is to behold himself. He is to overlook the poor projects of human

life, and to consider himself as a creature, through his natural corruption, falling into a state of endless misery, but by the mercy of God redeemed to a condition of everlasting felicity.1

Hence it is his duty, turning himself away from the world, to strive with perpetual endeavours, after the state of Christian Perfection, which is to be sought by constant self-denial, prayer, and devotion.

By these principles the Wesleys guided their conduct while at Oxford. But on his return from America, John seems to have been entirely dominated by a Moravian, one Peter Böhler, who showed him the meaning of the doctrine of Justification by Faith. This was very intimately associated with the Calvinistic doctrine of Election: at any rate it required, as the latter does, the verification of faith by an inward assurance of Salvation. John Wesley astonished his friends and relatives by declaring that up to that time he had not been a Christian, while Charles, who seems to have arrived independently at the same conviction, gave, in a kind of poetical autobiography, called "The Just shall live by Faith," his view of his religious state while at Oxford:

For ten long legal years I lay,

A helpless, though reluctant, prey

To pride, and lust, and earth, and hell:
Oft to repentance vain renewed,

Self-confident for hours I stood,

And fell and grieved, and rose and fell.

Hardly at last I all gave o'er;

I sought to free myself no more,

Too weak to burst the fowler's snare ;
Baffled by twice ten thousand foils,
I ceased to struggle in the toils,
And yielded to a just despair.

'Twas then my soul beheld from far

The glimmering of an orient star,

That pierced and cheered my nature's night :

Sweetly it dawned and promised day,

Sorrow and sin it chased away,

And opened into glorious light.

1 Law's Christian Perfection.