He now began to declare that doctrine of faith which he had been taught; and those who were convinced of sin gladly received it. He was also much confirmed in the truth, by hearing the experience of Mr. Hutchins, of Pembroke college, and Mrs. Fox: "Two living witnesses," he says, "that God can, at least, if he does not always, give that faith whereof cometh salvation, in a moment, as lightning falling from heaven."

Mr. Wesley and a few others now formed themselves into a religious society, which met in FetterLane. But although they thus assembled with the Moravians, they remained members of the church of England; and afterwards, when some of the Moravian teachers introduced new doctrines, Mr. Wesley and his friends separated from them, and formed that distinct community which has since been known as "The Methodist Society." The rules of the Fetter-Lane society were printed under the title of "Orders of a Religious Society, meeting in Fetter-Lane; in obedience to the command of God by St. James, and by the advice of Peter Bohler, 1738."

As yet Mr. Wesley had not attained the blessing for which he so earnestly sought, and now with clearer views. His language as to himself, though still that of complaint, was become, in truth, the language of a broken and a contrite heart. It was no longer in the tone of a man disappointed as to the results of his own efforts, and thrown into distressing perplexity, as not knowing where to turn for help. He was now bowed in lowly sorrow before the throne; but he knew that it was "the throne of grace;" and his cry was that of the publican, "God be merciful to me a sinner." In a letter to a friend, he says:

"I feel what you say, though not enough; for I am under the same condemnation. I see that the whole law of God is holy, just and good. I know every thought, every temper of my soul, ought to bear God's image and superscription. But how am I fallen from the glory of God! I feel that 'I am sold under sin.' I know that I too deserve nothing but wrath, being full of all abominations, and having no good thing in me to atone for them, or to remove the wrath of God. All my works, my righteousness, my prayers need an atonement for themselves. So that my mouth is stopped. I have nothing to plead. God is holy; I am unholy. God is a consuming fire: I am altogether a sinner, meet to be consumed.

"Yet I hear a voice, (and is it not the voice of God?) saying, Believe and thou shalt be saved. He that believeth is passed from death unto life. God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth on him should not perish, but have everlasting life.""+

In this state of mind he continued till May the 24th, 1738, and then gives the following account of his conversion:

"I think, it was about five this morning, that I opened my Testament on those words, 'There are given unto us exceeding great and precious promises, that by these ye might be partakers of the divine nature.' 2 Peter i. 4. Just as I went out, I opened it again on those words, Thou art not far from the kingdom of God.' In the afternoon I was asked to go to St. Paul's. The anthem was, 'Out of the deep have I called unto thee, O Lord; Lord, hear my voice. O let thine ears consider well the voice of my complaint. If thou, Lord, wilt be extreme to mark what is done amiss, O Lord, who may abide it? But there is mercy with thee; therefore thou shalt be feared. O Israel, trust in the Lord, for with the Lord there is mercy, and with him is plenteous redemption. And he shall redeem Israel from all his sins.' 1* + Ibid.

* Journal.

|

"In the evening I went very unwillingly to a society in Aldersgate-street, where one was reading Luther's preface to the epistle to the Romans. About a quarter before nine, while he was describing the change which God works in the heart through faith in Christ, I felt my heart strangely warmed. I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone for salvation: and an assurance was given me, that he had taken away my sins, even mine, and saved me from the 'law of sin and death.'

"I began to pray with all my might, for those who had in a more especial manner despitefully used me, and persecuted me. I then testified openly to all there, what I now first felt in my heart. But it was not long before the enemy suggested, "This cannot be faith, for where is thy joy?' Then was I taught, that peace and victory over sin are essential to faith in the Captain of our salvation; but that as to the transports of joy, that usually attend the beginning of it, especially in those who have mourned deeply, God sometimes giveth, sometimes withhold eth them, according to the counsels of his own will." *

After this he had some struggles with doubt; but he proceeded from "strength to strength," till he could say, "Now I was always conqueror." His experience, nurtured by habitual prayer, and deepened by unwearied exertion in the cause of his Saviour, settled into that steadfast faith and solid peace, which the grace of God perfected in him to the close of his long and active life.

His brother Charles was also made partaker of the same grace. They had passed together through the briers and thorns, through the perplexities and shadows of the legal wilderness, and the hour of their deliverance was not far separated. Bohler visited Charles in his sickness at Oxford, but "the Pharisee within" was somewhat offended when the honest German shook his head at learning that his hope of salvation rested upon "his best endeavors." After his recovery, the reading of Halyburton's Life produced in him a sense of his want of that faith which brings "peace and joy in the Holy Ghost." Bohler visited him again in London, and he began seriously to consider the doctrine which he urged upon him. His convictions of his state of danger, as a man unjustified before God, and of his need of the faith whereof cometh salvation, increased, and he spent his whole time in discoursing on these subjects, in prayer, and reading the Scriptures. Luther on the Galatians then fell into his hands, and on reading the preface he observes:

"I marvelled that we were so soon and entirely removed from him that called us into the grace of Christ, unto another gospel. Who would believe that our church had been founded on this important article of justification by faith alone? I am astonished I should ever think this a new doctrine; especially while our articles and homilies stand unrepealed, and the key of knowledge is not yet taken away. From this time I endeavored to ground as many of our friends as came to see me in this fundamental truth-salvation by faith alone, not an idle, dead faith, but a faith which works by love, and is incessantly productive of all good works and all holiness."†

"On Whit-Sunday, May 21st, he awoke in hope and expectation of soon attaining the object of his wishes, the knowledge of God reconciled in Christ Jesus. At nine o'clock his brother and some friends came to him and sung a hymn suited to the day. When they left him he betook himself to prayer. Soon afterwards a person came and said, in a very solemn manner, Believe in the name of Jesus of Nazareth and thou shalt be healed of all thine infir* Journal. + Ibid.

for righteousness.' See ye not, that the foundation is nothing in us? There is no connection between God and the ungodly. There is no tie to unite them. They are altogether separate from each other. They have nothing in common. There is nothing less or more in the ungodly, to join them to God. Works, righteousness, contrition? No. Ungodliness only. This then do, if you will lay a right foundation:-Go straight to Christ with all your ungodliness. Tell him, Thou whose eyes are as a flame of fire, searching my heart, seest that I am ungodly. I plead nothing else. I do not say, I am humble or contrite: but I am ungodly. Therefore bring me to Him that justifieth the ungodly. Let thy blood be the propitiation for me; for there is nothing in me but ungodliness.

"Here is a mystery. Here the wise men of the world are lost, are taken in their own craftiness. This the learned of the world cannot comprehend. It is foolishness unto them. Sin is the only thing which divides men from God. Sin (let him that heareth understand) is the only thing which unites them to God; that is, the only thing which moves the Lamb of God to have compassion upon them, and by his blood to give them access to the Father. "This is the word of reconciliation which we preach. This is the foundation which never can be moved. By faith we are built upon this foundation: and this faith also is the gift of God. It is his free gift, which he now and ever giveth to every one that is willing to receive it. And when they have received this gift of God, then their hearts will melt for sorrow that they have offended him. But this gift of God lives in the heart, not in the head. The faith of the head, learned from men or books, is nothing worth. It brings neither remission of sins, nor peace with God. Labor then to believe with your whole heart. So shall you have redemption through the blood of Christ. So shall you be cleansed from all sin. So shall ye go on from strength to strength, being renewed day by day in righteousness and all true holiness."*

"I would gladly," says Mr. Wesley, "have spent my life here; but my Master calling me to labor in another part of his vineyard, I was constrained to take my leave of this happy place. O when shall this Christianity cover the earth, as the waters cover the sea!" He adds in another place, "I was exceedingly comforted and strengthened by the conversation of this lovely people; and returned to England more fully determined to spend my life in testifying the gospel of the grace of God."+

He arrived in London in September, 1738. His future course of life does not appear to have been shaped out in his mind; no indication of this appears in any of his letters, or other communication: so little ground is there for the insinuation, which has been so often made, that he early formed the scheme of making himself the head of a sect. This, even those inconsistencies, considering him as a churchman, into which circumstances af terwards impelled him, sufficiently refute. That he was averse to settle as a parish minister, is certain; and the man who regarded "the world as his parish," must have had large views of usefulness. That he kept in mind the opinion of the bishop who ordained him, that he was at liberty to decline settling as a parish priest, provided he thought that he could serve the church better in any other way, is very probable; and if he had any fixed purpose at all, at this time, beyond what circumstances daily opened to him, and from which he might infer the path of duty, it was to attempt to revive the spirit of religion in the church to which he belong; ed and which he loved, by preaching "the gospel

of the grace of God," in as many of her pulpits as he should be permitted to occupy. This was the course he pursued. Wherever he was invited, he preached the obsolete doctrine of salvation by grace through faith. In London great crowds followed him; the clergy generally excepted to his statement of the doctrine; the genteeler part of his audiences, whether they attended to the sermon or not, were offended at the bustle of crowded congregations; and soon almost all the churches, of the metropolis, one after another, were shut against him. He had, however, largely labored in various parts of the metropolis in churches, rooms, houses, and prisons; and the effects produced were powerful and lasting. Soon after, we find him at Oxford, employed in writing to his friends abroad, communicating the good news of a great awakening both in London and in that city. To Dr. Koker, of Rotterdam, he writes, Oct. 13, 1738: "His blessed Spirit has wrought so powerfully both in London and Oxford, that there is a general awakening, and multitudes are crying out, What must we do to be saved? So that till our gracious Master sendeth more laborers into his harvest, all my time is much too little for them." And to the church at Hernhuth, he writes under the same date: "We are endeavoring here, also, by the grace which is given us, to be followers of you, as ye are of Christ. Fourteen were added to us since our return; so that we have now eight bands of men, consisting of fifty-six persons, all of whom seek for salvation only in the blood of Christ. As yet we have only two small bands of women, the one of three, the other of five persons. But here are many others who only wait till we have leisure to instruct them how they may most effectually build up one another, in the faith and love of Him who gave himself for them.

Though my brother and I are not permitted to preach in most of the churches in London, yet, thanks be to God, there are others left, wherein we have liberty to speak the truth as it is in Jesus. Likewise every evening, and on set evenings in the week, at two several places, we publish the word of reconciliation, sometimes to twenty or thirty, sometimes to fifty or sixty, sometimes to three or four hundred persons, met together to hear it."

In December he met Mr. Whitefield, who had returned to London from America, "and they again took sweet counsel together." In the spring of the next year, he followed Mr. Whitefield to Bristol, where he had preached with great success in the open air. Mr. Wesley first expounded to a little society, accustomed to meet in Nicholas

*The "Societies" which Mr. Wesley mentions in his journals as visited by him, for the purpose of expounding the Scriptures, in London and Bristol, were the remains of those which Dr. Woodward describes, in an account first published about 1698 or 1699. They began about the year 1667, among a few young men in Lonmorning lectures in Cornhill, were brought, says Dr. don, who, under Dr. Horneck's preaching, and the Woodward, "to a very affecting sense of their sins, and began to apply themselves in a very serious way to religious thoughts and purposes." They were advised by their ministers to meet together weekly for "good discourse;" and rules were drawn up "for the better ly for the use of the poor, and stewards were appointed regulation of these meetings." They contributed weekto take care of and to disburse their charities. In the latter part of the reign of James II., they met with discouragement; but on the accession of William and Mary, they acquired new vigor. When Dr. Woodward wrote his account, there were about forty of these societies in try, and nine in Ireland. Out of these societies about activity within the bills of mortality, a few in the countwenty associations arose, in London, for the prosecution and suppression of vice; and both these, and the private societies for religious edification, had for a time

lifeless formality, produced a haughty dislike of the spiritualities of religion, or a sneering contempt of them. The mischief was completed by the restoration of the Stuarts; for whatever advantages were gained by that vent in a civil sense, it let in a flood of licentiousness and impiety which swept away almost every barrier that had been raised in the public mind by the labors of former ages. Infidelity began its ravages upon the principles of the higher and middle classes; the mass of the people remained uneducated, and were Christians but in name, and by virtue of their baptism; whilst many of the great doctrines of the reformation were banished both from the universities and the pulpits. Archbishop Leighton complains that his "church was a fair carcass without a spirit ;" and Burnet observes, that in his time "the clergy had less authority, and were under more contempt, than those of any church in Europe; for they were much the most remiss in their labors, and the least severe in their lives." Nor did the case much amend up to the period of which we speak. Dr. Southey says, that "from the restoration to the accession of the house of Hanover, the English church could boast of its brightest ornaments and ablest defenders, men who have never been surpassed in erudition, in eloquence, or in strength and subtlety of mind." This is true: but it is equally so, that, with a very few exceptions, these great powers were not employed to teach, defend, and inculcate the doctrines of that church on personal religion as it is taught in her liturgy, her articles, and her homilies, but what often was subversive of them; and the very authority therefore which such writers acquired by their learned and able works was in many respects mischievous. They stood between the people and the better divines of the earlier age of the church, and put them out of sight; and they set an example of preaching which, being generally followed, placed the pulpit and the desk at perpetual variance, and reduced an evangelical liturgy to a dead form which was repeated without thought, or so explained as to take away its meaning. A great proportion of the clergy, whatever other learning they might possess, were grossly ignorant of theology, and contented themselves with reading short unmeaning sermons, purchased or pilfered, and formed upon the lifeless theological system of the day. A little Calvinism remained in the church, and a little evangelical Arminianism; but the prevalent divinity was Pelagian, or what very nearly approached it. Natural religion was the great subject of study, when theology was studied at all, and was made the test and standard of revealed truth. The doctrine of the opus operatum of the Papists, as to sacraments, was the faith of the divines of the older school; and a refined system of ethics, unconnected with Christian motives, and disjoined from the vital principles of religion in the heart, was the favorite theory of the modern. The body of the clergy neither knew nor cared about systems of any kind. In a great number of instances they were negligent and immoral; often grossly So. The populace of the large towns were ignorant and profligate; and the inhabitants of villages added to ignorance and profligacy brutish and barbarous manners. A more striking instance of the rapid deterioration of religious light and influence in a country scarcely occurs, than in our own, from the restoration till the rise of Methodism. It affected not only the church, but the dissenting sects in no ordinary degree. The Presbyterians had commenced their course through Arianism down to Socinianism; and those who held the doctrines of Calvin had, in too many instances, by a course of hot-house planting, luxuriated them into the fatal and disgusting errors of Antinomianism. There

were indeed many happy exceptions; but this was the general state of religion and morals in the country, when the Wesleys, Whitefield, and a few kindred spirits came forth, ready to sacrifice ease, reputation, and even life itself, to produce a reformation.

Before Mr. Wesley entered upon the career which afterwards distinguished him, and having no preconceived plan or course of conduct, but to seek good for himself and to do good to others, he visited the Moravian settlements in Germany. On his journey he formed an acquaintance with several pious ministers in Holland and Germany; and at Marienbourn was greatly edified by the conversation of count Zinzendorf, and others of the bre thren, of whose views he did not however in all respects even then approve. From thence he proceeded to Hernhuth, where he staid a fortnight, conversing with the elders, and observing the economy of that church, part of which with modifications he afterwards introduced among his own societies. The sermons of Christian David especially interested him; and of one of them, on "the ground of our faith," he gives the substance; which we may insert, both as excellent in itself, and as it so well agrees with what Mr. Wesley afterwards uniformly taught:

"The word of reconciliation which the apostler preached, as the foundation of all they taught, was, that we are reconciled to God, not by our own works, nor by our own righteousness, but wholly and solely by the blood of Christ.'

You must

"But you will say, must I not grieve and mourn for my sins? Must I not humble myself before my God? Is not this just and right? And must I not first do this before I can expect God to be reconciled to me? I answer, it is just and right. You must be humbled before God. have a broken and contrite heart. But then observe, this is not your own work. Do you grieve that you are a sinner? This is the work of the Holy Ghost. Are you contrite? Are you humbled before God? Do you indeed mourn, and is your heart broken within you? All this worketh the self-same Spirit.

"Observe again, this is not the foundation. It is not this by which you are justified. This is not the righteousness, this is no part of the righteousness, by which you are reconciled unto God. You grieve for your sins. You are deeply humble. Your heart is broken. Well. But all this is nothing to your justification.* The remission of your sins is not owing to this cause, either in whole or in part. Nay, observe farther, that it may hinder your justification: that is, if you build any thing upon it; if you think, I must be so or so contrite; I must grieve more, before I can be justified. Understand this well. To think you must be more contrite, more humbled, more grieved, more sensible of the weight of sin, before you can be justified, is, to lay your contrition, your grief, your humiliation, for the foundation of your being justified: at least for a part of the foundation. Therefore it hinders your justification; and a hinderance it is which must be removed, before you can lay the right foundation. The right foundation is, not your contrition, (though that is not your own,) not your righteousness, nothing of your own; nothing that is wrought in you by the Holy Ghost; but it is something without you, viz., the righteousness and blood of Christ.

"For this is the word, 'To him that believeth on God, that justifieth the ungodly, his faith is counted

our justification, but they are absolutely necessary in *"This is not guarded. These things do not merit order to it. God never pardons the impenitent."- Wes ley's Journal.