Page:American Historical Review vol. 6.djvu/793

S?icn: IVcshy and Methodism 783 Wesley and Methodism. By F. J. Sxell, M.A. Oxon. ["The World's Epoch-Makers."] (New York : Charles Scribner's Sons. 1900. Pp. X, 244.) This volume is a short, readable biography which portrays some of the prominent features of John Wesley's life and work in orderly arrange- ment. Some of the biographies of great men which have been published recently are too bulky. This sketch of Wesley's life is, on the other hand, somewhat too restricted. A fulness of impression such as the magnitude of the subject might lead one to expect can scarcely be gained in the limitations of this neat volume. After reading such estimates as Green, Augustine Birrell, and many other historians and critics have written of the era of the Wesleyan revival in the eighteenth century, one cannot easily rid himself of the conviction that the movement begun by the Wesleys was nothing less than a tidal wave in religious history. The story of John Wesley and Methodism is remarkable. In dramatic power, in variety of situation, in the play of the deeper sentiments and passions of a moral life upon a broad arena, in the signal effects produced upon an entire nation and its subsequent history, the tale is not only far beyond any mere romance in value, but it has a vital interest which no imagina- tive work could carry. There is breadth enough in the management of details of this life of Wesley to give the reader a clear view of the state of the times through which Wesley lived and labored for the regeneration of England. The degeneracy of the established church ; the worldliness of its clergy; the low standard of morals at the royal court, in high life and among the poor ; the great hunger for better things throughout Eng- land — evidenced by the crowds which the field-preaching gathered in every part of the kingdom from Cornwall to Scotland ; the hostilities which broke out in many of these multitudinous gatherings, the mobbing, the insults, the persecution, all of which were simply the violence and rending of the demons of English life as they, many of them, met the time of exorcism ; all this is sketched with spirit and brevity. Some unnecessary flings are here and there embodied in a single phrase; as, for example, in recounting Wesley's rescue in childhood from his father's burning house, this author says : " When, in later life, Wesley became saturated with the idea of hell, he looked back to this inci- dent as emblematical of another conflagration and another escape." This implication of such "saturation " is a wrong against the man who for more than fifty years, in thousands of sermons, preached the un- bounded, everlasting love of God with apostolic fervor. Some over-emphasizing of the eccentricities of Wesley are apparent in this narrative, partly because the qualities of his greatness are not raised to the prominence which they deserve. It is true that Wesley be- lieved in ghosts and witches ; but so did many other men in that age who were men of weight and learning. Such facts, however, must be construed by the general mood of those times, and not be taken too seriously by critics of a later era. Wesley had some unfortunate expe-