ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY wrote very severely of them afterwards. 1 The next time he came to Bedford it was upon his own mission, in 1758, when he also preached the sermon for the Bedfordshire assizes, in St. Paul's church. 3 The Methodists of that time, though not separate from the Church, had a small room for their own services, replaced a few years later by a chapel. 3 Wesley himself was in Bedfordshire again four times * ; but the main work of the Methodists in this county was done by two of his disciples, John Berridge, vicar of Everton, and Hicks of Wrestlingworth ; their 'circuit' embraced the counties of Bedford, Huntingdon, Cambridge, Essex and Hertford. 6 The people of Bedfordshire, as in the previous century, seemed to be specially favourable to missions of this kind. John Crook of Luton had been the first magistrate to join the Quakers ; Parker, the mayor of Bedford, was the first of such officials to call him- self a Methodist. 6 He mingled preaching with his public duties for forty years, and to such effect that Wesley wrote of him, between 1750 and 1760 : 'Mr. Parker hath not borne the sword in vain.' There was no cursing and swearing to be heard in the streets of Bedford, no work done on the Lord's day, no open wickedness of any kind. 7 There was also in Bedfordshire an unusual display of those extra- ordinary phenomena which accompanied the preaching of the early Methodists ; they attended the ministrations of Berridge and Hicks quite as much as those of Wesley himself. At one of Hicks' preachings at Wrestlingworth fifteen people fell down ' as if dead ' ; while Berridge preached ' some shrieked, others roared ; but the most general sound was a loud breathing like that of people half strangled.' In one case at the church of Everton (where the congregation was always drawn in part from Bedfordshire) as many as two hundred people were crying for mercy at the same time : ' the groans, lamentations, prayers and roarings were indescribable,' as also the shouts and songs of those who had found peace. 8 These things passed away with the novelty of the preaching ; in his visit of 1761 Wesley notes that few were affected in this way any more.* It is easy to criticise the methods and the work of the field- preachers ; but their extraordinary success is a searching criticism on the Church of the eighteenth century, and points to the same conclusion as the lives of Bunyan and of Fox a hundred years before. It is only too plain that religion was not set forth as a vital principle : that the preaching of 'passive obedience' and of loyalty to the Established Church had overshadowed or displaced the preaching of the Church's most dis- tinctive doctrines of regeneration and of grace, with their never-failing 1 He said the elders claimed more authority than the pope himself, and used the lowest means to gain it ; and that they thought theirs was the only church on earth (L. Tyerman, Life of Wesley, ii. 159)- ■ Ibid. ii. 300. 3 Ibid. 340.
- In 1760, 1761, 1762. 5 L. Tyerman, Life of IVesley, 309, 310.
a Ibid. 274. 7 We are not told how long these happy results lasted. 8 L. Tyerman, Life of IVesley, ii. 310-3. 8 Ibid. pp. 397, 444. 1 345 44
