started. Decay in morals was widespread. For a time it seemed as though the Christian faith itself was dead. Then suddenly new life appeared which was almost like a resurrection.

Few pages in European history are more wonderful than the Revival of Religion under Wesley and Whitefield, which was the landmark of the eighteenth century. and in a true sense the climax of the Reformation. The submerged and shipwrecked derelicts of humanity, the outcast, the criminal, the sinner and the profligate, -those who had been neglected and left to perish by their fellow men-joyfully and triumphantly awakened into a new life, as one awakes from some terrible disease and recovers health and strength and joy in living anew.

The story, so powerful and so startling in its beauty, has often been told,-the tens of thousands gathered under the cold frosty sky to hear the new preachers of salvation the gaunt and grimy miners standing motionless in awe, while the great tears traced white furrows down their cheeks, as they heard of the love of God and repented of their sins; the houses of drunkards and profligates transformed and breathing only purity and peace; the mute lips and saintly faces of the preachers as they were stoned and wounded by the mob; the eager burning charity of the converts, spending itself in acts of kindness on their persecutors. Since the time of S. Francis of Assisi there had been

nothing like this seen in Europe. We may go even back to the Apostles themselves for a time of such spiritual fervour of joy and love and purity of heart. Like the first Christian disciples these early Methodists Rejoiced that they were counted worthy to suffer shame for his name.

"And daily in the temple and in every house they ceased not to teach and preach Jesus Christ."

Two scenes only can be given here from the lives of the two great leaders. The first is on the hill of Walsall, where the aged Wesley stands, almost beaten to death with savage blows from the mob, his white hair streaming in the wind, his lips moving in silent prayer, while over him, stirred at last to pity and repentance, stand a prize-fighter and a butcher, keeping back the crowd. The second is the picture of Whitefield, when a fallen woman crept up to him to touch the hem of his garment, and to put a tear-stained letter into his hand, in which was written: "What shall I do to express my thanks to my good God? If you have any regard to a poor, blind, naked wretch, who is not only dust, but sin, you will not reject my request, that I, even I, may forsake all to persevere in a virtuous life."

The message of the Methodists was the message of the suffering Christ,-" Who loved me, and gave himself for me." This they brought home to men's hearts by the strength of their own spiritual conviction. The movement spread beyond Great Britain, not only

through Europe but abroad throughout the world; it crossed the seas and produced an equal devotion and enthusiasm in America. It even travelled with the early settlers to the newly settled lands of South Africa, Australia and New Zealand, each in turn.

"The Methodists themselves," says J. R. Green, the historian, "were the least result of the Methodist revival. Its action upon the Church broke the lethargy of the clergy; and the "Evangelical" movement, which found representatives like Newton and Cecil within the pale of the Church of England, made the foxhunting parson and the absentee rector at last impossible. In Walpole's day the English clergy were the idlest and most lifeless in the world. In our own time no body of religious ministers surpasses them in piety, in philanthropic energy, or in popular regard. In the nation at large appeared a new moral enthusiasm which rigid and pedantic as it often seemed, was still healthy in its social tone, and whose power was seen in the disappearance of the profligacy which had disgraced the upper classes, and the foulness which had infested literature, ever since the Restoration.

"A yet nobler result of the religious revival was the steady attempt, which has never ceased from that day to this, to remedy the guilt, the ignorance, the physical suffering, the social degradation of the profligate and the poor. It was not till the Wesleyar impulse had done its work that this philanthropic

impulse began. The Sunday schools established by Mr. Raikes of Gloucester at the close of the eighteenth century were the beginnings of popular education. By writings and by her own personal example Hannah More drew the sympathy of England to the poverty and crime of the agricultural labourer. A passionate impulse of human sympathy with the wronged and afflicted raised hospitals, endowed charities, built churches,

supported Burke in his plea for the Hindu, and Clarkson and Wilberforce in their crusade

against the iniquity of the slave-trade."

In the great industrial struggle which was to follow; in the generous answer given to the efforts of such men as Lord Shaftesbury and others; in all the later burning passion for right and justice, for pity and generosity, which went to redeem the nineteenth century, there must never be forgotten the fact that England was sunk in almost selfish death till Wesley came. The poorest of the poor, the criminals and abandoned drunkards, the outcast and the despised, were raised by him from the very depths of misery and profligacy to lives of heroic sacrifice and devotion.

But while the great Reformation itself, and the subsequent Wesleyan Revival, gave to the individual characters of weak men and women that inner strength and stamina which were needed for the coming industrial conflict, and for the struggle to resist the exploitation of labour under the Factory System, yet, at the

same time, it has to be acknowledged that these two religious movements were incomplete on the social side. The message of salvation that they brought was an individual message. It did not aim consciously at the redemption of society. The leaders themselves, with all their greatness, saw life from the individual standpoint, as something which had to be saved out of the wreck of a burning world. They did not see life steadily and see it whole. They were Puritans at heart. They had lost the medieval Catholic tradition.

As the eighteenth century drew to its close and the nineteenth century opened, the insufficiency of this individual standpoint had to be learnt, again and again, through the most cruel tyranny and suffering, and through the confusion of a terrible world crisis, hardly less great than that through which we have recently passed since August, 1914.

The narrow oligarchy that was in power during the eighteenth century, both in France and England, had to be defeated in order to usher in a democratic world. The eyes of historians are mainly turned towards the vast political conflagration of the French Revolution. But the industrial revolution in England, and the exploitation of Africa and Asia for markets abroad, represent aspects of human history still more significant, even if less melodramatic, than the political upheaval itself.