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and fame, laid all the splendor of his gifts and the possibilities of his life at the feet of Jesus Christ, and ungrudgingly gave all in a perfect consecration to that work to which he dedicated his heart and life. What empires were in his brain, what of passion's sweet fire filled his heart, what of conquest was in his will were surrendered to the kingdom, the love, and the advancing conquests of our Lord. And so he has won those gifts which cannot lose their value anywhere in God's universe or God's eternity; he attained that quality of life which we refuse to think of as subject to death; for God has no time or place where firm devotion to righteousness, unflinching loyalty to duty, and all-surrendering love will be of less worth than now and here.

His modesty would not ask for these words of eulogy. He never asked of his fellows more than the chance to do the best work that was in him for Christ and the Church. It need not be our care to note faults and count defects. Full vision does not note the spots on the sun; it takes a clouded glass for that. To all possible criticism of his character or conduct, there is one sufficient answer: let him be measured by his actual achievement, and he is sure of his place among the greatest and most useful servants of the Church.

"God buries his workmen but carries on his work." We are bound by our faith in the government of God to believe that maxim. Yet we dare to think that God will forgive the momentary despair with which we look around for the arm strong enough to bend the bow laid down by this mighty man of valor. We feel with Elisha that Israel in the ascended prophet has lost its very hosts of defense and its chariots of war. Perhaps his place in the Church and the world is not to be filled by anyone, but rather by that large inspiration which shall fall upon many hearts and lives through the holy memories of his noble life. Out of the realms of higher help he influences a thousand workers in the fields in which he so faithfully wrought.

Jehanisk

ART. II.-METHODISM AND RELIGIOUS THOUGHT. METHODISM came into England as deisin passed away. The passing of the latter phase of thought demonstrated the futility of the attempt to be religious without being Christian. Puritanism with rigorous form and little ardor, deism with neither form nor ardor, Methodism with much form and excessive ardor indicate the religious process in England during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. When Wesley and Whitefield broke with the religious thought and method of their age they seemed as men who proclaimed the Gospel with unwarranted ardor, prayed with extravagant faith, and sang with unnecessary unction. Their relation to ecclesiastical history seemed incidental and ephemeral. Nevertheless, the place of Methodism in a movement which transformed the theology of the eighteenth into that of the nineteenth century may be clearly determined. It has been stated that "it is useless to look to the evangelistic movement, in any of its forms, for any theologian who directly advanced the progress of Christian thought." The truth of the statement may be gladly admitted; but the sneer which less thoughtful writers than the one just quoted are apt to indulge in is irrelevant, because it is to the glory of the evangelistic movement that, though it did not directly advance thought, it vitalized that already produced and made possible the production of a higher theology, at the same time bringing current religious thought into the realm of ordinary humanity, thus making practical the conceptions of philosopher and theologian. While Kant and Lessing and Goethe were teaching men how to think new thoughts of God, Wesley and his coadjutors were teaching men how to express these conceptions in a new life with God. Methodism, indeed, was the popular expression in life and conduct of some of the highest conceptions of the age. The fundamental elements of Methodism were the findings of the philosopher vitalized.

Moreover, that the evangelical movement produced little advance in theological thought was in keeping with the spirit of the age. Of the Methodists it is asserted by Buckle:

57-FIFTH SERIES, VOL. XV.

Since the death of their great leaders they have not produced one man of original genius; and since the time of Adam Clarke they have not had among them even a single scholar who has enjoyed a European reputation. This mental penury is perhaps owing, not to any circumstance peculiar to their sect, but merely to that general decline of the theological spirit by which their adversaries were weakened as well as themselves,

For the coming of Methodism was contemporary with a brief period of quiet in the intellectual world. The preceding period had been given to thinking; it was timely that now the powers of men should be given to living. Thinkers had become breathless in their urgency for conclusions. The people, too, shared the intellectual exhaustion. They needed now an opportunity to assimilate the material which years of discussion had produced. A notable warfare had been waged between deist and theist, and the former had been practically driven from the field. Its spirit certainly was not dead, for it found expression in the writings of Swift and Gibbon and Paine, and it was still opposed by such as Watson; but such discussion no longer absorbed the intellectual powers of the people, nor indicated the essential problems of the religions world. After the struggle of the giants, in the earlier part of the century, it mattered little what Gibbon and others thought of the questions which had been involved. Evidently the mind of the age was seeking another kind of satisfaction. It was waiting for a practical application of the theories of the vie tors in the strife. What did that thinking mean? What bearing did those conclusions have on life? What mattered a vindication of a philosophy of God, if he was to remain only a philosophized deity? Evidently the salvation of the times in which such questions are asked cannot be secured by intellectual processes merely, nor mainly, but must be attained by the help of other forces also.

Theism, then, triumphant after the intellectual contest, must now face humanity; it must now answer questions asked, not by the polemic, but by men; it must now satisfy a spiritual, rather than an intellectual, demand. If theism, after however stern a conflict, could drive deism from the field, would it now be able to break to humanity the bread of life it professed to hold in its hand? It was a crucial time, not for

theology, but for religion, and it is little wonder that the men who answered these new questions did so, not by producing an advance in thought, but by making an appeal to life. Even deisin, destroying spiritual appetite, would be better than theism arousing a thirst yet impotent to assuage it. Therefore, Methodism, rising to meet the world's spiritual needs, brought a more emphatic vindication of religion than that furnished by the apologists; and, if the age had understood the situation, the evangelists, even with their crudities and extravagancies, would have been more warmly welcomed than new theologies and philosophies of however high a type.

But the evangelistic movement was not independent of intellectual conditions. No successful evangelistic movement ever is. In the development of religion the thought and the spirit of the time are closely co-related; the intellectual tone of courage has so great power in determining its religious qualities. It was important to the religious life in England that Methodism should not spring into an intellectual arena. Not that the spiritual life flourishes best when the intellectual life is low, but rather when it is quickened in the interests of the essential manhood. Religion has its subjective and objective elements. When the latter are prominent, when the intellectual powers are occupied with the sweep of great theological movements, the spirit is more likely to become confused or absorbed in the hurly-burly of passing events. But when the storm and stress of external movements have passed away the subjective element becomes prominent, and the spirit, looking in upon itself with less obstructed vision, sees more clearly its needs and more directly seeks and more surely finds its satisfactions. Moreover, the intellect of Europe was in a transition period. The thought of the age was turning away from a materialistic to a spiritual conception of being. The Wesleys came at that opportune time when empiricism was yielding to idealism. Human thought, experiencing the chilling influence of Spinoza and Hume, had been warmed but slightly by the teachings of Berkeley and Leibnitz. But a warmer stream of thought was to flow as Kant taught that, though knowledge may begin in doubt, it does not end there, and as Hegel and Fichte raised their delicate structures

of idealistic philosophies. Being had been considered from a material standpoint; it was now to be contemplated from a psychical standpoint. The reality of being was to be referred to the inner life. A more spiritual religion was being proclaimed by the evangelist, at a time when the thinkers were preparing to proclaim a more spiritual philosophy.

Although great truths had been expressed in the period just closing, they were largely useless because isolated in different systems of thought, because vitally unrelated in the great sum of truth. A fusion of these was needed. But that could take place only as a movement, fervid in its heat, waked them into life and amalgamated them into a potency which would save them to theology by making them practical to the world. That was the distinctive function of the whole evangelistic movement in which Methodist and Moravian, Wesley and Whitefield, Zinzendorf and Schleiermacher participated. Theirs was not essentially a revival of a religion of the feelings-that was incidental; it was rather a religious movement which vitalized essential truths. The awakening of the consciousness of men to their religious states was an important and doubtless the most obvious influence exerted, but it was not the only nor the most profound work of the eighteenth-century evangelism. Deeper than the appeal to the feelings was the application to men's souls of vitalized truths which otherwise had remained dormant in the religious thought of the age. If Methodism has been more effectual than the other participants in the general movement, this may be attributed to its greater organizing capacity rather than its greater fervor. That Macaulay could say of Wesley, "He was a man. whose genius for government was not inferior to that of Richelieu," goes far to explain the unusual success of Methodism.

Methodism, then, found certain theological contents ready for its use. Philosophy and theology, in Germany and England, from times past and present brought their gifts to the Wesleys. Consciously or unconsciously, this new power rising among men placed the current processes of thought under tribute; or, if the conceptions of the philosopher were independently realized by the first Methodists, it is none the less true that Methodism finds equal support in the philosophy and

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