it must choose or decline this work. The Board assumes that a certain attempt at missions is in itself a Christian duty, and it thus stands on a false basis in its appeal to the benevolent, to a great degree failing of good work, and almost wholly failing to engage the means and men of the Orthodox churches to an extent at all consistent with their professions of faith and duty.

We will add here but a single remark, that benevolent organizations like that of the American Board should confine their operations to gathering and administering funds in aid of those enterprises which can support their appeal by clear evidence of a good work already begun, and sure to be done to some extent even if no aid is rendered. We do not believe in throwing away help on a work that has taken no hold. It may display the benevolent, but it does not help the needy. It would be a noble enterprise to goad this eminently pious Board into a vigorous application of common sense to their operations, though we fear that it will not be undertaken soon enough to save the institution from a forced contraction which will be fatal to its support. Properly done, it would give for the first time a genuine vitality to its existence, a life deeper than sentiment. We do not forget that this basis for organized benevolence implies many new modes of Christian labor and enterprise, especially in the initiation of missions; but we think the growing sense of the Christian world will demand, and the course of events under Providence provide these. Although we may seem to deny the duty of seeking the lost, it would appear upon fuller consideration that we would rather improve the method of this search,- that we would especially conduct it in the channels really opened by Providence. This may be truly called the Missionary Age upon which we are now entering. The wave of sentiment has rolled by, and its record is before us. The time to apply principle, to direct the forces of civilization to the work of redeeming peoples and lands, is now at hand. The laws and prospects of that work will engage the Christian and the statesman, the scholar and the saint, and prove by their hold upon governments and peoples with how great a joy in all hearts the day of redemption draweth nigh.

WE welcomed the first volume of Dr. Stevens's work in the Examiner for March, 1859. It is now brought to a close. The third volume,* now before us, continues the history of the Methodist movement in England, and sketches of the Methodist missions from England, after the death of Wesley in 1791, down to the great Jubilee in the hundredth year from the public or social beginnings of the movement, the year 1839.

The author takes up the period in five divisions, making the first two about seven years each, the second ten each, and the last fourteen; and in each he gives, in successive chapters, the doings at the Conferences, and general progress of the cause, the lives, successes, and deaths of remarkable preachers, and then a review of the period.

If we were compelled to make comparisons where all is so interesting, perhaps we should single out as the most instructive portions the narrative of the slow and careful steps by which Methodism resigned the hope of reforming and regenerating the National Church while remaining in it; - the Conference, in 1792, deciding by lot to forbear giving the sacrament for a year, and forbidding Methodist service during church hours; in 1793, voting to grant the sacrament where unanimously desired, at the same time abolishing "all distinctions between ordained and unordained ministers"; in 1794, determining that the Lord's Supper should not be administered where the union of the society could be preserved without it; in 1795, that it should not be administered in the chapels on Sundays on which it is administered in the national churches. Next we should name as of rare interest the biographical portions of the volume; for instance, the sketches of the scholars, Watson, Benson, Clarke; of the "village blacksmith" and the "Yorkshire farmer"; of Jonathan Saville, the poor little cripple, who made many rich and straight; and of many other eccentric and edifying spirits. And, finally, we should instance the narrative of the missions, the self-sacrifice manifested in the repeated invasions of Africa, just trembling on the verge of Quixotism, as full of affecting interest.

We are struck with two things, among many others, in reading these quaint and feeling accounts of the experiences and successes of converts; first, what a happy illustration they afford of the influence of the heart in the culture of the head, seen in the development of the faculty of interpreting Scripture and man; and, secondly, the extraordinary revelation made of the susceptibility of human nature to be impressed through sympathy, by the narratives of the effects of

The History of the Religious Movement of the Eighteenth Century, called Methodism By ABEL STEVENS, LL. D. Vol. III. New York: Carlton and Porter. 8vo. pp. 524.

preachers upon hardened sinners almost before they began to speak. Both on the intellectual and on the emotional sides, Methodism is a phenomenon which deserves every Christian's and every thinker's thoughtful study.

The author gives us the promise, which we hail with great satisfaction, of another work, to contain the separate and special history of the Methodist Episcopal Church in America.

Even if the denomination to which this publication is especially interesting were not the numerous one that it is, we still could not wonder at the acceptance and popularity implied by the first volume's having passed through twenty-four, and the second seventeen editions, within these four years. It is a noble record of a marvellous "movement" (we cannot escape that word), and we trust it has been and will be widely read beyond the wide limits of the Connection which has personal reasons to be charmed with its delineations and reminiscences. We congratulate our brethren, the Methodists, on having such an historian among them, and still more on having such a history; and we congratulate ourselves on being introduced, in a manner so graceful and genial, to such a vast and goodly company of confessors, such a noble army of martyrs, such a genuine representation, in many of the best characteristics, of the old original Apostles. Verily, the "Ages of Faith" and the age of miracles are not past. As we turn over page after page filled with the plain, touching, and moving story of what those devoted itinerants suffered in the shape of revilings, buffetings, and scourgings,- as we read how they resisted unto blood, testifying and striving against sin, how they carried their own earthly life in one hand and eternal life in the other, as an offering to the crowds that thus foully treated them, - two thoughts rise at once to our minds. The one is, Here again is that mystery of iniquity manifested of old in men's treatment of the meek and merciful Master, and the other is, "Here is the patience and the faith of the saints." And we hardly know which to marvel at the more, that men could inflict, or that men could endure, such outrages as the Methodists in England had to undergo.

We have said that this history interests not Methodists only, but all Christian people. We would add, that for all, whether Christians or not,

for all, at least, who can say, "I am a man, and count nothing that belongs to humanity foreign to me," - these pictures of one of the most memorable movements of humanity - whether, with the lowest sceptic, you call it a sentimental stampede, or, with the admiring and adoring believer, a spiritual awakening and modern miracle- must surely possess a peculiar attraction. To us, at least, these brief biographies have proved no less interesting, if not far more so, than if they had been little romances. Romances, indeed, they are, of truth and nature and divine grace, 66 stranger than fiction." Since Mayhew's "London Labor and the London Poor," we have read nothing in this way so charming as many of these quaint and affecting sketches of the children of the spirit in which the volumes before us abound. would gladly give specimens, if we knew where to begin or end in taking bricks out of so goodly a structure as samples of the building.

We

In regard to the manner in which Dr. Stevens has done his work, we have only to acknowledge in this new volume the same merits as we found in its predecessors; the same felicity in the distribution of his matter, combining the biographic and the annalistic methods; the same vigorous and spirited style; the same wise and kindly tone of remark; the same genial, gentlemanly, scholarly, charitable spirit.

But we express only a very small part of the value of these volumes when we describe them as full of entertaining matter skilfully handled; they are full of edifying lessons for the seeker of Christian wisdom.

66

The term "Methodist," first given, it would seem, in derision or disparagement, and accepted with a proper sense of the fact that the foolishness of men is the wisdom of God, was retained, we may well believe, not without a feeling that it expressed or hinted a great deal of truth and wisdom, which, in the things of religion, is generally too little appreciated. Although cavillers will associate with the name Methodist only the idea of a martinet in moral discipline, and, in the matters of religious experience, of one so much a devotee of method as to deserve the name of a methodistic man, a spiritual mechanic, and although calumniators will sweepingly say, Much ignorance hath made them mad, — their method is the method of madness," a wise and right-minded observer, and especially a lover of the simplicity of the Gospel, will have suggested to him by the title of Methodist quite other thoughts. These people, he will say to himself, mean to keep themselves reminded that there is a way of life, a method of salvation; they mean to remember Him who is himself "the way." They believe, and mean practically to keep in mind, that in spiritual no less than in secular things there must be an adaptation of means to ends. They hold, too, that where there is a will, there is a way; and admirably have they proved themselves, by their fidelity to these simple truths, an exception to that interpretation, at least, of the saying of Jesus, which has it, that the children of this world are wiser in their generation than the children of light are in theirs.

Wisdom, certainly this is the quality which the Methodist movement, in its beginnings, in the persons of its first leaders and subsequent guides, prominently illustrates. Wise steersmen for Christ, (to adopt, or adapt, the image of one of their preachers,*) they have certainly proved themselves in the storms of Church and State through which they have been called to pass. And, indeed, is there any better explanation of the wondrous union of so much wisdom with so much enthusiasm what their enemies would call so much method with so much madness than to ascribe this fine balance of qualities to the possession of the secret of apostolic simplicity?

Candor, indeed, constrains us to confess that, while the very name of Methodist tells to a thoughtful mind so many of the good points of the denomination that bears it, it also bespeaks some of their leading errors or dangers. It should caution them not to forget, what, indeed, they

"Under-rowers," Benson, p. 63.

themselves profess, as well as ourselves, to remember, that God's "ways are not as our ways," and to be careful that we do not "limit," by our methods either of speech or of action, "the Holy One of Israel." And we gratefully acknowledge that Methodism, especially when we take into account a great deal of its material in past times, has memorably guarded itself against this rock.

But there is another liability from which we are not quite so sure that our Methodist brethren take sufficient care to keep clear. In reading the glowing and rapturous records of the experience of ministers and converts, the question has forced itself upon us, Is there not a danger, in all this, that selfishness, self-enjoyment, spiritual dissipation, will creep in under the very guise of piety and devotion? And what has suggested this question has been our perceiving, or seeming to perceive, a stress laid upon states of feeling, as if desirable for their own sake, as if feeling were to be sought as an end, and not merely as evidence or motive of action. In a word, we have feared that the social and sentimental elements combined were liable, where so much use is made of sympathy in religion, to lead people away from that very simplicity and soberness of Christ and the Apostles which we have always supposed to be one of Methodism's great ideals. He, certainly, whom we call our Master and Model was very far from encouraging anything scenical or sentimental in the simple and serious matter of the religious life.

Full well do we remember, indeed, and hope we appreciate the significance of the fact, that the same Teacher who said, "Why call ye me Lord, Lord, and do not the things which I say?" also said, “Out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh." And if the question had to be met, what class of Christians has both spoken the most fervently and worked the most faithfully for Christ, we certainly feel that the Methodists would not be behind any.

And perhaps our being tempted to make the suggestion we have made in regard to the comparative value of emotion, as a thing to be sought for and relied upon, arises partly from the fact, that the historian of a movement like the Methodist one naturally makes most prominent those manifestations which were most characteristic and peculiar to the people he writes of, the relations of their experience, and the expressions of their feelings, - dwelling less on those quiet, more retired, less romantic, yet not less real and precious, proofs of true religion and Christianity which daily domestic, social, neighborly, and civil life affords, and which are presented alike by all true people of the Lord.

So that, after all, we would have far more emphasis laid on our gratitude for what Methodism has done and is doing, than on our criticism of its liability to morbid moods or movements. We thank the Methodists for what they have done to keep alive the sense of a living connection (the true Apostolic succession) between the Apostolic age and ours, in the community of one continuous work and warfare of the spirit. We thank the historian of "the religious movement called Methodism," and the body he represents, for reminding us so impressively that the Christian religion, as it was a movement in the begin