thing of this kind. But take care what you do with respect to that young man; for he is as surely called of God to preach as you are. Examine what have been the fruits of his preaching, and hear him yourself."

Wesley heard him.

"It is the Lord!" he exclaimed, as the sermon ended; "let Him do what seemeth Him good. What am I that I should withstand God?"

The recent revival of lay-preaching in the Church of England was anticipated by sermons which startled England at the time of Wesley's great crusade against indifference and lethargy. The owning of the legitimacy of lay preaching by Susannah Wesley does not prove her to have been, in a sectarian sense, a Methodist. If she erred at all in doctrine or in practice, her faith was sound, and the Church herself owes a debt to her daughter who said: "Few insist upon the necessity of private prayers. But if they go to church sometimes and abstain from the grossest acts of mortal sin, though they are ignorant of the spirit and power of godliness, and have no sense of the love of God and universal benevolence, yet they rest well satisfied of their salvation, and are pleased to think they enjoy the world as much as they can while they live, and have heaven in reserve when they die. I have met with abundance of these people in my time, and I think it one of the most difficult things imaginable to bring these off from their carnal security, and to convince them that heaven is a state as well as a place—a state of holiness begun in this life, though not perfected till we enter on life eternal-that all sins are so many spiritual diseases which must be cured by the power of Christ before we can be capable of being happy, even though it were possible for us to be admitted into heaven hereafter."

And again in 1735

"God is Being itself, the I AM, and therefore must necessarily be the Supreme Good! He is so infinitely blessed that every perception of His blissful Presence imparts a glad vitality to the heart. Every degree of approach towards Him is, in the same proportion, a

degree of happiness; and I often think that were He always present to our mind, as we are present to Him, there would be no pain nor sense of misery."

Had the Churchpeople of her day and of some succeeding ones been more fully alive to the informations of the Spirit that dwelt upon Susannah Wesley, there had been little scope for the schism of Wesleyan Methodism, and less room still for the later faction of delusion and superstition called "Christian Science." All that is worthy, abiding and efficacious in the doctrines supposed to emanate from Mrs. Eddy is contained in full measure pressed down and running over in the teaching of the Bible and the Prayerbook. In the phrases above quoted these teachings at least are vested in pure and understandable English.

CHAPTER VI

REASONABLE RELIGION AND THE EVANGELICAL

REVIVAL

MRS. MACAULAY, ELIZABETH CARTER, HESTER CHAPONE, SELINA COUNTESS OF HUNTINGDON, MRS. TRIMMER, HANNAH MORE

IT is a practice with Church historians to decry the period of Church life that followed the death of Anne, and preceded the Evangelical Revival of the early part of the nineteenth century and to say that the Church was then slothfully idle, if not in a state of suspended animation.

The reasons given for this reprehensible state of things are that the Government of the time laboured persistently at the suppression of enthusiasm-enthusiasm being then identified with Jacobitism-and that the age was an age of intellect.

It is true that that cold hand of policy laid its clutch upon the activities and the aspirations of the Church. Yet there had to be peace in England for the Church to mass forces for a forward movement. The soldiers of the Cross had to receive instruction. Scholarship and learning are not acquired in a day. Teachers themselves have to be taught. What if reason became a test of faith? It should not, surely, be the exclusive test. But a Church which disregards the claims of reason is no Church for humankind. The enthronement of a " goddess of reason " in Notre Dame was the answer of the Parisian multitude to the contempt of reason displayed by the Church of France. In England things are differently managed alike by Church and by country. The British bas bleu was also, in most instances, a godly matron. The votaresses

of reason in England were votaresses of the English Church. It need not vex the consciences of good Anglicans that in Hanoverian times much quietude prevailed in things religious. Elizabeth Carter, Catherine Macaulay, Hester Chapone, Mary Delany, and Fanny Burney could not work beyond the limitations of their genius. Yet were they all faithful Women of the Church of England.

Although, in her own time, the highly-distinguished Catherine, wife of Dr. Macaulay a Scotch physician resident in London, was the first among them all, she is least famed to-day of any of the bluestockings who won for themselves the liberty of following learning and letters as an avocation. Yet in possessing herself of her privileges she made more noise and fuss than the rest of them put together. In the hour when the voices of the populations of many countries were raising the cry of LIBERTY, EQUALITY, FRATERNITY, Mrs. Macaulay wrote a socialistic history of England, though she objected, when Dr. Johnson proposed it, to let her footman sit with herself and her guests at the luncheon-table. For her history she was publicly thanked in the House of Commons, where Pitt delivered an eulogy on her great abilities. Her political treatises and pamphlets were eagerly read, and she was regarded by many of her admirers as a sibyl of public events and a monitress of the public conscience. So inspirational was her personality that one devotee, the Rev. Thomas Wilson, D.D., the non-resident Rector of St. Stephen's, Walbrook, caused a statue of her to be placed, in a decorated niche of marble, within the chancel of his church.

In the age when magnificent Olympian forms of architecture superseded the pious Gothic for church building, even when St. Paul's Cathedral and other edifices of Sir Christopher Wren's creation marked the rising of a new London, and fostered a new character in Christian thought, there was confusion in the minds of Churchmen as to what soul qualities constituted a saint. The deposition of the Virgin Mary from a throne of intercession, and the banish

L

ment of her effigies from the churches, left a void in the hierarchy of heaven for those who did not know their Saviour as the Christ in whom there is neither male nor female. And on the vacant pedestals of God's houses of prayer, as in the empty niches of men's consciences, were set up, here and there, statues of the lately-dead-men and women-who had assisted in the development of human genius, or who had served their country well. And should only the departed be placed in these Walhallas? This question the Rev. Dr. Wilson asked himself, in spirit at least. But he believed Mrs. Macaulay's title to the awful honour of "counterfeit presentment" in the railedoff place where Christians meet to celebrate the love and sacrifice of their Lord, to lie in her character as much as in her achievements. Later on he bethought him he had been mistaken in her character. In any case he caused her statue to be removed and done away with, when its original disappointed his high thoughts of her and, at over fifty years of age, married a second husband of twenty-one. Mr. William Graham was the brother of a quack doctor of the provinces, and was described by some of Mrs. Macaulay's friends, at the time of her marriage, as a ship-surgeon's mate. He became shortly afterwards the Rev. William Graham, M.A., of Misterton Church, Leicestershire. Upon the death of his talented spouse, in 1791, he did for her glorification what Dr. Wilson had done in her life-set up a statue of her in his parish church.

Mrs. Macaulay, when Mrs. Graham, collected and republished her Letters on Education, with Observations on Religious and Metaphysical Subjects, with a Preface in which she made the following confession of the religious principles upon which she had always endeavoured to act and advise :

"A full persuasion of the equity and goodness of God, with a view to the purity and benevolence for which the precepts of our religion are so eminently distinguished, has been the author's sole guide in forming her instructions: on the full conviction, first, that it is on these attributes of the Deity we can alone build any such con