words; the hunger for men was one of the dominating passions of his life. Do not the clubs of Johnson have their counterpart in the class meetings of Wesley-was there not at bottom the same vital interest in men? Johnson said that he looked upon every day as lost when he did not make some new acquaintance, and Wesley would have thought any day lost when many were not brought into the kingdom of God.

They were alike also in their personal piety in an age of social corruption. Seen against the background of the age in which they lived-an age that lives for us in the pictures of Hogarth and in the novels of Fielding and Smollett, an age that received its theology from Warburton and its social ethics from Chesterfield and Walpole Johnson and Wesley loom up by reason of their religious fervor and their moral integrity. The difference in the religious life of the two is that Johnson, while "a good and a pious man and a great observer of days, lived without assurance and exaltation;" he experienced none of the rapture of the saint, he lived in the fear of God. Wesley, on the other hand, held out to all his followers the joy of salvation, the peace of righteousness. Just a few weeks before Johnson's death, however, he experienced what Cowper called his conversion. Boswell's account I give: "He had shut himself up, and employed a day in particular exercises of religion-fasting, humiliation, and prayer. On a sudden he obtained extraordinary relief, for which he looked up to Heaven with grateful devotion. He made no direct inference from this fact; but from his manner of telling I could perceive that it appeared as something more than an incident in the common course of events." Of this incident Cowper wrote to John Newton: "We rejoice in the account you give of Dr. Johnson. His conversion will indeed be a singular proof of the Omnipotence of Grace; and the more singular, the more decided."

The most striking evidence of the coincidence of their views and of their mutual regard for one another is their attitude to the American war. Johnson's prejudice against

the Americans is so well known as not to need comment. Wesley at first was inclined to sympathize with the colonists in their demands, but when war actually came on he took the side of the government and issued his Calm Address to Our American Colonies, of which forty thousand copies were distributed by the government among those who would be most naturally influenced by Wesley. He was very severely attacked by some of the members of his own flock for changing sides and for plagiarizing Dr. Johnson's pamphlet Taxation No Tyranny. Against the first charge Wesley wrote, giving his reasons for writing the pamphlet: "Least of all did I write with a view to inflame any; just the contrary, I contributed my mite toward putting out the flame which rages all over the land. This I have more opportunity of observing than any other man in England. . . . Now, there is no possible way of putting out the flame, or hindering its rising higher and higher, but to show that the Americans are not used either cruelly or unjustly; that they are not injured at all." Wesley was at heart as loyal to the English crown as was Johnson. As to the second charge, that the pamphlet was "a bundle of Liliputian shafts, picked and stolen out of Dr. Johnson's pincushion," the answer was not so easy, for the pamphlets are strikingly alike. There must have been some understanding between the two men, however, for Dr. Johnson wrote him a letter saying: "I have thanks to return for the addition of your important suffrage to my argument on the American question. To have gained such a mind as yours may justly confirm me in my own opinion. What effect my paper has had upon the public I know not; but I have no reason to be discouraged. The lecturer was surely in the right who, though he saw his audience slinking away, refused to quit the chair while Plato stayed." Is there a finer compliment than that in Boswell's Life of Johnson-even the compliment to Burke? The evidence of Wesley's conservatism is not confined to the American war; he offered to answer the letters of Junius, and gave other evidences of his loyalty to the government of

George the Third. Viewing the matter from the wider standpoint of the revolutionary spirit then at work on the Continent, Johnson and Wesley were, the one with the more aristocratic and cultured classes, the other with the masses of the people, bulwarks of conservatism. The statement of Leslie Stephen with regard to Johnson's influence is strikingly like that of Lecky's characterization of the Wesleyan movement. Says Leslie Stephen :

The stubborn adherence of Johnson, and such men as Johnson, to solid facts, and their contempt for philosophy, goes far to explain how it came to pass that England avoided the cataclysm of a revolution. It expresses the resolute determination of the dogged English mind not to loosen its grasp on solid fact in pursuit of dreams.

...

Mr. Lecky says in tracing the revolutionary movement on the Continent:

Many old abuses perished, but a tone of thought and feeling was introduced into European life which could only lead to anarchy, and at length to despotism, and was beyond all others fatal to that measured and ordered freedom which can alone endure. Its chief characteristics were, a hatred of all constituted authority, an insatiable appetite for change, a habit of regarding rebellion as the normal as well as the noblest form of self-sacrifice, a disdain for all compromise, a contempt for all traditions, a desire to level all ranks and subvert all establishments, a determination to seek progress not by the slow and cautious amelioration of existing institutions, but by sudden, violent, and revolutionary change. Religion, property, civil authority, and domestic life were all assailed, and doctrines incompatible with the very existence of government were embraced by multitudes with the fervor of a religion. England, on the whole, escaped the contagion. Many causes conspired to save her, but among them a prominent place must, I believe, be given to the new and vehement religious enthusiasm which was at that very time passing through the middle and lower classes of the people, which had enlisted in its service a large proportion of the wilder and more impetuous reformers, and which recoiled with horror from the antichristian tenets that were associated with the Revolution in France.

Erin Mins

FREDERICK WILLIAM FABER was a disciple of Wordsworth. He was born the same year that Wordsworth finished the "Excursion," and in his youth he looked upon that orb of song which was shining in the Lake region and the Westmoreland hills. Wordsworth's commanding influence attracted Faber as the sun attracts the planets, and in the poet's genial light his mind was like a bed of violets in the spring. Friends they were, too, and in after years Faber used to describe the long rambles which he and Wordsworth took over the romantic and beautiful Lake country.

The voice of Faber was keyed to the music of Wordsworth, and that key was celestial. Wordsworth saw God in the beauty of a flower, he saw him in the blue sky, in the light of setting suns and in the mind of man; and his singing bird was like "a mountain river, pouring out praise to the Almighty Giver." And so with Faber. He sang the hymns of the Lord, and his inspiration came from woods and flowers, from mountains and seas, from running streams and the sunshine of common skies; or, more correctly, these were a sort of trellis over which he spread himself, and became like a vine full of flowers.

Faber's God is the God of harmony and beauty. Harmony is melodious sound; beauty is melodious color. In cloud and sky, in field and forest, in river and brook and fountain, in the curve of the wave, in the forms of the crystal and in the white-robed mountain peaks there is a wondrous array of beauty. But when the sun drives away the darkness and makes the clouds sing, beauty becomes glory. Faber stood before that picture until he saw the King in his beauty; and seizing his harp he sang:

My God, how wonderful thou art,

Thy majesty how bright,
How beautiful thy mercy seat

In depths of burning light!

The beauty of nature is an overflow of the beauty of God,

and it was made that the beauty of the Lord our God might be upon us. So Faber thought and so he sang.

But there is music. Pythagoras thought that nature is set to music, and Carlyle declared that all deep things are musical; indeed, from the waving forest and the tossing sea up to the singing stars and the chorus of angels, there is music. But did man make the laws of sound? Is the scale a human invention? Faber thought not. "Thou, Lord," he wrote, "art the Father of music; sweet sounds are a whisper from thee." Harmony, as well as beauty, is the gift of God.

Where is the source of love? Love is greater than beauty, greater than harmony; it is the greatest thing in the world; indeed, in the end of the world nothing is of value except the love of God and our love for each other. But where does love come from? Faber saw that God is love, and the fountain of love; and he wrote these beautiful lines on the "Eternal Father":

All fathers learn their craft from Thee;

All loves are shadows cast

From the beautiful, eternal hills

Of thine unbeginning past.

He saw God also in the trees and in the forest, and they were his interpreters. That was a beautiful picture on the plains of Mamre when Abraham sat in his tent door in the heat of the day and asked his visitors to rest themselves under the tree. He was a lover of the trees. So was Faber, and his favorite tree was a symbol of God. Said he:

The thought of God is like the tree

Beneath whose shade I lie
And watch the fleets of snowy clouds
Sail o'er the silent sky.

In a bit of mossy ground he saw a modest flower, scarce bending to the wind, though overhead the wood was thundering like a storm. It was a picture of souls living down in the thought of God; and the flower lifted its face toward heaven and said, "He shall be a hiding place from the wind, and a covert from the tempest."