from the text, "Ye serpents, ye generation of vipers, how can ye escape the damnation of hell?" an offended hearer said to him, "Sir, such a sermon would have been suitable in Billingsgate; but it was highly improper here." Wesley replied, "If I had been in Billingsgate my text should have been, 'Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world."" He arraigned with growing severity the wickedness of England, public as well as private. He pleaded for more knowledge on the part of the rich as to the life of the poor. "On Friday and Saturday I visited as many. . . as I could. I found some in their cells underground, others in their garrets, half starved with both cold and hunger, added to weakness and pain. But I found not one of them unemployed who was able to crawl about the room. So wickedly, devilishly false is that common objection, "They are poor only because they are idle.' If you saw these things with your own eyes, could you lay out money in ornaments or superfluities?"

Mention has already been made of changes in Wesley's ideas as to Church polity. But these changes are not to be attributed exclusively to the demands arising from the Methodist movement. He was much influenced by Lord King's Account of the Primitive Church, and by Bishop Stillingfleet's Irenicon. In 1745, only a few weeks before reading the former book, he received a letter urging him to renounce the Church of England. In his reply he stated some thoroughly High-Church views, saying:

We believe it would not be right for us to administer either baptism or the Lord's Supper, unless we had a commission to do so from those bishops whom we apprehend to be in a succession from the apostles. We believe that the threefold order of ministers is not only authorized by its apostolic institution, but also by the written word.

But in his Journal on January 20, 1746, he writes:

I set out for Bristol. On the road I read over Lord King's Account of the Primitive Church. In spite of the vehement prejudice of my education I was ready to believe that this was a fair and im

partial draught; but if so, it would follow that bishops and presbyters are (essentially) of one order; and that originally every Christian congregation was a Church independent of all others!

Soon after Bishop Stillingfleet's Irenicon convinced him that neither Christ nor the apostles prescribed any particular form of Church government, and that it was "an entire mistake" to believe none but episcopal ordination valid. He declared in 1780, "I verily believe I have as good a right to ordain as to administer the Lord's Supper." Possibly he unconsciously adopted the more easily the views of King and Stillingfleet because of the pressure of circumstances. Certainly it was very convenient for him that he became convinced he was as much entitled to ordain as any bishop, and that he could do so without being guilty of schism; for the time came when he was crowded into doing it. The Methodists early began to demand preachers of their own who could administer the sacraments, for there were few clergymen in the movement and the Methodists often went without the sacraments and ordinances of the Church, both because some would not go to the church for them and because they were refused the sacraments by the churches. And Wesley early saw the practical utility of lay preaching. With his customary directness he exclaimed in 1756, “What an idle thing it is to dispute about lay preachers! Is not a lay preacher preferable to a drunken preacher? to a cursing, swearing preacher?" But in the same year, apropos of the demands of the Methodists, he said in another letter: "I tolerate lay preaching because I conceive there is an absolute necessity for it, inasmuch as, were it not, thousands of souls would perish everlastingly; yet I do not tolerate lay administering, because I conceive there is no such necessity for it." Meanwhile he adopted the views already outlined as to his right to ordain. When in 1784 he finally came to the point of ordaining, for work in America, Whatcoat and Vasey as priests and Coke as a superintendent, he did it because his opinion then changed as to the expediency of the act, not as to its legality. In explaining his position he

said: "These are the steps which, not of choice but necessity, I have slowly and deliberately taken. If anyone is pleased to call it separating from the Church he may. But the law of England does not call it so; nor can anyone properly be said so to do unless, out of conscience, he refuses to join in the services and partake of the sacraments administered therein."

There seems no evidence of consistent development in Wesley's thought as to "special providences," supernatural occurrences, and "faith healing." Throughout his life he believed in them. He cites instances where he himself, other people, and even his horses were healed; and where fogs lifted, storms ceased, and winds changed in answer to prayer. He regarded the Jacobite uprising of 1745 as a warning and punishment to England for her sins. At that time he preached from such texts as, "Who can tell if God will turn and repent, and turn away from his fierce anger, that we perish not?" He regarded the earthquakes which occurred in England during the fifties and in Lisbon in 1755 as marks of God's displeasure. He calls sin the cause and earthquakes the cure of God's anger, and I believe he would have held the same view had the earthquakes taken place at any period of his life. But few, if any, instances of faith cure, and all that class of personal phenomena, are recorded as occurring within his own knowledge in his later life, and much less often reports of any on the testimony of others.

To sum up and restate in conclusion: John Wesley was at first, through inheritance and environment, a HighChurchman, an ascetic, a recluse, a student of books and of the past. His reading, his frail health, and his disappointments combined to make him, until his return from Georgia, morbidly self-conscious and introspective. His dissatisfaction with himself at that time rendered him the readier for the influence of Böhler and the Moravian teaching as to the possibility of justification by faith, the witness of the Spirit, and Christian perfection. The mysticism of the Moravians and the rapid rise and emotional features of the Methodist

movement led him temporarily into extreme views and expressions along those lines. But his doctrinal ideas were later modified into a conception of Christianity which, while it emphasized the possibility of a conscious communion between the individual soul and God, laid increasing emphasis on the indispensability of conformity in life to the example of Jesus and to the models furnished by the Sermon on the Mount and the thirteenth chapter of First Corinthians. Conformity to the plain teachings of the Bible and of common sense became Wesley's basis of all judgment as to right and wrong. This theological development was along the same line with the modification of his High-Church views and his growth in tact, adaptability, and philanthropy. As causing this development the importance of his constant tours through Great Britain can hardly be overestimated. To his out-of-doors life and early rising he attributed his good health; and certainly his sanity and optimism could not but be increased by that and by the variety and interest which the frequent change of scene afforded. Furthermore, his travels gave him the experience and wide knowledge of existing conditions and of human nature in all its phases which showed him the intense need of a new religious movement and the changed and widened bases on which it must

rest.

Thus the student, the religious conservative, and the philosopher was transformed into the observer and the progressive and practical reformer.

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ART. VI.-THE ATONING CHRIST: AN INTERPRE

TATION.

THE coming of Christ into the world was not for the purpose of changing God's attitude toward men, but men's attitude toward God. The creation of man had its inception in the infinite goodness of God, and the race has never been without the enjoyment of the unlimited blessings of divine compassion. It is impossible to think that God, whose knowledge of his creation and love for all his creatures are perfect and eternal, should be taken by surprise by man's rebellion against righteousness or by any unforeseen facts concerning his attitude toward him, and from such knowledge allow his love for man to be turned to anger. That God is a being subject to moods and passions is unthinkable. The coming of Christ did not increase God's love for men. It has made them more lovable to the degree that it has wrought into their moral natures the divine likeness, but God did not love men less before Christ came. The infinite heart loves all mankind, not so much because they are holy and just as because they are capable of such divine excellencies; and it was to save them—that is, to change their moral relations toward God and perfect in them the divine imagethat Christ came into the world. God does not love the world because Christ came to save it, but Christ came to save the world because God loved it. It is not God, then, who is reconciled to men by the coming of Christ, but men who are reconciled to God. He was in Christ reconciling the world unto himself, and we love him because he first loved us. The coming of Christ was for the purpose of bringing the world to God and uniting men to him in loving obedience and holy likeness; to put men at one with God and be to the world the atoning Christ.

Our Lord not only gave to the world a revelation, he was a revelation in himself. He was the Son of God and the Son of man. In Christ we get our first true knowledge