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the comforts and refinements of civil society, the connection between genius and climate, we then suppose, ceases, or is felt only in a very remote degree. If we consult the page of historic truth, it will incontestibly prove to us,

"Summos posse viros, et magna exempla daturos,
"Vervecum in patria; crassoque sub aëre nasci ;"

Juvenal, Sat. x. Book xlix.

and that the poets of the north may aspire to as conspicuous a place in the annals of fame as those of the south. Dante, Tasso, Ariosto, and Petrarch, are the pride and glory of the Italians; but let him pronounce who is capable of reading their works in the original, and those of Shakespeare, Milton, Dryden, and Pope, whether our countrymen are not entitled to a higher tribute of admiration than their rivals, on the same score of invention,-a faculty which unquestionably holds the first place among the virtues of a poet. In a word, the difference between an ignorant and an enlightened government cannot be more strikingly exemplified than in the energy and solicitude with which the former operates upon the moral feelings of a people, and in the supineness and negligence with which the latter suffers the influence of mere natural causes to decide upon the destinies and manners of a nation.

ESSAY VI.

ON THE RAPID GROWTH OF METHODISM.

WE have of late been in the habit of witnessing so many political convulsions, that those evils which do not instantly threaten to overwhelm us, excite no very lively sensations of alarm in our breasts,-else, before this time, a thousand orthodox pens would have filled every corner of the kingdom with relations of the various evils and dangers to which the church and state were equally exposed, from the amazing increase of Methodism; a subject of so great and tremendous a nature, that, compared with it, that of the catholic emancipation shrinks into total insignificance.

Our curiosity then is naturally prompted to inquire by what means a religious sect, in an age, the characteristic of which is certainly not very favourable to the spirit of proselytism, should have made such rapid strides within the short space of sixty years, as to number among its disciples, secret and avowed, seven hundred thousand people, composed however chiefly

of the low and middling classes of the community? The term Methodist we know, strictly speaking, can only be applied to the followers of Wesley* and Whitfield; but we have used it in a more extensive sense, and under that name designated all the evangelical dissenters who form, what has been emphatically called, "the combined armies against the church of England."

To this enquiry we shall studiously endeavour to bring a mind divested of all those prepossessions arising out of that reverence which we entertain for the consecrated servants of our faith; since it must be admitted with regret, that this most serious and important subject has been hitherto treated, with only one or two exceptions, in a tone too magisterial and virulent to confer the slightest service upon the interests of true religion. After a careful examination then into the various causes of the increase of Methodism, we are inclined to think that it has been chiefly promoted and diffused by the seven following:-1. The prejudices of the common people against episcopacy.-2. The

* A Fellow of Merton College first distinguished Mr. Wesley and his adherents by the appellation of Methodists, in allusion to an ancient college of physicians at Rome, who were remarkable for putting their patients under regimen, and were therefore called Methodists.-See Cooke's Life of Wesley.

Methodist doctrines of the immediate and perpetual interference of Providence, of experience, and justification by faith only.-3. Their class meetings.4. Extemporaneous preaching.—5. Affected sanctity and austerity of manners.-6. The imperfect residence of the clergy of the established church.-7. The domestic irreligion of the great.

The history of modern Europe has demonstrated, that the ignorance and envy of the common people are sure sources of establishing erroneous opinions respecting religion; and, as it is not the peculiar boast of this country, that the understandings, even of the lowest members of society, are enlarged by all the aids of education and by its benign effects, or are exempt in a remarkable degree from the vice of envy, we are not to be surprized, that the existence of those evils may be brought forward as one of the causes which have afforded great facility to the Methodists for prosecuting the vast designs which they have formed against the established church. To indispose the minds of men towards any institution, religious or civil, the most effectual way, we take it for granted, is to exaggerate its abuses: and how often do we meet in the publications of the Methodists the insinuation, and in their preachings, the avowal, although it be an

article of their creed to write or to speak nothing against our church establishment, that bishops, in the plenitude of their wealth, their power, their dignity, their arrogance, lose all recollection of the apostolic mandate, "to be blameless, not greedy of filthy lucre, nor lifted up with pride and self-conceit;" and that, instead of cherishing the poor, and considering them as their brethren, they have no other object than to amass wealth, and to aggrandize their own families? yet these accusations, the makers of which justly subject themselves to the weighty charge of wilfully violating the sacred obligations of truth, rarely fail to experience a most favourable reception with beings whose mental faculties, for the want of cultivation, exceed but little the cattle which they drive.

We know it to be generally conceived, that it is not common to envy those with whom we cannot easily be placed in comparison. The peasant, it may be justly imagined, would indulge in no animosity against the bishop, whose walk of life is so different to his: yet, from crafty men ingrafting their own pernicious prejudices upon his ignorant and unsuspicious mind, he is taught to view the episcopal bench with as much illwill as if it had given him the most serious provocation to malice. This feeling of the common people,

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