Chapter XXII: Appendix: F (pages 73 and 98)

“The observant Frenchman to whom we have several times referred, M. Grosley, says of the ‘sect of the Methodists,’ ‘this establishment has borne all the persecutions that it could possibly apprehend in a country as much disposed to persecution as England is the reverse.’ The light literature of forty years overflows with ridicule of Methodism. The preachers are pelted by the mob; the converts are held up to execration as fanatics or hypocrites. Yet Methodism held the ground it had gained. It had gone forth to utter the words of truth to men little above the beasts that perish, and it had brought them to regard themselves, as akin to humanity. The time would come when its earnestness would awaken the Church itself from its somnolency, and the educated classes would not be ashamed to be religious. There was wild enthusiasm enough in some of the followers of Whitefield and Wesley; much self seeking; zeal verging upon profaneness; moral conduct, strongly opposed to pious profession. But these earnest men left a mark upon their time which can never be effaced. The obscure young students at Oxford in 1736, who were first called ‘Sacramentarians,’ then ‘Bible moths,’ and finally ‘Methodists, to whom the regular pulpits were closed, and who went forth to preach in the fields—who separated from the Church more in form than in reality—produced a moral revolution in England which probably saved us from the fate of nations wholly abandoned to their own devices.”—_From Knight’s History of England._

--------------

APPENDIX (PAGES 97 AND 98).
(_See Appendix A and F._)

--------------

--------------

APPENDIX (PAGE 114).

“The ‘two brothers in song’ (John and Charles Wesley) began their issue of ‘Hymns and Sacred Songs’ in 1739, and continued at intervals to supply Christian singers for half a century. Thirty-eight publications appeared one after the other: now under the name of one brother, now under that of the other; some with both names, and others nameless. The two hymnists appear to have agreed that, in the volumes which bore their joint names, they would not distinguish their hymns.”—_The Epworth Singers and other poets of Methodism, by the Rev. S. W. Christophers, Redruth, Cornwall._

--------------