It has been already observed that a French historian of Christianity speaks of Quakerism and Methodism as the two chief forms of English mysticism.[604] To an educated man of ordinary observation in the eighteenth century, especially if he regarded the new movement with distrust, the analogy between this and different or earlier varieties of ‘enthusiasm’ appeared still more complete.  Lord Lyttelton, for example, in discussing a favourite theological topic of that age—­namely, the absence of enthusiasm in St. Paul, and his constant appeals to the evidence of reason and the senses—­contrasts with the life and writings of the Apostles the extravagant imaginations, and the pretensions to Divine illumination, of ‘mystics, ancient and modern,’ mediaeval saints, ’Protestant sectaries of the last age, and some of the Methodists now.’[605] Montanus and Dionysius, St. Francis and Ignatius Loyola, Madame Bourignon, George Fox, and Whitefield are all ranked together in the same general category.  Methodists, Moravians, and Hutchinsonians are classed as all nearly-related members of one family.  Just in the same way[606] Bishop Lavington, in his ’Enthusiasm of Methodists and Papists,’ has entered into an elaborate comparison between what he finds in Wesley’s journals and in the lives and writings of saints and mystics of the Roman Church.[607] Nor does he fail to discover similar resemblances to Methodist experiences among the old mystic philosophers, Montanists, Quakers, French Quietists, French prophets, and Moravians.  The argumentative value of Lavington’s book may be taken for what it was worth.  To his own contemporaries it appeared the achievement of a great triumph if he could prove in frequent cases an almost identical tone of thought in Wesley and in Francis of Assisi or Francis de Sales.  To most minds in our own days it will rather seem as if he were constantly dealing blows which only rebounded upon himself, in comparing his opponent to men whose deep piety and self-denying virtues, however much tinged by the errors of their time and order, worked wonders in the revival of earnest faith.  On the whole Lavington proved his case successfully, but he only proved by what easy transitions the purest and most exalted faith may pass into extravagances, and, above all, the folly of his own Church in not endeavouring to find scope for her enthusiasts and mystics, as Rome had done for a Loyola and a St. Theresa.  He himself was a typical example of the tone of thought out of which this infatuation grew.  What other views could be looked for from a bishop who, though himself an awakening preacher and a good man, whose dying words[608] were an ascription of glory to God ([Greek:  doxa to theo]), was yet so wholly blind to the more intense manifestations of religious fervour that he could see nothing to admire, nothing even to approve, in the burning zeal of the founders of the Franciscans and of the Jesuits?  Of the first he had nothing more to say than that he was ’at first only a well-minded but weak enthusiast, afterwards a mere hypocrite and impostor;’ of the other he spoke with a certain compassion as ’that errant, shatter-brained, visionary fanatic.’[609] And the Methodist, he thought, had a somewhat ‘similar texture of brain.’