Wesley himself was protected both by disposition and training from falling deeply into some of the dangers to which enthusiastic and mystical religion is very liable.  He was credulous, and even superstitious, but he checked his followers in the credence which many of them were inclined to give to stories of ecstasies, and visions, and revelations.  He spoke slightingly of orthodoxy, and held that ’right opinions were a very slender part of religion;’[624] but, far from countenancing anything like a vague undogmatic Pietism, his opinions went almost to the opposite extreme of precise definition.  Neither could it be said of him that he spiritualised away the plain meaning of Scripture—­a charge to which the old Quakers were constantly liable, and which was sometimes alleged against the later Methodists.  He himself never spoke contemptuously—­as the mystics have been so apt to do—­of the value of learning; and of reason he said, in the true spirit of Henry More, ’I believe and reason too, for I find no inconsistency between them.  And I would as soon put out my eyes to secure my faith, as lay aside my reason.’[625] But the Methodists, as a body, were far less inclined to act on this principle.  Without disparagement to the conspicuous ability of some individual members of their communion, both in the present and in the past, it may be certainly said that they have always utterly failed to attract the intellect of the country at large.  Great, therefore, as was its moral and spiritual power among large classes of the people, Methodism was never able to take rank among great national reformations.

Neither Wesley nor the Wesleyans have ever yielded to a mischievous tendency which has beset most forms of mysticism.  They have never, in comparison with the inward worship of the soul, spoken slightingly of ’temples made of stones,’[626] or of any of the chief outward ordinances of religion.  Their opponents often attempted to make it a charge against them, and thought, no doubt, they would be sure to prove it.  But they never did so.  Wesley was always able to answer, with perfect correctness, that what was thus said might be true of Moravians, or of Tauler, or of Behmen, or of St. Theresa, or of Madame de Bourignon, or of the Quakers, or even of William Law, but that he himself had never done otherwise than insist most strongly on the essential need of making use of all the external helps which religion can offer.[627]

By far the gravest imputation that has ever been brought against the disciples of each various form of mystical or emotional religion is that, in aspiring after some loftier ideal of spiritual communion with the Divine, they have looked down with a kind of scorn upon ’mere morality,’ as if it were a lower path.  And it must be acknowledged that men of the most pure and saintly lives have, nevertheless, used expressions which misguided or unprincipled men might pervert into authority for lawlessness.  Tauler, whom an admiring