how he became involved in controversies with his friends and fellow-workers—­is not all this and much more written in books which may be in everybody’s hands—­in the books of Southey, of Tyerman, of Watson, of Beecham, of Stevens, of Coke and Moore, of Isaac Taylor, of Julia Wedgwood, of Urlin, and of many others?  It need not, therefore, be repeated here.  Neither is it necessary to vindicate the character of this great and good man from the imputations which were freely cast upon him both by his contemporaries (and that not only by the adversaries, but by many of the friends and promoters of the Evangelical movement), and also by some of his later biographers.  The saying of Mark Antony—­

    The evil that men do lives after them;
    The good is oft interred with their bones—­

has been reversed in the case of John Wesley.  Posterity has fully acquitted him of the charge of being actuated by a mere vulgar ambition, of desiring to head a party, of an undue love of power.  It has at last owned that if ever a poor frail human being was actuated by pure and disinterested motives, that man was John Wesley.  Eight years before his death he said, ’I have been reflecting on my past life; I have been wandering up and down between fifty and sixty years, endeavouring in my poor way to do a little good to my fellow-creatures.’  And the more closely his career has been analysed, the more plainly has the truth of his own words been proved.  His quarrel was solely with sin and Satan.  His master passion was, in his own often-repeated expression, the love of God and the love of man for God’s sake.  The world has at length done tardy justice to its benefactor.  Indeed, the danger seems now to lie in a different direction—­not indeed, in over-estimating the character of this remarkable man, but in making him a mere name to conjure with, a mere peg to hang pet theories upon.  The Churchman casts in the teeth of the Dissenter John Wesley’s unabated attachment to the Church; the Dissenter casts in the teeth of the Churchman the bad treatment Wesley received from the Church; and each can make out a very fair case for his own side.  But meanwhile the real John Wesley is apt to be presented to us in a very one-sided fashion.  Moreover, his character has suffered from the partiality of injudicious friends quite as much as from the unjust accusations of enemies.  It is peculiarly cruel to represent him as a faultless being, a sort of vapid angel.  We can never take much interest in such a character, because we feel quite sure that, if the whole truth were before us, he would appear in a different light.  John Wesley’s character is a singularly interesting one, interesting for this very reason, that he was such a thorough man—­full of human infirmities, constantly falling into errors of judgment and inconsistencies, but withal a noble specimen of humanity, a monument of the power of Divine grace to mould the rough materials of which man is made into a polished stone, meet to take its place in the fabric of the temple of the living God.