As an illustration let us take the somewhat complicated question of John Wesley’s Churchmanship.  That he was most sincerely and heartily attached to the Church of England is undeniable.  In the language of one of his most ardent but not undiscriminating admirers, ’he was a Church of England man even in circumstantials; there was not a service or a ceremony, a gesture or a habit, for which he had not an unfeigned predilection.’[710] He was, in fact, a distinctly High Churchman, but a High Churchman in a far nobler sense than that in which the term was generally used in the eighteenth century.  Indeed, in this latter sense John Wesley hardly falls under the denomination at all.  As a staunch supporter of the British Constitution, both in Church and State, he was no doubt in favour of the establishment of the National Church as an essential part of that Constitution.  But it was not this view of the Church which was uppermost in his mind.  On several occasions he spoke and wrote of the Church as a national establishment in terms which would have shocked the political High Churchmen of his day.  He ’can find no trace of a national Church in the New Testament;’—­it is ’a mere political institution;’[711] the establishment by Constantine was a gigantic evil:’  ’the King and the Parliament have no right to prescribe to him what pastor he shall use;’[712] he does not care to discuss the question as to whether all outward establishments are a Babel.  But does it follow from this and similar language that he taught, as the historians of the Dissenters contend, the principles and language of Dissent?[713] Very far from it.  The fact is, John Wesley in his conception of the Church was both before and behind his age.  He would have found abundance of sympathisers with his views in the seventeenth, and abundance after the first thirty years of the nineteenth, century.  But in the eighteenth century they were quite out of date.  Here and there a man like Jones of Nayland or Bishop Horsley[714] might express High Church views of the same kind as those of John Wesley, but they were quite out of harmony with the general spirit of the times.  Wesley’s idea of the Church was not like that of high and dry Churchmen of his day; that Church which was always ‘in danger’ was not what he meant; neither was it, like that of the later Evangelical school, the Church of the Reformation period.  He went back to far earlier times, and took for his model in doctrine and worship the Primitive Church before its divisions into East and West.  Thus we find him recording with evident satisfaction at Christmastide, 1774, ’During the twelve festival days we had the Lord’s Supper daily—­a little emblem of the Primitive Church.’[715] When he first appointed district visitors he looked with great satisfaction upon the arrangement, because it reminded him of the deaconesses of the Primitive Church.  In the very act which tended most of all to the separation of Wesley’s followers from