the Church he was still led—­or, as some will think, misled—­by his desire to follow in what he conceived to be the steps of the Primitive Church.  His ideas of worship are strictly in accordance with what would now be called High Church usages.  He would have no pews, but open benches alike for all; he would have the men and the women separated, as they were in the Primitive Church;[716] he would have a hearty congregational service.  When it was seasonable to sing praise to God, they were to do it with the spirit and the understanding also; ’not in the miserable, scandalous doggerel of Sternhold and Hopkins, but in psalms and hymns which are both sense and poetry, such as would sooner provoke a critic to turn Christian than a Christian to turn critic;’ they were to sing ’not lolling at their ease, or in the indecent posture of sitting, but all standing before God, praising Him lustily and with a good courage;’ there was to be ’no repetition of words, no dwelling on disjointed syllables.’[717] Wesley was much struck with the remarkable decorum with which public worship was conducted by the Scotch Episcopal Church, which has always been more inclined to High Church usages than her English sister.[718] The Fasts and Festivals of the Church Wesley desired to observe most scrupulously:  every Friday was to be kept as a day of abstinence; the very children at Kingswood school were, if healthy, to fast every Friday till 3 P.M.  All Saints’ Day was his favourite festival, and he made it his constant practice on that day to preach on the Communion of Saints.  He distinctly implies that he considers the celebration of the Holy Communion an essential part of the public service at least on every Lord’s Day, and adduces this as a proof that the service at his own meetings must necessarily be imperfect.  From his private memoranda, quoted by Mr. Urlin,[719] we find that he believed it to be a duty to observe so far as he could the following rules:—­(1) to baptize by immersion; (2) to use the mixed chalice; (3) to pray for the faithful departed; (4) to pray standing on the Sunday in Pentecost.  He thought it prudent (1) to observe the stations [Wednesday and Friday], (2) to keep Lent and especially Holy Week, (3) to turn to the east at the Creed.  It is useless to speculate upon what might have been; but can it be doubted that if John Wesley’s lot had been cast in the nineteenth instead of the eighteenth century, he would have found much to fascinate him in another revival, which, like his own, began at Oxford?

But how was it that if John Wesley showed this strong appreciation of the aesthetic and the symbolical in public worship, this desire to bring everything to the model of the Primitive Church, he never impressed these views upon his followers?  How is it that so few traces of these predilections are to be found in his printed sermons?  John Wesley had so immense an influence over his disciples that he could have led them to almost anything.  How was it that he infused into them nothing whatever of that spirit which was in him?