quite apart from their Calvinism, never cordially in harmony with John Wesley.  As years went on Wesley must have felt himself more and more a lonely man so far as his equals were concerned, for in point of breeding and culture he was fully the equal of the very best.  It must not be supposed that Wesley did not feel this isolation.  There is a sadness about the strain in which he wrote to Benson in 1770.  ’Whatever I say, it will be all one.  They will find fault because I say it.  There is implicit envy at my power (so called) and jealousy therefrom.’  Wesley was not demonstrative, but he was a man of strong affections and acute feelings, and he felt his loneliness, and more so than ever after the death of his brother Charles.  There is a touching story that a fortnight after the death of the latter Wesley was giving out in chapel his dead brother’s magnificent hymn,

    Come, O thou traveller unknown,

and when he came to the lines,

    My company before is gone,
      And I am left alone with thee,

the old man (then in his eighty-fourth year) burst into tears and hid his face in his hands.

One feature in Wesley’s character must be carefully noted by all who would form a fair estimate of him.  If it was a weakness, and one which frequently led him into serious practical mistakes, it was at any rate an amiable weakness—­a fault which was very near akin to a virtue.  A guileless trustfulness of his fellow-men, who often proved very unworthy of his confidence, and, akin to this, a credulity, a readiness to believe the marvellous, tinged his whole career.  ‘My brother,’ said Charles Wesley, ’was, I think, born for the benefit of knaves.’[740] It is in the light of this quality that we must interpret many important events of his life.  His relations with the other sex were notoriously unfortunate; not a breath of scandal was ever uttered against him; and the mere fact that it was not is a convincing proof, if any were needed, of the spotless purity of his life; for it is difficult to conceive conduct more injudicious than his was.  The story of his relationship with Sophia Causton, Grace Murray, Sarah Ryan, and last, but not least, the widow Vazeille, his termagant wife, need not here be repeated.  In the case of any other man scandal would often have been busy; but Wesley was above suspicion.  His conduct was put down to the right cause—­viz. a perfect guilelessness and simplicity of nature.  The same tone of mind led him to take men as well as women too much at their own estimates.  He was quite ready to believe those who said that they had attained the summit of Christian perfection,[741] though, with characteristic humility, he never professed to have attained it himself.  He was far more ready than either his brother Charles or Whitefield to see in the physical symptoms which attended the early movement of Methodism the hand of God; but, in justice to him, it should be added that he was