’to see a man that had one foot in the grave, but I found a man that had one foot in heaven.’[757] ‘Sir,’ said Mr. Venn to one who asked him his opinion of Fletcher, ’he was a luminary—­a luminary did I say?—­he was a sun!  I have known all the great men for these fifty years, but none like him.’  John Wesley was of the same opinion; in Fletcher he saw realised in the highest degree all that he meant by ‘Christian Perfection.’  For some time he hesitated to write a description of this ‘great man,’ ’judging that only an Apelles was proper to paint an Alexander;’ but at length he published his well-known sermon on the significant text, ‘Mark the perfect man,’ &c. (Ps. xxxvii. 37), which he concluded with this striking testimony to the unequalled character of his friend:  ’I was intimately acquainted with him for above thirty years; I conversed with him morning, noon, and night without the least reserve, during a journey of many hundred miles; and in all that time I never heard him speak one improper word, nor saw him do an improper action.  To conclude; many exemplary men have I known, holy in heart and life, within fourscore years, but one equal to him I have not known—­one so inwardly and outwardly devoted to God.  So unblamable a character in every respect I have not found either in Europe or America; and I scarce expect to find another such on this side of eternity.’  Fletcher, on his part, was one of the few parish clergymen who to the end thoroughly appreciated John Wesley.  He thought it ’shameful that no clergyman should join Wesley to keep in the Church the work God had enabled him to carry on therein;’ and he was half-inclined to join him as his deacon, ‘not,’ he adds with genuine modesty, ’with any view of presiding over the Methodists after you, but to ease you a little in your old age, and to be in the way of receiving, perhaps doing, more good.’  Wesley was very anxious that Fletcher should be his successor, and proposed it to him in a characteristic letter; but Fletcher declined the office, and had he accepted, the plan could never have been carried out, for the hale old man survived his younger friend several years.  The last few years of Fletcher’s life were cheered by the companionship of one to whom no higher praise can be awarded than to say that she was worthy of being Fletcher’s wife.  Next to Susanna Wesley herself, Mrs. Fletcher stands pre-eminent among the heroines of Methodism.  In 1785 the saint entered into his everlasting rest, dying in harness at his beloved Madeley.  His death-bed scene is too sacred to be transferred to these pages.

Indeed, there is something almost unearthly about the whole of this man’s career.  He is an object in some respects rather for admiration than for imitation.  He could do and say things which other men could not without some sort of unreality.  John Wesley, with his usual good sense, warns his readers of this in reference to one particular habit, viz. ’the facility of raising useful observations