baronet; John Nelson, the worthy stonemason of Birstal, who was pressed as a soldier simply because he was a Methodist, and whose death John Wesley thus records in his Journal:  ’This day died John Nelson, and left a wig and half-a-crown—­as much as any unmarried minister ought to leave;’ Sampson Stainforth, Mark Bond, and John Haine, the Methodist soldiers who infused a spirit of Methodism in the British Army; Howell Harris, the life and soul of Welsh Methodism; Thomas Olivers, the converted reprobate, who rode one hundred thousand miles on one horse in the cause of Methodism, and who was considered by John Wesley as a strong enough man to be pitted against the ablest champions of Calvinism; John Pawson, Alexander Mather and other worthy men—­of humble birth, it may be, and scanty acquirements, but earnest, devoted Christians—­would all deserve to be noticed in a professed history of Methodism.  In a brief sketch, like the present, all that can be said of them is, ‘Cum tales essent, utinam nostri fuissent.’

(2) THE CALVINISTIC CONTROVERSY.

The Methodists met with a vast amount of opposition; but, after all, there was a more formidable enemy to the progress of the Evangelical revival than any from without.  The good men who made so bold and effectual a stand against vice and irreligion in the last century might have been still more successful had they presented a united front to the common foe; but, unfortunately, a spirit of discord within their ranks wasted their strength and diverted them from work for which they were admirably adapted to work for which they were by no means fitted.  Hitherto our attention has been mainly directed to the strength of the movement.  The pure lives and disinterested motives of the founders of Methodism, their ceaseless energy, their fervent piety—­in a word, their love of God and their love of their neighbour for God’s sake—­these are the points on which one loves to dwell; these are traits in their characters which posterity has gratefully recognised, though scant justice was done them by the men of their own generation.  In their quarrel with sin and Satan all good men will sympathise with them.  It is painful to turn from this to their quarrels among themselves; but these latter occupy too large a space in their history to be lightly passed over.

It has frequently been remarked in these pages that the eighteenth century, or at least the first half of it, was essentially an age of controversy; but of all the controversies which distracted the Church and nation that one which now comes under our consideration was the most unprofitable and unsatisfactory in every way.  The subject of it was that old, old difficulty which has agitated men’s minds from the beginning, and will probably remain unsettled until the end of time—­a difficulty which is not confined to Christianity, nor even to Deism, but which meets us quite apart from theology altogether.  It is that which, in theological language, is involved in