and shake it into life. But the hand which could do this must be a strong one, and rough was sure to be the treatment with which such an assailant would be met.

To the clergy especially, such a reformation would be offensive. The clergy were in fact the bitterest opponents of the Methodist revival. They assailed it` with taunts, scoffs, and ruder weapons. They instigated the mob. They excited the magistrates; they denounced the Methodist preachers before the bench, as ringleaders of rebellion. When converts repaired to their Churches, and filled seats long vacant, the clergyman abused them from the pulpit. When they came to the Lord's Table, he drove them away. In his eyes, the scold and the drunkard were harmless neighbours; but he could not bear the scandal of their reformation. This was a double reproach to his character and his ministry. The converts were a set of rogues, the preachers double-faced hypocrites. The justices of peace took the same line with the clergy, and with equal keenness. Every jolly toper felt himself struck at by the Methodist teacher. The worthless and the decent among the gentry made common cause with the rabble. The pillory, pond, and gaol, were in their eyes the only fit places for such reformers. The passions of the mob concurred with the dislike of the higher classes, and the rabble was let loose under the august sanction of magistrates and mayors.

The Methodists suffered the fate of early Christianity

-but their doctrines were made more odious by their discipline and practice, which were aimed avowedly at the vices and follies of men. Such a warfare, once engaged in, was sharp, and the weapons used were of the coarsest sort.

The

In those days men were not nice in their violence, and the sufferer had scanty means of redress. Magistrates led the way.* Those of Staffordshire took the first place in the fray.

Thus ran their warrant :

"To all High Constables, Petty Constables, &c.

"Whereas we, his Majesty's Justices of the Peace for the County of Stafford, have received information that several disorderly persons, styling themselves Methodist Preachers, go about raising routs and riots, to the great damage of his Majesty's liege people and against the peace of our Sovereign Lord the King; &c.

"These are in his Majesty's name, to command you, and every one of you, within your respective districts, to make diligent search after the said Methodist Preachers, and to bring him or them before some of us, his said Majesty's Justices of the Peace, to be examined concerning their unlawful doings.

"Given under our hands and seals, this 7th day of October, 1743.

"J. Lane,

"W. Persehouse."

* Wesley's Journal, i. p. 414.

Nor was this view confined to the worthies of Staffordshire. In Cornwall* the Magistrates committed the Methodists to the House of Correction, as vagrants. They issued warrants to apprehend them, as having no lawful calling, and as disturbing the peace of the parish. Then they sentenced them to join the army as common soldiers.+ Churchwardens and Constables turned out after them, as if to hunt down a runaway felon. The mobs were nothing loth to have a hand in the affray. They pelted them with dirt in the streets; hooted them out of the markets; broke open their houses, destroyed their furniture, smashed the windows of their meetinghouses; assailed and terrified the Methodist women; beat and wounded the men.§ Sailors thought it a spree, to hustle them; colliers and miners hunted them down. Sometimes the authorities interfered for their protection, more often they abetted the riot.||

In Bristol, where Methodism first assumed consistency and strength, the multitude resolved to put it down. After some nights' preparation, they assembled in force; "not only the courts and alleys, but all the street, upwards and downwards, was filled with people shouting, cursing, and swearing, and ready to swallow the ground with fierceness and rage." They defied the magistrates, abused the chief constable, and only yielded when a strong force arrested the ringleaders. In this

* Journal, pp. 446, 447.

§ Ibid. pp. 425, 428.

Ibid. i. p. 440.

Ibid. p. 478.

Ibid. pp. 435, 477, 411.

case the mayor acted with firmness, and the riot was put down.

In London, the mob stoned the Methodists in the streets-tried to unroof the meeting-house of the Foundry; threw crackers, at Chelsea, into the room where Wesley was preaching; at Long Acre they broke in the roof with stones. But in London the magistrates acted as became them, and gave Wesley efficient protection.

It was not so in Wednesbury, where both the clergyman and the neighbouring magistrates united to stir up the rabble. Horns were sounded to collect the mob-houses were broken open-property destroyed—men and women shamefully handled. For four or five months, Wednesbury was given up to these disgraceful outrages. From these Wesley narrowly escaped with his life; and still greater was the hazard he ran in Walsall, where the mayor accompanied and encouraged the rioters; there, assailed, bruised, and maimed, he hardly, and by his own personal efforts, escaped from the hands of the mob.

In other parts of the country, the outrages were even more systematic, and of more organized ferocity. The fate of the preachers was the same as that of the Irish Readers in our days; many were maimed by stones and cudgels; some were thrown into ponds, and held under water till they were nearly dead; others were daubed with mud and paint. Those who attended the Methodist meetings were objects of savage violence; they

were pelted with eggs filled with blood; in the streets they were so roughly handled that many, especially the women, never recovered the outrage. Every public event, prosperous or adverse, was laid hold of to excite the mob against the Methodists. In the Rebellion, they were denounced as partisans of the Stewarts, and Charles Wesley had gravely to defend himself before a bench of magistrates at Wakefield, for a supposed allusion, in his sermon, to the Pretender. In Cornwall, when news arrived of a victory over the Spaniards, the multitude shewed their joy by pulling the Methodist preacher's house to the ground. A more serious mode of annoyance was resorted to by the magistrates; who seized the Methodist preacher, under color of a presswarrant, and sent him as an "able-bodied man, who had no lawful calling," to a king's ship, or to the army. Thus Maxfield was seized in Cornwall, and Wesley at Gwenap, and John Nelson, torn from his home at Birstal, was sentenced by the Justices at Halifax-the vicar of Birstal sitting on the bench; and Beard, pressed into the army, after undergoing a long confinement in prisons-which were then dens of filth and fever-paid for his sufferings with his life.

In Cork, the mayor made a curious compromise between his duty and his dislike to the Methodists: when the mob became outrageous, he was sent for, and arrived with a party of soldiers; he said to the mob, 'Lads, once, twice, thrice, I bid you go home; now I have