country, one or two things happened deserving of notice. On May 14 he preached on the BowlingGreen at Berwick-on-Tweed, and in the evening at Alnwick. Being urged to give the people at Warksworth a sermon also, he consented, and adds: A post-chaise came for me to the door; in which I found one waiting for me whom, in the bloom of youth, mere anguish of soul had brought to the gates of death.' Suitable counsel was given; and 'she did feel the next day something she could not comprehend, and knew not what to call it.' Wesley then remarks: 'Ah! thou child of affliction, of sorrow and pain, hath Jesus found thee out also. And He is able to find and bring back thy husband, as far as he has wandered out of the way.'

In addition to the remains of what may have been an exceedingly fine old castle, we have a reference to what is supposed to have been a hermitage :

'On the other side, towards the bottom of a steep hill covered with wood, is an ancient chapel, with several apartments adjoining to it, hewn in the solid rock. The windows, the pillars, the communion-table, and several other parts are But where are the inhabitants? Gathered to their fathers; some of them, I hope, in Abraham's bosom, till rocks and rivers and mountains flee away, and the dead, small and great, stand before God.'

entire.

Going forward, he never despaired of his message; but still, halting at Alemouth, he calls

it a poor barren place.' A company of soldiers, on their way to the war in Germany, were addressed in the market-place at Alnwick, when it was hoped that they would put their Christian armour on.

Like all who live to extreme old age, Wesley lived to see many of the friends of earlier days pass away. This was the case in Scotland as elsewhere. During repeated visits he was greatly encouraged by his experience at Inverness, where the town ministers accorded him the warmest of welcomes and granted him the use of the High Kirk. 'Were it only for this day, I should not have regretted the riding an hundred miles,' he once remarked. Then he added: 'Observe the remarkable behaviour of the whole congregation after service. Neither man, woman, nor child spoke one word all the way down the main street. Indeed, the seriousness of the people is the less surprising when it is considered that for at least an hundred years this town has had such a succession of pious ministers as very few in Great Britain have known.' He considered Inverness to be the fourth town in Scotland in regard to size; and the people in general speak very good English.'

Many years later, or in June 1789, he found that Inverness presented quite an altered outlook, and one that was in all respects more discouraging. The good pastors, Mackenzie and Fraser, had gone to rest. 'The three present ministers are of another kind; so that I have no more place in the Kirk; and the wind and rain would not permit me

to preach on the Green. Being now informed (which I did not suspect before) that the town was uncommonly given to drunkenness, I used the utmost plainness of speech; and I believe not without effect.'

It is noteworthy that Wesley spent part of the last summer of his life in Scotland; but unhappily part of the MS. of the Diary relating to that time has been lost. He returned to Aberdeen on June 25. 'I took a solemn farewell of a crowded audience,' he says. 'If I should be permitted to see them again, well; if not, I have delivered my own soul.' Hardly more than eight months later, he also had entered into the rest he had for so long anticipated with thrilling joy.

No doubt memories of Wesley in Scotland are still dear to many Scottish hearts. His love for the country and the people prompted him to preach the Gospel there; and hence to the Scottish people, as well as to others in the British Isles, he being dead yet speaketh.

IN

CHAPTER XI

WESLEY IN IRELAND

N our account of the characteristics of the man John Wesley himself, many things not touched upon might have been mentioned, all of which would have served to bring out in bolder relief his idiosyncrasies. Thus, for example, he harboured no more admiration for lawyers and their ways than he did for the surgeons of his day and their empirical practices. Referring to Liverpool, he wrote in 1766: 'I looked over the wonderful Deed which was lately made here: On which I observed, 1. It takes up three large skins of parchment, and could not cost less than six guineas; whereas our own Deed, transcribed by a friend, would not have cost six shillings. 2. It was verbose beyond all sense and reason; and withal so ambiguously worded, that one pass.ge only might find matter for a suit of ten or twelve years in Chancery.' Even in the eighteenth century, a physician might be found to condemn the most moderate use of intoxicants; but as opposed to such total abstinence, Wesley speaks of wine as 'one of the noblest cordials in nature.'

He thought it to be even dangerous for elderly people to give up the moderate use of stimulants to take to water-drinking. He saw the evil of excess, and by all means he discouraged the use of ardent spirits, which became a great curse in the time of George II. Perhaps nothing so vividly depicts contemporary drinking customs as some of Hogarth's pictures; and while looking at these, we realise that the Revival was indeed a temperance reformation.

But in this chapter the aim will be to give facts and incidents connected with Wesley's work in Ireland, thus showing the social and religious condition of the Irish people in the eighteenth century.

In the year 1749 George Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne, the first philosophical writer of his time, published his Word to the Wise, the aim being to urge the Roman Catholic clergy to stimulate the peasants of Ireland to greater industry. The good Bishop thought that he detected in the Irish common people 'a remarkable antipathy to labour,' and to this cause he put down the ills from which they suffered. 'No country is better qualified to furnish the necessaries of life, and yet no people are worse provided,' he says; and then he thus depicts the ordinary peasant class as they were one hundred and fifty years ago :—

'The house of an Irish peasant is the cave of poverty; within you see a pot and a little straw; without a heap of children tumbling on the dunghill. Their fields and gardens are a lively counterpart