Arnoldite party of young men." In 1848 he came into close
acquaintance with Julius Hare, Bishop Stanley, Stanley the
younger, and Thomas Hughes, through whom Arnold's spirit
must have constantly touched him. But Maurice becomes his
"master"—such is his constant name for him-his "oak of the
mountain," "inspired, gigantic;" and to Maurice, Kingsley be-
came "the freshest, freest-hearted man in England." He
meets Bunsen, "such a divine-looking man, and so kind," and
Bunsen finds for him an honored place among his crowding
friendships.

But our ramble must cease somewhere. We set out at
Stoke-on-Terne rectory, when the century was new.

Let us rest
at Eversley rectory, with the century half gone. To multitudes
these men with whom we have been in familiar touch are as
fascinating as the heroes of romance. No one of them, from
Coleridge to Robertson, is without his devoted admirers among

us.

But to this individual attraction is given new intensity when it is seen how remarkably their lives interpenetrated each other, and how powerfully each was affected by the rest. When the history of the religious thought of the past hundred years is written, to Coleridge and Wordsworth, the philosopher and the poet of the spiritual life, standing side by side at the gate of the century, will be traced in large degree the impulse which gave to these highborn souls of a later day their keythought and their master motive. It would indeed be vain to assert that the path over which we have now journeyed is the one royal road upon which truth has come down to our own mighty day; yet, without doubt, our ramble has taken us through the seed plot wherein has started much of the best growth for those fields of social reform, education, and theological thought which the men of the next century will, with hope and ardor, cultivate-from which they will reap for the world harvests abundant and rare.

Frank Mason North

ART. II.-SHOULD METHODISTS "SING LOW?" THE somewhat recent demand that Protestants should enjoy fuller religious liberty in the South American republics* has elicited an utterance from a certain Roman Catholic publication which is worthy of examination. The editor of The New York Freeman's Journal, the Rev. L. A. Lambert, LL.D.who some years ago deservedly secured world-wide fame for his noble contribution to Christian literature, Notes on Ingersollhas recently been studying Methodist history. The editorial in his paper plainly indicates that the man who pursued Ingersoll "step by step, piercing him with keen Damascus blade at every turn, aye, dissecting him to the very marrow of his bones," has written in great haste and not in the best spirit.

After quoting the statement of a Methodist exchange that two registered letters had been "addressed by Methodist ministers to the pope, calling attention to the fact that Protestants in certain South American countries, where [Roman] Catholicism is supreme, have no religious liberty," Dr. Lambert says: "It seems to us, in view of the record of the founder of Methodism on religious toleration, that Methodist ministers should sing low." He then affirms, "Had they had their way, and followed the inspirations of John Wesley, this free republic would have had no existence." Having told us that "the Methodists have never been sufficiently numerous to shape the laws or policy of any nation on earth," he next declares: "Had Methodism been always the religion of the people of the South American States, as Catholicism has been, we have no doubt a missionary going there to teach any other form of worship would have a hard and dangerous time of it." Because John Wesley wrote a letter, in 1780, which called forth a great deal of criticism, he is surprised that Methodist ministers should be so "imprudent in pushing themselves forward as champions of toleration," and regards it as a "strange" procedure that they "are now

In 1894 a committee was appointed by the Chicago Methodist Ministers' Meeting to direct a movement toward securing larger religious freedom for Protestants in South America. In the prosecution of its work it received letters, strongly indorsing the effort, from such representative characters as Dean Farrar, Neal Dow, Algernon Charles Swinburne, General O. O. Howard, Justin McCarthy, W. E. H. Lecky, Bishop A. C. Coxe, Miss Frances E. Willard, and Mrs. Julia Ward Howe. The present article has been prepared by one actively engaged in that movement.-ED.

appealing to the pope in behalf of religious toleration in South America." Very humorously indeed he asks: "Would it not have been more prudent, and more modest in them, to have left the appeal to the pope in the hands of the Quakers, or some other sect whose founder was not so conspicuous a persecutor of Catholics?" After pleasantly reminding us that "any conduct on the part of Methodist ministers that is calculated to recall the intolerant record of their founder is bad economy," he fearlessly asserts, "The inflammatory addresses of John Wesley were the prime cause of the great London anti-Catholic riots in 1780, which resulted in the death of nearly five hundred people." Then, taking a calm survey of the entire situation, he proceeds to deliver the following admonition: "In view of these facts it is meet for Methodist ministers to set their music to the key of B flat, and sing low."

His assertions suggest a few questions to which our common Christianity may profitably give attention:

I. What is "the record of the founder of Methodism on religious toleration?" Is it such that Methodist ministers should "sing low?" John Wesley wrote a well-known letter, in the opening days of 1780, a letter which Dr. Lambert will admit is the very quintessence of mildness itself when compared with the awful historic facts which made such a letter possible. Its facts are like those contained in the letter written by Lord Acton, an English Roman Catholic, to Mr. Gladstone, and published in the London Times of November 9, 1874, facts the very recital of which called forth such a storm of indignation that Lord Acton, "in order to repel the charge that the facts were invented for a theory," resolved that he would "furnish the means of testing certain statements" made by him "in a letter of November 8 to Mr. Gladstone," and so addressed a letter to the editor of The Times, which was published in the issue of that paper for November 24, 1874, a letter that stirred the world profoundly from the Thames to the Tiber. Let Dr. Lambert read in its entirety the letter found in Tyerman's Life of Wesley, and then read the letters of Lord Acton in the London Times. We give the three following sentences from Lord Acton's letter to Mr. Gladstone as a sample of religious toleration—not toleration as it was understood by the man who

* Tyerman's Life and Times of the Rev. John Wesley, M.A., vol. iii, pp. 318-320.

said, "The world is my parish," but toleration as it was understood by occupants of the papal throne:

One of the later popes has declared that the murder of a Protestant is so good a deed that it atones, and more than atones, for the murder of a Catholic.

Now Pius V, the only pope who has been proclaimed a saint for many centuries, having deprived Elizabeth (queen of England), commissioned an assassin to take her life; and his next successor, on learning that the Protestants were being massacred in France, pronounced the action glorious and holy, but comparatively barren of results.

He (Gregory XIII) implored the king during two months, by his nuncio and his legate, to carry the work on to the bitter end, until every Huguenot bad recanted or perished.

Dr. Lambert will not deny that such utterances as these the utterances of popes-should move "any government, Protestant, Mohammedan, or pagan," to consider the question, If selfexistence is to be our policy, what course shall we pursue toward the adherents of a Church whose head advocates an exterminating policy for those who do not believe in the teachings of that Church? When John Wesley, whose "genius for government," Macaulay says, "was not inferior to that of Richelieu," was brought face to face with this most difficult question, he did not advocate the persecution of Roman Catholics, but would concede to them both ciyil and religious liberty.

His letter moved the Rev. Arthur O'Leary to enter into controversy with Mr. Wesley. All will admit that O'Leary's "quaint jocularity and rounded periods are amusing;" but does the editor of the Freeman's Journal-a master spirit in controversy think that they furnish "the slightest answer to Wesley's allegations?" We shall now let Mr. Wesley, in the final paragraph of his closing letter to Father O'Leary, speak for himself:

Would I then wish the Roman Catholics to be persecuted? I never said or hinted any such thing. I abhor the thought; it is foreign to all I have preached and wrote for these fifty years. But I would wish the Romanists in England (I had no others in view) to be treated still with the same lenity that they have been these sixty years; to be allowed both civil and religious liberty, but not permitted to undermine ours. I wish them to stand just as they did before the late act was passed; not to be persecuted or hurt themselves, but gently restrained from hurting their neighbors.*

* Tyerman. Life and Times of the Rev. John Wesley, M.A., vol. iii, p. 322.

To the present day, according to Tyerman, "the arguments in Wesley's letter of January 21, 1780, remain unanswered."

John Wesley's record on "religious toleration" is a noble one. He marched through life endeavoring to discover good everywhere. Is it not a fact that he admired the piety of members of the order of La Trappe, and saw in their experience the work of God-a work of righteousness, and peace, and joy in the Holy Ghost? Did he not commend and publish the life of Thomas Firmin, an English Unitarian, "whose real piety, notwithstanding his erroneous notions on the Trinity, he says he dares not deny?" Did he not even go the length of saying that he "makes no doubt that Marcus Antoninus, the heathen emperor of Rome, shall be one of the many who shall come from the east and from the west, and shall sit down in the kingdom of God?"

II. Is it true that "the inflammatory addresses of John Wesley were the prime cause of the great London anti-Catholic riots in 1780, which resulted in the death of nearly five hundred people?" What strange things we are now told concerning the man who, during his lifetime, was said to be "a Jesuit, a correspondent of the pope, in league with France, and in the pay of Spain!" John Wesley's "inflammatory addresses" the "prime cause of the great London anti-Catholic riots in 1780!" What reputable historian makes such an assertion as this? It is not Knight, nor Stanhope, nor Green, nor Lecky, nor even the Roman Catholic historian, Justin McCarthy, who, in his History of the Four Georges,* says: "Not Mark Antony, not Charles XII, not Napoleon ever went through such physical suffering for the love of war, or for the conqueror's ambition, as Wesley was accustomed to undergo for the sake of preaching at the right time and in the right place to some crowd of ignorant and obscure men, the conversion of whom could bring him neither fame nor fortune." Could McCarthy pay a nobler tribute than this even to the saint who, tradition asserts, banished the snakes from Ireland?

In a sermon preached in 1891, the pastor of the Channing Unitarian Church, at Newton, Mass., also said: “John H. Newman, in one of his works, selects John Wesley as the only man known to him in the Church of God who stood forth as

* Vol. ii, p. 138