ot on pretty well; but
then "the communion which he had so long been able to maintain with the
Lord was suddenly interrupted." This is his theological version of the
case; the rationalistic version immediately follows: "I began to
dislike my solitary situation, and to fear I should never be able to
weather out the winter in so lonely a dwelling." No man could be less
fitted to bear a lonely life; persistence in the attempt would soon
have brought back his madness. He was longing for a home; and a home
was at hand to receive him. It was not perhaps one of the happiest
kind; but the influence which detracted from its advantages was the one
which rendered it hospitable to the wanderer. If Christian piety was
carried to a morbid excess beneath its roof, Christian charity opened
its door.

The religious revival was now in full career, with Wesley for its chief
apostle, organizer, and dictator, Whitefield for its great preacher,
Fletcher of Madeley for its typical saint, Lady Huntingdon for its
patroness among the aristocracy and the chief of its "devout women."
From the pulpit, but still more from the stand of the field-preacher
and through a well-trained army of social propagandists, it was
assailing the scepticism, the coldness, the frivolity, the vices of the
age. English society was deeply stirred; multitudes were converted,
while among those who were not converted violent and sometimes cruel
antagonism was aroused. The party had two wings, the Evangelicals,
people of the wealthier class or clergymen of the Church of England,
who remained within the Establishment; and the Methodists, people of
the lower middle class or peasants, the personal converts and followers
of Wesley and Whitefield, who, like their leaders, without a positive
secession, soon found themselves organizing a separate spiritual life
in the freedom of Dissent. In the early stages of the movement the
Evangelicals were to be counted at most by hundreds, the Methodists by
hundreds of thousands. So far as the masses were concerned, it was in
fact a preaching of Christianity anew. There was a cross division of
the party into the Calvinists and those whom the Calvinists called
Arminians; Wesley belonging to the latter section, while the most
pronounced and vehement of the Calvinists was "the fierce Toplady." As
a rule, the darker and sterner element, that which delighted in
religious terrors and threatenings was Calvinist, the milder and
gentler, t