" Under such an impression
John Wesley set about realizing an instantaneous and sensible
conversion. If a man under high mental excitement is looking for such a
thing to occur, something will take place sooner or later that will
answer the expectation. So, on Wednesday, May 24, 1738, about nine
o'clock in the evening, at a society's meeting in Aldersgate street,
Wesley persuaded himself that he had felt the desired transition and had
passed--from what, to what? In the answer to that question lies the
whole doctrinal difference between modern Methodism and the Church of
England. Stevens, in his history of Methodism 1, 108, says, Methodism
owes to Moravianism special obligations: (1) It introduced Wesley into
that regenerated spiritual life, the supremacy of which over all
ecclesiasticism and dogmatism it was the appointed mission of Methodism
to reassert. But a still stranger event occurred in John Wesley's life,
which contributed still farther to darken and confuse his teaching at
this critical period of his career. He had been carried away by his love
of the Moravians so far as to take a long journey, and to visit the
headquarters of their communion at Hernhutt, in Saxony. There he had
been an honored guest at the retreat which the enthusiast Count
Zinzendorf had carved out of his estate for these hunted Bohemian
followers of Huss and Wickliff. But he had returned home, after a brief
residence among them, as Luther returned from Rome, not a little shaken
in his allegiance to their system. Indeed, shortly afterwards he broke
from them entirely; set up a sort of English Moravianism of his own, and
organized it with "bands" and "class-meetings" on the Moravian model.
But his feelings as a churchman revolted against their
ultra-spiritualism; repudiated their doctrine that sacraments and
outward means were nothing, and protested that a man must do something
more than wait, in quietude, until the influx of God's spirit came upon
him, and filled, like a rising tide, all the sluices and channels of his
soul. But no sooner had this unquiet soul emancipated itself from one
foreign influence than it was warped out of its true course by another.
_German mysticism_ had done its work on him, and its doctrine of
regeneration into God's kingdom by an interior convulsion of the mind
had left its mark upon Wesleyanism for all future time. But just as this
extravagance seemed likely to subside, and to be absorbed amid the
healthier atmosp