u desire to keep secret?"

Such rules could only have been accepted under the influence of an
overpowering religious enthusiasm, and there was much truth in the
judgment which the elder brother of John Wesley passed upon them in
1739. "Their societies," he wrote to their mother, "are sufficient to
dissolve all other societies but their own. Will any man of common-sense
or spirit suffer any domestic to be in a band engaged to relate to five
or ten people anything without reserve that concerns the person's
conscience, how much soever it may concern the family? Ought any married
person to be there unless husband and wife be there together?"

From this time the leaders of the movement became the most active of
missionaries. Without any fixed parishes they wandered from place to
place, proclaiming their new doctrine in every pulpit to which they were
admitted, and they speedily awoke a passionate enthusiasm and a bitter
hostility in the Church. Nothing, indeed, could appear more irregular to
the ordinary parochial clergyman than those itinerant ministers who
broke away violently from the settled habits of their profession, who
belonged to and worshipped in small religious societies that bore a
suspicious resemblance to conventicles, and whose whole tone and manner
of preaching were utterly unlike anything to which he was accustomed.
They taught in language of the most vehement emphasis, as the cardinal
tenet of Christianity, the doctrine of a new birth in a form which was
altogether novel to their hearers. They were never weary of urging that
all men are in a condition of damnation who have not experienced a
sudden, violent, and supernatural change, or of inveighing against the
clergy for their ignorance of the very essence of Christianity.
"Tillotson," in the words of Whitefield, "knew no more about true
Christianity than Mahomet." _The Whole Duty of Man_, which was the most
approved devotional manual of the time, was pronounced by the same
preacher, on account of the stress it laid upon good works, to have
"sent thousands to hell."

The Methodist preacher came to an Anglican parish in the spirit and with
the language of a missionary going to the most ignorant heathens; and he
asked the clergyman of the parish to lend him his pulpit, in order that
he might instruct the parishioners--perhaps for the first time--in the
true Gospel of Christ. It is not surprising that the clergy should have
resented such a movement; and the