ach
other or of the heart.[198:1]

* * * * *

By far the most momentous event of American church history in the
closing period of the colonial era was the planting of the Methodist
Episcopal Church. The Wesleyan revival was strangely tardy in reaching
this country, with which it had so many points of connection. It was in
America, in 1737, that John Wesley passed through the discipline of a
humiliating experience, by which his mind had been opened, and that he
had been brought into acquaintance with the Moravians, by whom he was to
be taught the way of the Lord more perfectly. It was John Wesley who
sent Whitefield to America, from whom, on his first return to England,
in 1738, he learned the practice of field-preaching. It was from America
that Edwards's "Narrative of Surprising Conversions" had come to Wesley,
which, being read by him on the walk from London to Oxford, opened to
his mind unknown possibilities of the swift advancement of the kingdom
of God. The beginning of the Wesleyan societies in England followed in
close connection upon the first Awakening in America. It went on with
growing momentum in England and Ireland for quarter of a century, until,
in 1765, it numbered thirty-nine circuits served by ninety-two
itinerant preachers; and its work was mainly among the classes from
which the emigration to the colonies was drawn. It is not easy to
explain how it came to pass that through all these twenty-five years
Wesleyan Methodism gave no sound or sign of life on that continent on
which it was destined (if one may speak of predestination in this
connection) to grow to its most magnificent proportions.

At last, in 1766, in a little group of Methodist families that had found
one another out among the recent comers in New York, Philip Embury, who
in his native Ireland long before had been a recognized local preacher,
was induced by the persuasions and reproaches of a pious woman to take
his not inconsiderable talent from the napkin in which he had kept it
hidden for six years, and preach in his own house to as many as could be
brought in to listen to him. The few that were there formed themselves
into a "class" and promised to attend at future meetings.

A more untoward time for the setting on foot of a religious enterprise
could hardly have been chosen. It was a time of prevailing languor in
the churches, in the reaction from the Great Awakening; it was also a
time of intense p