digested principles, it would be supplied by this publication. On all such topics Mr. Southey is extremely flippant and assuming, without any qualification to support his pretensions. Educated, as it is reported, in the Socinian school, and afterwards allured farther from the truth by the glare of a still more delusive philosophy, he has corrected many of his former errors, and is now professedly an orthodox member of the Church of England. I am happy to see him in that fold. It would be illiberal to remember the aberrations of his youth, and not to allow him the praise of having for several years employed his talents well and usefully. His is, evidently, an amiable and elevated, as well as a highly cultivated mind; but his views are yet too dim, and his theological attainments far too scanty, to give him a right to all that authority which he claims on many of those vital and solemn subjects which he decides with so censurable a confidence.

It is much to be regretted that no general principles appear to have been laid down by Mr. Southey, to guide him in his estimate of Mr. Wesley's conduct and character. He is constantly vacillating between the philosopher and the Christian; but, unhappily, the tendency to philosophize most frequently predominates. The natural causes of every movement of the soul, and of every singularity in the conduct of Mr. Wesley and his followers, are eagerly sought, and abundantly laboured out. Devotional ardour is resolved into constitutional temperament; religious joys and depressions into buoyancy of the spirits, and the influence of disease; Mr. Wesley's selection of the means of usefulness

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into the blind impulse of surrounding circumstances; his active zeal into ambition; the great effects of his preaching into his eloquence, and the opportune occurrence of a new contagious disease; his enterprize into a consciousness of his own powers; and his want of clerical regularity into his natural unsubmissiveness of mind. Some of these points shall be examined in the sequel; but this mode of determining such questions savours too much of the school from which we trust Mr. Southey is on many great points happily rescued; and it implies too great a concession to the infidel and superficial philosophy of the day, of the evil tendency of which, when otherwise applied, he has a deep conviction. He has resorted to weapons which may as easily be wielded against Christianity as against Methodism ; and against every distinguished character in the annals of the Church of Christ, as against Mr. Wesley.

Is Mr. Southey a believer in Christianity? If so, waiving for the present a minuter consideration of the following points, he must believe in the providential designation of distinguished characters to produce great and beneficial effects upon society;— he must believe in the influence of the Holy Spirit upon the minds of men, exciting them to their duty, and assisting them in it; he must believe that to renew a corrupt heart, and to give real effect to the Christian ministry, is the work of God, though carried on by human agents. He is not a Christian if he believes not these doctrines; he is not a Churchman; his Christianity is a name, a pretence; and if, in reality, he admits them, they

were uuhappily often absent from his mind, or frequently confused by the lingering traces of former erring sentiments, when he applied himself to determine the questions which presented themselves in the course of his late researches into Methodism.

Another cause of the wavering and erring judgment which he forms of Mr. Wesley, though far less blameable, is, that when he assumes something of the character of a Christian in the view of a case, it is not so much of a Christian generally, as of a zealous advocate of the order and discipline of the Church of England, I do not blame this rule in every instance, but it is objectionable as a primary one. The religious character and motives of Mr. Wesley are in question; but surely the order and rule of any Church, however excellent, are not the standard by which either can be determined. That standard is to be found in the principles of our common Christianity. The order of a Church may have been violated by an irregularity which it does not allow. The fault may have been, that Mr. Wesley's zeal was too expansive, or that the rule which his zeal violated was too contracted; these are other considerations, and are not surely to influence the judgment as to general character and motive. His Christianity must be tried by other laws, and can only be determined by the Bible itself. Modern times cannot exhibit a character in which all the great, and all the graceful virtues of Christianity were more fully embodied, and, through a long life, more amply realized, than in the Founder of Methodism. They have not presented a more laborious, a more successful minister of Christ. On what

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principle then is he ceaselessly charged with ambition, and the love of power, as the leading, though sometimes the unconscious motives of his actions? Why does Mr. Southey delight to rake into the corruption of our general nature, to stain the lustre and dissipate the fragrance of the eminent virtues of this distinguished man, as though those virtues must necessarily have struck root into that corruption as their soil, and have drawn from them a sickly exuberance, and a deleterious and earthly odour? Where virtues so eminent were sustained by evidence so palpable, why has Mr. Southey, in so many instances, suffered himself to be seduced by a paltry philosophy which resolves all virtue into selfishness, or more properly into vice itself; and in others determined motives by a rule drawn from party predilections, to the neglect of those more favourable decisions which the general Christian rule would have supplied? Mr. Southey may say, that the faults charged are infirmities, from which the best of men are not exempt. But ambition, taken in the generally received sense, as Mr. Southey uses the term, is not an infirmity. It is a vice, utterly incompatible with the spirit and temper of a real Christian; and, if he did not intend very greatly to lower Mr. Wesley's character by the charge, as indeed it seems but fair to acknowledge, this only proves that Mr. Southey has very low, and inadequate notions of real Christianity itself.— He either trifles with Mr. Wesley's character, or with religion.

Southey's Life of Wesley is not a mere narrative of the incidents which occurred in the career of the

individual, and of the rise, progress, and opinions of the religious body of which he was the Founder. The author passes judgment on every thing as it occurs; and, not unfrequently, so marshals his facts as to give the greater plausibility to his censures. We acknowledge that the opinions of Biographers and Historians, who are supposed to be calm and unprejudiced observers of persons and events, respecting which sufficient time has elapsed to allow a judgment to be formed, unbiassed by partial impressions, often form the most instructive part both of Biography and History. We read works of this kind not merely for the facts they contain, but for the sake of the opinions of those who profess to have studied their subject; and willingly put ourselves under the direction of a guiding mind for the discovery of those lessons which Providence designed to teach mankind, by the occasional introduction of great and singular characters, and the permission of important actions, upon the stage of our world, Unless, however, we have taken the resolution of submitting our judgments implicitly to every writer who undertakes to think for the public, we naturally enquire into the competency of an author for so high an office. To this enquiry Mr. Southey must be subjected.

The question, however, is not whether he had habits sufficiently diligent to collect the facts necessary for fairly exhibiting the character of Mr. Wesley and of Methodism; nor whether he had the ability to work them into clear and spirited narrative, Neither will be denied; but these are minor considerations. He has not contented himself with nar

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