234 Mr, Augustine Birrell on John Wesley. [May 29, 



gentleman. He was a man of very wide reading, and his judgments 

 on books were not only "polite" but eminently sane and sbrewd. 

 His religious opinions, and his extraordinary credulity in some 

 matters, in no way affected the perfect sanity of his behaviour or the 

 soundness of his judgment. He was a cool, level-headed man, and 

 had he devoted his talents to any other pursuit than that of spreading 

 religion he must have acquired a large fortune. He knew that he 

 would have succeeded in other walks of life, but from the first day of 

 his life almost he learnt to regard religion as his business. In his 

 Journal he never exaggerated, or never seemed to do so ; the England 

 he described was an England full of theology and all sorts of queer 

 vague points, and strange subjects were discussed in all places — of 

 some of them the very phraseology was now as extinct as the wolf, or 

 at least as rare as the badger. Although not over well disposed, as 

 his life went on, towards the clergy of the Establishment, he very 

 seldom recorded any incidents of gross clerical misbehaviour. In 

 spite of the rudeness of the manners of the people, Wesley's sufferings 

 were really nothing to those with which Parliamentary candidates had 

 had to put up for centuries. What would really shock the reader of 

 his Journal was his description of what might be called the public 

 side' of the country — the state of its gaols or its criminal code, the 

 callous indifference of the magistracy, the indifference of the clergy to 

 what might be called missionary effort. Wesley's Journal was a 

 book which ought to be kept in mind as a means of knowledge of the 

 eighteenth century, just as much as ' Tom Jones ' was a means of 

 knowledge or as Hogarth was. As one read his Journal one was con- 

 strained to admire the magnificence of the vigour, the tremendous 

 force of the devotion and the faith which kept John Wesley in per- 

 petual motion for more than half a century, and one felt glad to be 

 able to place that Journal beside Walpole's letters and Boswell's 

 Johnson, and to know that in it there were some aspects of the 

 eighteenth century that could not be found elsewhere. 



[A.B.] 



