200 THE LAND'S END 



signs of the inner struggle and change sobbings, 

 howlings, contortions and Glory Hallelujahs is not 

 a healthy one for so extremely emotional a people. 



Wesley's fame does not however suffer from these 

 sad incidental results of his great propaganda. He 

 remains a very great man, the greatest of all the sons 

 of the Anglican Church, one who went about his work 

 among Celts and Saxons indifferently in a white heat 

 which set men's hearts on fire. He had no pleasure 

 in seeing people carried so completely away by their 

 feelings and behaving like lunatics or frenzied wild 

 beasts in a cage ; on the contrary, he abhorred the 

 sight of such things even as he abhorred Dissent and 

 that "odious familiarity with the Deity" which grieved 

 and disgusted his reverent mind in his preachers. 

 Nor did he consider, nor was it possible for him to 

 know, in his long strenuous life, which was but a 

 battle and a march, as the poet has said of another 

 leader of men, while like the wind, homeless, with- 

 out resting, he stormed across a world convulsed by 

 a tremendous religious awakening and excitement 

 he did not know that he was inflicting a deadly 

 injury on the Church which he loved above all things 

 and clung to all his life long, and, finally, that in the 

 end it would all make for ugliness. 



This is indeed the chief cause of the repulsion 

 with which Methodism and Nonconformity in general 

 is regarded by those who have the sense of beauty, 

 whose hearts echo the poet's cry- 

 Beauty is truth, truth beauty : that is all 

 Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know. 



