On Friday week Mr. Augustine Birrell delivered a lecture at
the Royal Institution on " John Wesley : Some Aspects of the Eighteenth Century," the chief point of which was a defence of the eighteenth century. Though it was a brutal. corrupt, and ignorant age, yet it was also an age of enthusiasm, learning, and probity. Wesley's life spanned it. He was born in 1703, and died in 1791. His journal was "one of the most amazing records of human exertion ever penned by man." He paid more turnpike tolls than any man who ever lived, his average of travelling being 8,000 miles a year, and he preached 40 500 sermons. That is a good epitome of one side of Wesley, but be was, of course, a good deal more than this. In spite of the fact that he had not Whitefield's eloquence, he was a magnetic man. One might apply to him what Dr. Johnson said of Milton,"He was born for whatever was arduous; difficulties vanished at his touch, and he was not the greatest of wandering evangelists only because he was not the first." Had he been born in the Middle Ages he would have been the greatest of the friars.
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