| 110 continued this arduous service-and they were scholars and gentleman-displayed a courage far surpassing that which carries the soldier through the hailstorm of the battlefield. Ten thousand might more easily be found who would confront a battery than two, who, with the sensitiveness of education about them, could (in that day) mount a table by the roadside, give out a Psalm, and gather a mob.'
"To face all this, and to face it day after day, and year by year, in England, in Scotland, in Wales, in Cornwall, in Ireland, required a supreme bravery, and persistence. Yet it needed even greater courage to meet hurricanes of abuse, and tornadoes of slander. Wesley had to face this also on all sides. The most popular actors of the day held him up to odium and ridicule in lewd comedies. Reams of calumny were written against him; shoals of pamphlets, full of virulence and falsehood, were poured forth from the press. The most simple, the most innocent, the most generous of men, he was called a smuggler, a liar, an immoral and designing intriguer, a Pope, a Jesuit, a swindler, the most notorious hypocrite living. The clergy, I grieve to say, led the way. Rowland Hill called Wesley 'a lying apostle, a designing wolf, a dealer in stolen wares,' and said that he was 'as unprincipled as a rook, and as silly as a jackdaw, first pilfering his neighbor's plumage, and then going proudly forth to display it to a laughing world.' Augustus Toplady said, among floods of other and worse abuse, that 'for thirty years he had been endeavoring to palm on his credulous followers his pernicious doctrines, with all the sophistry of a Jesuit, and the dictatorial authority of a Pope;' and described him as 'the most rancorous hater of the gospel system that ever appeared in England.' Bishop Lavington, of Exeter, denounced the Methodists as a dangerous and presumptuous sect, animated with an enthusiastical and fanatical spirit, and said that they were 'either innocent madmen or infamous cheats.'"-Archdeacon Farrar, D. D., in The Contemporary Review.-"From Palmyra to Independence," pp. 302-304.
Thus we see that to judge of a man, a people, or a cause, by reports, is unreliable, and should be unsatisfactory to all right-minded people. We only call attention to these things
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