George-Whitefield-Field-Preacher

302 GEORGE WHITEF1ELD
Whitefield and Wesley, nominally adhered to the Established
Church, and called themselves Churchmen, to determine their
standpoint. Churchmen they might be in name and spirit
and faith, but Churchmen in modes of action they were not.
As Methodists they were no part of the Church of England,
neither would she recognise them ; yet they were not Dis-
senters. They did not feel the objections of the Independents
to Episcopacy; they did not feel the scruples of Baptists
about the baptism of infants ; they did not feel the repugnance
of Quakers to forms and sacraments of every kind ; they did
not feel the abhorrence of Presbyterians to prelates and the
liturgy. Neither State nor Church had made any provision
for this new people. The action of the Church had already
been taken ; it now remained for the State to determine its
mode of procedure. It quietly let Methodism fall into the
ranks of Dissent, politically considered. There was a Tolera-
tion Act, and the worshippers in the new tabernacles and
chapels that were beginning to multiply might avail themselves
of its protection. Hence it has followed that this movement,
which arose at Oxford, which was impelled and guided by
duly ordained clergymen, and which might have crowded the
Church of England with vast congregations of devout and
holy people, has become more and more identified with the
oldest and most extreme forms of dissent in this land.
Whitefield's chapels and those of the Countess of Huntingdon
are all Independent chapels, the use of the liturgy in some
of them not hindering either minister or congregation from
declaring that they regard the union of State and Church as
an unholy alliance, damaging to the Church and burdensome
and useless to the State. Even the society which Wesley
established, and the members of which he so solemnly coun-
selled to abide loyal to the Church of which he was a minister,
has gradually gone the way of all dissenting societies ; it has