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YORK.
of the Church in the most slovenly and perfunctory
manner.
We can easily imagine how startling to such men
must have been the appearance of a man like John
Wesley in their parishes, and how vehement would
be their denunciations against an enthusiasm which
they did not share and an earnestness which they
could in no wise comprehend. But the feeling was
not confined to the Parson Adamses or Trullibers.
The clergy, generally, were full of prejudices of the
narrowest description. They hated Nonconformists
as intensely as they detested Romanists ; and although
Wesley was an ordained clergyman of the Church of
England, his contempt for all the formalities of her
discipline, his
open-air preaching in the market-place
or on the village green, when the pulpits of the
churches were closed against him, and the excited
fervour of his disciples, their groans of contrition
when conviction of sin was awakened within them,
and their shouts of exultation when they deemed
that the burden of that sin was removed, caused him
to be regarded by the great majority of clerg}', both
in town and country, as a fanatic of the wildest
description and his teaching and preaching as subversive
of all ecclesiastical decency and order.
The history of John Wesley is too well known to need
recapitulation. He seems always to have taken a great
interest in the Yorkshire people. His journals show
how laboriously he traversed that great county in the
hope of awakening some deeper feeling of religion
amongst its inhabitants. His success varied in Yorkshire
as elsewhere. Sometimes he was kindly treated