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JOHN Wesley's work. 411
by the clergyman and gladly admitted to his pulpit.
But that was the exception, not the rule. In other
places he was mobbed, reviled and abused in all
possible ways, and the poor people who gathered
round him were subjected to the like indignities.
But all this violence ceased in time. The movement
spread. Societies banded together under John
Wesley's rules, became established in one town, village,
and hamlet in Yorkshire after another, long before
the death of their originator ;
and, at the present day,
there are few counties in England where the Wesleyan
system, in one or other of the branches into which
it has become divided, has a stronger hold upon
certain classes of the population.
Yet, indirectly, Wesley's work has benefited the
Church of England. It had an awakening effect. It
was a rude awakening, at the first, undoubtedly, but it
was a real one. It was followed by other movements
in the Church itself. It was succeeded by the Evangelical
revival, and subsequently by the Oxford movement,
each needful in their day, each characterized
by genuine earnestness and real piety on the part of
both leaders and followers. The result has been
that the Church has, by slow degrees, become more
elastic, more tolerant, and—may we not add ?—more
efificient, than she was a century ago. All this
surely betokens a future in that Church's history
which, as we may venture to hope, may be characterized
by a truer appreciation of the great principles of
the Gospel of Christ, by a purer and brighter exhibition
of mutual forbearance and more enlarged
toleration.