I cannot better begin this article than in the words of Professor Austin Phelps, of Andover Seminary, an eminent representative of orthodox Congregationalism: “The rise of Methodism was the birth of a spiritual reform of which all the Christian denominations in Great Britain and America were in desperate need. The Established Churches of England and Scotland were dying of spiritual anaemia. Dr. Blair at Edinburgh and Bishop Porteous at London were droning moral platitudes in the pulpits, while the masses of the people, especially in England, never heard of them or of the gospel they professed to preach. Never before, nor since, has the phenomenon been so signally developed, of Christianity gasping in the struggle to live on the religion of nature. Among the ruling classes religious convictions had no intensity, and religious life no reality. The chief power in saving to the future the old church of Cranmer and Ridley was the Methodist revival. It broke upon the kingdom in tongues of flame. Then was the golden age of field preaching. In the venerable cathedrals of England the magnates of the church on the Lord’s day preached to a dozen hearers; sometimes to less; occasionally to nobody but the sexton and the choir. An audience of two hundred was a crowd. At the same time Wesley and Whitefield were haranguing ten and twenty thousands at a time in the open air. The wisdom of the city fathers of Boston had not then illumined the world. The Church of England could no more withstand it than she could have withstood the day of judgment. To her it was the day of judgment. English Christianity has never lost the elements of spiritual life which Methodism, by direct reproof and by the power of contrast, then put into it. Methodism saved the Anglican Church from extinction. It was a reinforcement of apostolic Christianity, also, in every other Christian denomination in the English-speaking nations and colonies. We have all felt the throb of its pulsations. It has been what new blood is to falling dynasties and decadent races.”
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