their faith, they were the more prepared to listen with attention and
respect to the stirring calls of the Evangelical preacher. The very
sense of weariness, now that long controversy had at last come to its
termination, tended to give a more entirely practical form to the new
religious movement. And although many of its leaders were men who had
not come to their prime till the Deistical controversy was almost over,
and who would probably have viewed the strife, if it had still been
raging, with scarcely any other feeling than one of alarmed concern,
this was at all events not the case with John Wesley. There are
tolerably clear signs that it had materially modified the character of
his opinions. The train of thought which produced the younger Dodwell's
'Christianity not Founded upon Argument'--a book of which people
scarcely knew, when it appeared, whether it was a serious blow to the
Deist cause, or a formidable assistance to it--considerably influenced
Wesley's mind, as it also did that of William Law and his followers. He
entirely repudiated the mysticism which at one time had begun to attract
him; but, like the German pietists, who were in some sense the religious
complement of Rationalism, he never ceased to be comparatively
indifferent to orthodoxy, so long as the man had the witness of the
Spirit proving itself in works of faith. In whatever age of the Church
Wesley had lived, he would have been no doubt an active agent in the
holy work of evangelisation. But opposed as he was to prevailing
influences, he was yet a man of his time. We can hardly fancy the John
Wesley whom we know living in any other century than his own. Spending
the most plastic, perhaps also the most reflective period of his life in
a chief centre of theological activity, he was not unimpressed by the
storm of argument which was at that time going on around him. It was
uncongenial to his temper, but it did not fail to leave upon him its
lasting mark.