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make the ears of them that hear it tingle. Or they have impressive visions, like Isaiah, when he saw the seraph fly and touch his lips with a live coal from Jehovah's altar. Paul also had his "visions and revelations of the Lord," and when, after his conversion, he "went away into Arabia," we may think of him as "coming to the mountain of God, even to Horeb," where Moses saw the burning bush, and Elijah heard the "still small voice." Perhaps it was then and there that the apostle to the Gentiles was caught up to the third heaven and heard the words unspeakable. Time and time again did Bishop Foster evince, in preaching or in prayer, the mystic depths of such possibilities of heavenly vision. He walked and talked with God as one familiar with "the secret place of the Most High."

One might analyze his power as a preacher by noting a variety of elements. The impressiveness of his personal presence, of which we have already spoken, was in itself an element of strength. With intellectual qualities of a high order he combined deep emotionality. He was gifted with a sensitive and poetic temperament, and a powerful imaginative faculty. His dialectic skill was often reinforced with telling pictures, so that his hearers were made to see his thoughts in living forms. The saintly character of the preacher was also a recognized force in his public ministrations. The man behind the sermon is always the great potential magnet; but in his case it was not the man only, but the saint, the theologian, the philosopher, the father, brother, friend. He had a genius for reasoning, and an absorbing passion for the study of the deep things of God. He was eloquent in form, and face, and eye, and thought, and tone. His profound emotion and glowing imagination kindled a fire in other hearts, and his hearers became enraptured with the wisdom and power of his thoughts.

The subject-matter of his sermons was characteristically of a high order. He chose great themes. Even in speaking to a company of children he would discourse on heaven, and eternal judgment, and the holiness of God; and he possessed the wisdom and tact to hold both the young and the old spellbound with his living pictures of spiritual verities. His own estimate of what a preacher is under holiest vows to proclaim may be inferred from

his scathing rebuke of the dilettanteism which has disgraced some modern pulpits. In his sermon before the Centennial Conference in Baltimore, in December, 1884, he said, along with many other burning words: "Let the pulpit flame with thought, with earnest Gospel messages, and other truths which illustrate and give force to its teachings. Let the preacher feel the gravity of his great commission, and let him expound the doctrines of faith as if he believed them and felt them.. The man who has the effront

ery to stand in a Christian pulpit in the nineteenth century, ignorant of its thought and hunger, unconscious of the forces around him, without a sense of the gravity of the situation, to waste the time and abuse the patience of a long-suffering congregation in trashy sentimentalism, or in pompous and hollow rodomontade, deserves to be whipped from the temple as a harlequin. A world swinging in darkness; millions of men perishing for the light of life; continents with signals at half-mast; the cry of distress and despair coming from dying men and women; sin rampant, the wild beast of nameless sin ravening and destroying; death busy mowing down thousands at a swath; eternity in the prospect; everything to stir men with concern, and a puppet in the pulpit of God, with shallow placidity reciting the merest mimicry of thought a minister of Jesus, the Man of sorrow, sent to save souls; to stand as his ambassador; to tell the pathetic story of his love a minister of Jesus, able to preach without feeling, without passion, without desire, and then to look into the faces of his fellow-men !"

There are those yet living who remember the annual sermon preached before the New York Conference at Newburgh in 1864 on "Sin and Redemption." Two days thereafter Davis W. Clark offered, and the Conference unanimously adopted, the following resolution: "That the thanks of this Conference are due and are hereby tendered to Rev. R. S. Foster, D.D., for the very able discourse delivered before this body on the first evening of its session; and that a copy of the same be solicited for publication under the direction of the author." Dr. Foster thereupon expressed his keen appreciation of their action, but informed his brethren that the discourse was only an excerpt from a large theological treatise

on which he was engaged, and which he expected in due time to publish. One striking passage in that sermon the reader may find on page 245 of the volume on Sin, the last one published in the author's "Studies in Theology." We cite a portion of it as a brief specimen of the preacher's characteristic thought and style. Having contrasted the conditions of man under law and under grace, in the first Adam as in paradise, and in the second through redemption, he declared with no little emotion:

"It may be heresy, but for myself, deeply conscious as I am of the plague of a nature utterly sinful in its tendencies, I would rather be in the second head than in the first; rather take my chances with Christ than with the unfallen Adam; rather be born a fallen soul, in a fallen world, under the redemption of Jesus, with all sorrow and suffering brimming my cup of earthly life, than be born of Eve amid the bloom of paradise, with angel brothers around me, under the inevitable exposures and terrible dangers of an economy of unappeasable law; rather take the certainties of sin, with the possibilities of pardon and recovery with a Saviour such as Jesus, than the hopes of fallible immaculateness without a redeemer. If others would choose Adam, I would choose Christ. I am content to enter a fallen world through the gate of suffering if I may feel enfolding me the arms of the pitying, omnipotent Son of Mary, rather than an unfallen world, with the exigencies and perils of fallibility without a rescuer. If others would venture, of choice, on an eternity whose doom hangs in the balance of a single chance under the primeval law, I would cling to the Seed of the woman, who saves to the uttermost of a thousand sins and falls."

These fragments must suffice for this imperfect sketch. The great preacher has ceased from his labors and gone "beyond the grave" to mingle with "the spirits of just men made perfect," and to know what it is to be there. He has left an imperishable heritage of good to all who knew him and heard him preach, and to the thousands who read the printed products of his thought. I cannot better close this paper than by citing the tribute of a fair young spirit who passed into the heavens more than forty years ago, but who felt, when hearing this man preach, that he belonged

to the seraphic natures that stand close by the throne of God. In the diary of Mary E. Willard, which was edited after its author's death by her elder sister Frances, and entitled Nineteen Beautiful Years, we find, under date of April 29, 1860, a reference to Dr. Foster's last sermon in Evanston before retiring from the presidency of Northwestern University: "As Dr. F. stood before the large audience for every seat and even the aisles were full-he looked sad, though very calm. But when, at the close of the discourse, he addressed the students of the university his feelings overcame him. He stopped and covered his face. We all wept together in silence. I seldom cry, but then I could not help it. As Dr. Foster stood before us saying farewell, I thought,

'If I should ever win that home in heaven,

For whose sweet rest I humbly hope and pray,

In the great company of the forgiven,'

among the radiant faces close by God's throne, I should see that of this great, good man, whom 'none know but to love, and none name but to praise.""

Milton S. Terry

ART. II.-WESLEY'S RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE.

It is probable that the things most characteristic of Methodism are to be found in the earliest years of its history, in the work, the plans, and especially in the experience of its earliest representatives. Methodism does not differ in this respect from other great revivals, whether of the national or of the religious life. One may well go to Adams, Jefferson, Washington, and Hamilton for an exposition of the principles which determine our national life. No one has seen the distinctive doctrines of the Reformation more clearly that did Luther. The freshness of their experience, the vividness of their spiritual perceptions, and the ingenuousness of their utterances, make the testimony of the apostles the source of final authority on Christ and Christianity. It is proposed to discuss in this paper the most distinctive thing in early Methodism, which was John Wesley's religious experience; to discover the way in which he was led to this experience, which was by his intercourse with the Moravians, and to raise the question whether we have not lost, or at least obscured, Wesley's point of view. Early Methodism developed novel methods. The class meeting was new, and field preaching was so novel that Wesley could not easily reconcile himself to it. Some of the doctrines he preached were thought to be new, but they were as old as the New Testament. The general doctrinal system had been wrought out by James Arminius, that brave old Dutchman, during the period 1576-1609. As student, pastor, and professor he wrought out nearly all of our great principles, but for some reason they lacked carrying power, and after two and a quarter centuries had scarcely made a ripple in the life of the Christian Church. The primary cause of Methodism is to be found neither in its novel methods nor in its system of doctrine. It is to be found in the fire that came down from heaven and "strangely warmed" John Wesley's soul on that memorable twentyfourth of May, 1738. He put that new experience first, and the Methodist Church of our time very much needs to understand his interpretation of that experience.

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