These things being misrepresented to Wesley's coadjutor, Whitfield, occasioned in his mind a prejudice against them; but they occurred under his own preaching also. Thus, in Wesley's Journal, we read that "no sooner had he (Whitfield) begun to invite all sinners to believe in Christ, than four persons sunk down close to him almost in the same moment. One of them lay without either sense or motion; a second trembled exceedingly; the third had strong convulsions all over his body, but made no noise unless by groans; the fourth, equally convulsed, called upon God with strong cries and tears. From this time I trust we shall all suffer God to carry on his own work in the way that pleaseth him."*

Would to God that we all did so! We then should be much nearer the Millennium than we are; but our fingers are always itching to tinker the handiwork of Providence. We can't trust God's facts alone, just as they are, to speak their own language; that is generally the hardest thing we find to do, the last lesson that we learn. We must put our gloss upon them; show that their tendencies are evangelical, and fit in exactly to our articles and confessions; or, if we can't make them do this, why then-God's facts, we find, come from the Devil. Sometimes we can't see the use of a particular set of facts, and then we affirm that they are

* It would be easy to multiply instances of the same phenomena under dif ferent preachers, during this Revival. Men, women, and children were alike the subject of them. At Everton, under Mr. Berridge's preaching, as described by an eye-witness, "the greatest number of those who fell were men..... Some sinking in silence fell down as dead; others with extreme noise and violent agitation. I stood on a pew seat, as did a young man in the opposite pew, an able-bodied fresh healthy countryman; but in a moment down he dropped with a violence inconceivable. The pew seemed to shake with his fall. I heard afterwards the stamping of his feet, ready to break the boards, as he lay in strong convulsions at the bottom of the pew." Again, while Mr. Hicks was preaching at Wrotlingsworth, "fifteen or sixteen persons felt the arrows of the Lord, and dropped down."-Smith's Wesley and his Times.

Wesley's views on what may be called the philosophy of the matter may be seen in the following extract from his Journal.-" The danger was to regard extraordinary circumstances too much, such as outcries, convulsions, visions, trances, as if these were essential to the inward work, so that it could not go on without them. Perhaps the danger is to regard them too little; to condemn them altogether; to imagine they had nothing of God in them, and were an hindrance to His work. Whereas, the truth is, I.—God suddenly and strongly convinced many that they were lost sinners; the natural consequences whereof were sudden outcries and strong bodily convulsions. II.-To strengthen and encourage them that believed, and to make His work more apparent, He favoured several of them with divine dreams, others with trances or visions. III.—In some of these instances, after a time, nature mixed with grace. IV.-Satan likewise mimicked this work of God in order to discredit the whole work; and yet it is not wise to give up this part any more than to give up the whole. At first it was doubtless wholly from God. It is partly so at this day; and He will enable us to discern how far, in every case, the work is pure, and where it mixes or degenerates."

On this subject, see a recently published book, The Revival: by W. M. Wilkinson. Chapman and Hall.

not; at other times they are too mean, too vulgar for us, they shock our delicate sensibilities. We are ashamed that they should go naked as God made them, so we clothe them with our conventionalities, put them into a canonical suit, or a court dress, and trim them up to suit our dainty fancies, determined, at all events, that we will bring them up respectably.

O, brothers! in all seriousness, let us not build up the walls of our small systems and petty conceits to bar out God's facts. Let us pray that the spiritual sight within us may be so strengthened that we may have no need to put, as it were, a green shade before our eyes to temper and colour the light of heaven to suit their morbid state. In small, as well as in great things, there is need that we, not alone in the language of the lip, but still more in the habits of the life, breathe forth the devout prayerFATHER, THY WILL BE DONE.

A REVIVAL ON THE CONTINENT,
By an EYE-WITNESS.

Read at a Prayer Meeting of United Christians in Belfast, on Sept. 23, 1859.

We have found the account of which the above is the heading, in the weekly paper called The Revival, and the story it tells is as valuable in a spiritual view, as that it contains within itself the true type of the more world-spread Revivals which have of late attracted so much attention.

The spiritual portents of Revivals have not yet been enough recognised, nor their deep-seated causes sufficiently inquired into. It is almost by a mistake of the editor, that such a story as follows, has found a place in his columns, for he has no theory by which to account for the spiritual phases which the Revival at Möttlingen assumed; but it is well adapted for our readers, who are prepared for it, by their habit of accepting facts in preference to opinions.

The Revivals have not amongst their many friends and many enemies, had fair play for their great facts-for those great spiritual facts which a careful inquiry on the spot, would bring to light, and when found, would place in a proper setting. The whole moving causes of Revivals are to be found in spiritual forces, and in their culminations they exhibit the law of their origin in unmistakeable forms. And yet these forms are precisely those which Revival leaders and their journals make it their especial business either to ignore or to excuse, as not belonging to them. It is now becoming difficult to find the slightest allusion made to any of

these spiritual facts, and the editor must blame himself for giving insertion to a fact which he is utterly unable to ask his readers to believe. And yet if it be true, and we cannot doubt its truth, so identical as it is with the facts we are frequently laying before our readers, how it should gladden the world's heart to find that the great Apostolic gifts of healing are not only no delusion, but that they exist to-day, as they have done through all time, when men are found in a state to receive and to impart them! How glorious to find the Bible stories of the divine attributes of the soul, receiving proof among us, amounting to a demonstration of the truth of God's Word!

Shame to say, that men have so fallen away from the simple truths of the Bible, that such proofs are needful, and that by man's removing his soul from God, he sees them now only as phenomenal facts, instead of as the normal conditions of a regenerated life.

If God's Word be true, the science of healing is to be extended in this direction, by the Elders of a true Church, and not by the physicians of the body.

In what year to come of the Christian era, will our Elders dispense the healing art, which brought the thousands of maimed and sick, to be cured in their bodies and souls, by the good pastor Blumhardt, of Möttlingen?

The author of this narrative, the Rev. Marcus Spittler, supplied it to the undersigned, who has just returned from the continent, and heard while there, from very trustworthy authorities, of the matter treated of in these papers, These authorities were pastors of the Swiss Church, and were formerly colleagues with Mr. Blumhardt, now of Boll, Wurtemberg. Only want of time hindered the undersigned from visiting the scenes themselves, he being assured that there is no wilful exaggeration in these accounts. RICHARD GREAVES.

Pittville, Cheltenham.

"There is, in the Black Forest of the kingdom of Wurtemberg, in Germany, a small Lutheran village of the name of Möttlingen, which had had throughout a whole century the most devoted and excellent ministers (the last but two was the well-known writer for the young, and distinguished missionary, the Rev. Dr. Barth), but seemed at last, as the latter used to say, 'to be preached to death,' until at the beginning of the year 1844, on a sudden, God's Spirit wrought there a most remarkable change. The change in that little village was preceded by the almost superhuman sufferings of one of his parishioners, the frightful details of which, you will kindly permit me not to mention in this place. The medical man who attended the person was perfectly at a loss as to that case; he said, 'Is there no clergyman in this village who can pray? I can do nothing here.' The minister (Blumhardt) who had then the spiritual care of the village, felt the force of such a reproach; he went and tried. The more frightful the manifestations of the destroying power of Satan became, with the more unshaken faith in the all-overcoming power of the living God, that pastor continued to struggle against the assaults of the infernal powers, till at last, after a tremendous outery of the words, 'Jesus is Victor! Jesus is Victor! heard almost throughout the whole little village, the person found herself freed from all the dreadful chains, under which she had sighed so long, and often come to the very brink of death.

"That voice Jesus is Victor!' sounded like a trumpet of God through the village. After a week, one man of very loose and deceitful character, whom the pastor on that account felt almost afraid of approaching, came trembling and

pale to Blumhardt into his study, and said, 'Sir, is it then possible that I can be pardoned and saved? I have not slept for a whole week; and if my heart be not eased it will kill me.' He made an astonishing confession of iniquity, which for the first time opened the pastor's eyes to the multitude and enormity of sins, prevailing among the people. The pastor prayed with him, and put Christ before him in his readiness to pardon even the vilest of sinners that would come to Him for mercy. When the man seemed completely cast down and almost in despair, Blumhardt found it his duty, as an ambassador of Christ, solemnly to assure him of God's mercy in Jesus Christ, and lo! immediately his countenance was changed, beaming with joy and gratitude. The first thing which now the man did was to go to his fellow-sinners from cottage to cottage and to tell them what he had just experienced. First they were astonished, cuald not understand it; yet they saw the marvellous change in him. He urged them to go to the minister about their souls, some he even dragged as it were in triumph to the manse, till about twenty persons were in the same way convinced of sin and found grace and forgiveness in Jesus. Then came the monthly day of humiliation and supplication,' as it is termed in the Lutheran Church of Wurtemburg, on which Blumhardt preached from the text, 'The right hand of the Lord doeth valiantly.' The address,' writes the pastor himself, given on that occasion, was the signal of a universal breaking of the ice. My house was, from that day, actually besieged by my parishioners. I had to attend to them, almost without sleeping, from seven o'clock in the morning till eleven in the evening. You could see men, who had never before cared for their souls, sit in my parlour for hours, and patiently wait till their turn came. In about two months, there were scarcely twenty persons that had not thus come to me; they all deeply regretting, and bewailing, and confessing their sins, and I comforting them with God's mercy in Christ Jesus.'

A peculiar feature of the Revival at Möttlingen, to which I would now refer, is the healing of bodily and mental diseases in answer to prayer. Let us hear Blanhardt himself on this point:-'It was especially, he writes, in that awful case of illness,' alluded to at the beginning, that I discovered how the testamentary words of our Lord Jesus Christ, They shall lay hands on the sick and they shall recover,' are not yet quite out of power, if applied with an hable, penitent, and believing heart. Everything concerning illness in my parish began to be changed. Seldom did a medical man appear in it; the people would rather pray. Certain diseases, especially amongst new-born chidren, seemed entirely to cease; and the general state of health became better than it was before.' Yet never did Blumhardt in the least urge the people to give up medical means; they did it all of their own accord. Nor did he consider his personal presence and mediation necessary. Hundreds and thousands that caine, in course of time, from all parts of Europe, yea, from the remotest parts of the globe, or applied to him, either through friends and relations, or by letter, were directed by him to search themselves before the Almighty, to repent, to give themselves entirely up to God with all their families, atid He would then, in answer to a child-like petition as to their peculiar necessities, do according to His holy pleasure. But others without number Game or were brought to Möttlingen, specially on days of public worship; seres of them were accommodated inside the church, outside in the churchyard or listened to the sermon from neighbouring houses. From early in the rning till after the third service in the evening, Blumhardt had scarcely a inute of rest. Hundreds came, one after the other, desiring to lay their spiritual and bodily complaints in particular before him. I myself, who am writing this, was an eye-witness during eighteen months. Two years after the beginning of the Revival, one Sunday morning, with a friend, I counted more. than a hundred villages and towns of Wurtemberg and the Grand Duchy of Baden, from which either a few or whole bands of thirty to fifty had come to hear the Word of God, or to receive release from diseases. It would take me hours to testify what the Lord has, through a series of years, done for many a distressed family or individual, who, when all human means seemed to fail, oked up to God as a compassionate and merciful Father. God knows the cases, and those who were concerned know them, and praise Him here on earth as long as their breath is within them."

DANIEL DE FOE.

Ir is not generally known that the great author of Robinson Crusoe was wise enough to believe in the unseen world, and in its connexion and correspondence with the things of this state of being. A mind like his, so practical and far-seeing in the politics of his day, and so full of nature as to write that inimitable story for children of all ages, was not without a deep sense of the powers that surround the sons of men, and he was man-like and child-like enough to believe in all the things of God.

Mr. John Forster, his recent accomplished biographer, treats of this part of De Foe's character, and gives us some instances of it, which we shall lay before our readers, that they too may take courage when they see the great names which have not feared to connect themselves with the subject of Spiritualism.

We make the following extract from an Essay on Daniel De Foe, by John Forster, pp. 67, 68 :—

"I ought here to mention, that, besides innumerable passages in his general writings to the same effect, he published a formal treatise on apparitions and spirits, and the strong probabilities of their direct communication with the visible world. There can be little doubt that De Foe's religious convictions and belief sought help and sustainment from speculations of this nature, and that he believed it to be the moral and material defect of his day that the spiritual element in life obtained such small recognition. "Between our ancestors laying too much stress on supernatural evidence," he says, and the present age endeavouring wholly to explode and despise them, the world seems hardly ever to have come to a right understanding Spirit is certainly something we do not fully understand in our present confined circumstances; and, as we do not fully understand the thing, so neither can we distinguish its operation. Yet, notwithstanding all this, it converses here is with us and amongst us-corresponds, though unembodied, with our spirits; and this conversing is not only by an invisible, but to us an inconceivable way." Such communication he believes to take place by two modes; first, by immediate personal and particular converse;" and, secondly, by "those spirits acting at a distance rendering themselves visible, and their actions perceptible, on such occasions as they think fit, without any farther acquaintance with the person." It was his conviction that God had posted an army of these ministering spirits round our globe, "to be ready, at all events, to execute His orders and to do His will; reserving still to himself to send