soon sought to establish a definite Christian society within the limits of the Church. Like the Puritan attempt before, this was doomed to failure, and a separate Christian society came into being under the name of Methodist. As the clergy refused their pulpits to such as these, the new preachers went forth into the fields and meadows of England. They made their voices heard "in the wildest and most barbarous corners of the land, among the bleak moors of Northumberland, or in the dens of London, or in the long galleries where in the pauses of his labour the Cornish miner listens to the sobbing of the sea." By their intense earnestness, their keen enthusiasm, their deep convictions, they stirred vast multitudes of their fellow-countrymen. If the rich and wealthy sneered at them, they found the poor country folk ready to listen and to learn. The newly aroused enthusiasm took undesirable forms: "Women fell down in convulsions, strong men were smitten suddenly to the earth; the preacher was interrupted by bursts of hysteric laughter or of hysteric sobbing. All the phenomena of strong spiritual excitement, so familiar in our "Revivals," but strange and unknown then, followed on their sermons; and the terrible
