On Friday week Mr. Asquith, in the course of a
speech at the reopening of Wesley's Chapel in the City Road, praised Wesley specially for his "instinct of government" and for his "concentration." "He had, in a degree which so far as I know has rarely been excelled, the faculty of intellectual and moral concentration. Everything he saw, everything he thought, and everything he read—and we know that on his journeys he was an omnivorous reader, and we have the excellent authority of Dr. Johnson that he could talk on any subject—everything he saw, thought, or read was assimilated and compressed into the service of the great work of his life." We have spoken of Wesley at length elsewhere, and can only note here how Wesley managed to impress his own high character and devotion upon his followers. Wesley was always a scholar and a gentleman ; and the results of those characteristics may be traced to this day even in his humblest followers. One of the most perfect examples of a true gentleman that the present writer has ever known was a miner who was also a Methodist local preacher. In him, as in so many of his colleagues scattered up and down England, a certain gentle grace and spiritual refinement seemed part of his "profession."
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