counsel of its pope. And to all missives of inquiry or request, he replied promptly, with condescension, with authority. He wrote, not as an equal, submitting, or suggesting, but as a superior, prescribing, the measures he proposed. Without asserting, he assumed, that all his dicta were unquestionable, and, possibly unconsciously, thus facilitated the pretensions of his successors to the infallibility of the decisions of the Pope. Yet greedy of power, and eager to plant his authority on the strongest foundations, he never ventured to claim his supremacy over the provincial bishops on religious grounds. His plea was, the superior dignity of the episcopate of the city of Rome. In the east, in a bold attempt to exalt himself above the pope of Constantinople, he was baffled by the decisions of the Council of Chalcedon, A. D. 451. These granted to the Roman See the precedence of every other, in consideration of its antiquity, but asserted the entire independence of that of Constantinople, and its full jurisdiction over the churches of Asia. But in the west, after a sharp contest with the metropolitan of Gaul, he succeeded in obtaining a rescript from Valentinian III., announcing his supremacy over the churches beyond the Alps.20 (A. D. 445). And from that time forth, Rome, which was relaxing her hold of her earthly sceptre, grasped harder the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and ceasing to be the political, became the religious, nay, only the ecclesiastical capital of at least the western world; and the pope grew rapidly to be the greatest man on earth.

As yet, he is but the most conspicuous man in western Christendom; and Attila and his heathen Huns are swarming through Lombardy, and gathering over Rome.

Alaric had been king of the Goths, but Attila might have been styled the supreme king of all the Barbarians. His sway was absolute from the mouth of the Danube to the Rhine. He had conquered the peninsulas of Denmark, and Norway and Sweden; and his arms swept the steppes of northern Asia almost to the frontiers of China. A mysterious sword, buried upright under ground, had been miraculously discovered by a

20 Smith's Biog. Dict., Articles Leo and Hilarius.

Hunnish shepherd, in tracking the blood of a heifer, whose foot its point had wounded." He presented it to Attila, who received it as the sword of the Scythian war-god," which had long disappeared from the earth, and was now committed to him as the incarnate spirit of war, and the destroyer of the world. It was his boast that the grass never grew again where his horse-hoofs trod.

Leo found him in his camp on the Mincio, at the head of five hundred thousand savages, breathing from the slaughters of Aquileia. The pope was accompanied by Avienus, a senator, and the præfect Trigetius, as envoys for the State.

Attila had dealt with ambassadors of the empire like them before, and had outmatched them; had spurned their high pretensions, had struck straight through their circumlocutions, and cut even their consciences, through all their words of fraud. But here was a man come with truth on his tongue, and his purpose in his face, to expose his life for his flock, and to supplicate mercy for Rome. The heathen was perplexed. Leo was a man of majestic presence," and he wore the full robes of his sacred office. Attila knew him for the high priest of Christ, the man of peace, as, unabashed and calm, he stood face to face with him, the antichrist, the man of war. And slow tears gathered in Leo's eyes as he spoke for pity for his people, and Attila was melted. And solemn omens sounded in Leo's warnings, and Attila was awed. He stood silent, thinking of Alaric and his fate."4

He evacuated Italy, and retired to the Danube. The church had saved the State and itself from the deluge of a more hideous heathenism than that of ancient Rome.

But the empire had now become effete for every purpose of

21 Attila, p. 350.

22 Their only idea of religion is, to plunge a naked sword into the ground. . . and then they worship that with great respect, as Mars, the presiding deity of the regions over which they wander. - Ammianus Marcellinus on the Huns, p. 582. Translation Bohn. Lond.

23 Gibbon, chap. xxxv.

24 When he first spoke of marching on Rome, his friends had admonished him of the fate of Alaric.- Gibbon, chap. xxxv.

human progress. Out of its civilization, which was of the past, the church had drafted all that could be made available for the good of the future. By converting those of the Barbarians who were to resettle Italy, she had prepared them to receive it. And she now stood ready to convey it to a new social state, and to new races of men. That state, these races, were now in waiting, and twenty-four years after the retreat of Attila, their vanguard came at the summons of Odoacer, to erect the first Barbaric kingdom of Italy on the ruins of the western empire.

ARTICLE XXVI.

John Wesley.

IN Epworth, Lincolnshire, England, a market-town of some two thousand inhabitants, there lived, in the first of the last century, a good Christian minister, who had been for more than twenty years, previous to the particular time to which we call attention, the pastor of the village church. He was a clergyman of the Church of England. But if we may judge anything from his outspoken words and zeal, there was no little of the old Puritan spirit in his heart. Cromwell's deeds were yet fresh in the public mind, and the spirit which sent the Pilgrims to New England had by no means died out. The wife of this good man went even beyond him in her religious enthusiasm. To this minister's home, on the 17th of June, 1703, there came a little son; and if he brought joy to that home and to hearts there, he has brought joy to thousands of homes and millions of hearts since that day. This little boy was JOHN WESLEY.

How little did the mother dream, as her babe lay upon her arm, or the father conjecture, as he carried his child to the church to be christened, or the people of the village of Ep

worth think, as afterward they saw this little boy playing about the streets, that he was to develop into a man whose words should be heard to the ends of the earth, and who was to originate one of the greatest movements of the age, to start a system of religious faith which was to roll on over mountains and seas, and across continents, the tide of its adherents swelling as it rolled, until to-day it stands one of the noblest and strongest pillars in the Christian church, in point of numbers overshadowing every other denomination in our land,—numbering in this country alone more than one million three hundred thousand souls! This branch of the church has been constantly "lengthening its cords, and strengthening its stakes, enlarging the place of its habitation," by pushing out its missionary posts into Scandinavia, Germany, China, India, Bulgaria, Africa, South America, among the aborigines of this country, and various islands of the sea. The Methodist Church, founded by John Wesley but little more than a century ago, "numbers on both continents more than two million communicants, and more than ten million of the human family regularly attend its pulpit ministrations," as the result of that system established by the son of the humble pastor of Epworth.

But to return and note the career of the little youngster we have left, and who had just made his debut in the minister's family. We have no special record of his boyhood days; he grew up, as we may suppose, very much as other boys do, attracting no particular attention, as he exhibited no especial traits of genius, and nothing that particularly betokened the coming man.

There was, however, one event, which took place when he was six years of age, that undoubtedly had a great influence, through his mother, and his own recollection, upon his future life. The boy's father, when he took charge of the parish at Epworth, found many of his parishioners in a most profligate state, and the zeal with which he discharged his duties, in admonishing them of their sins, excited a spirit of diabolical hatred in those whom he failed to reclaim. Some of these wretches twice attempted to set his house on fire, but without

success; but on the third attempt they succeeded. At midnight, Mr. Wesley was roused from sleep by the cry of fire in the street. Going to the door, to his alarm, he found that it was his own house which was on fire, and that the roof had already been burned through. Bidding his wife and the two elder girls to flee for their lives, he ran to the nursery where the maid and five children were sleeping, and gave the alarm. The maid snatched the youngest and bade the others follow her; the three eldest did so; but John was not awakened by the alarm, and in the fright and confusion of the moment seems to have been overlooked. Some of the children clambered out of the windows, while Mrs. Wesley, after three attempts to reach the door, but each time driven back by the flames, at length, after a brief prayer to be saved from such a dreadful death, to use her own expression, "waded through the fire," and escaped into the street. At this moment a cry was heard from the nursery; it was the voice of John, pent up by the flames. The father ran to the stairs; but they were on fire, and so nearly consumed that they would not bear his weight. In the agony of his soul he fell on his knees, and there before the wall of fire which separated him from his boy commended the soul of his child to God. But God had work on earth for that child, in the future man, to do. When the little fellow awoke enough to understand something of the state of affairs, he climbed upon a chest near the window, and was seen from the yard below. One man mounted upon the shoulders of another, and a third upon his, and just as the roof fell in, they snatched him from the fiery prison. Gathering his family around him in a neighbor's house, the father cried out, “Come, neighbors, let us kneel down; let us give thanks to God! he has given me all my eight children; let the house go, I am rich enough!"

We say this incident in John's life, which he ever after regarded as a providential deliverance, made a lasting impression on his mind. He remembered the deliverance, and often referred to it with emotion and with gratitude. And to commemorate the event, and to keep it fresh in his thoughts that