[360] Methodist Magazine, 1780, p. 611.
[361] The letter was written about a month after Wesley had been at Sunderland.
[362] Methodist Magazine, 1780, p. 168. Mr. Goodday lived in Hallgarth Square, next door to the Methodist meeting-house, into which he had a private entrance. Here he constantly took his seat; nor was he ever known to absent himself from hearing the plainest preacher, or the feeblest exhorter. (Methodist Magazine, 1829, p. 795.)
[363] Methodist Magazine, 1797, p. 354. It may be added, that, in 1775, Dr. Conyers became rector of Deptford, where he converted his coach-house and stable into a domestic chapel, and established lectures four nights every week. On April 23, 1786, after preaching to a crowded congregation in Deptford church, and while pronouncing the benediction, his speech faltered; he was taken home; and, within four hours afterwards, he was in heaven.
[364] After all, this was an ecclesiastical peccadillo. The following is an extract from the seventy-fourth canon of the Church of England, and has never been repealed. “All deans, masters of colleges, archdeacons and prebendaries, doctors in divinity, bachelors in divinity, and masters of arts, having any ecclesiastical livings, shall usually wear, in their journeys, cloaks with sleeves, without gards, welts, long buttons, or cuts. And no ecclesiastical person shall wear any coif or wrought nightcap, but only plain nightcaps of black silk, satin, or velvet. In private houses and in their studies, the said persons ecclesiastical may use any comely and scholarlike apparel, provided that it be not cut or pinckt, and that in public they go not in their doublet and hose, without coats or cassocks; and that they wear not any light coloured stockings.” How is it that the ritualists of the present day disregard this canon of their church?
[365] Stevens’s “History of Methodism,” vol. ii., p. 19.
[366] Methodist Magazine, 1780, p. 168.
[367] Methodist Magazine, 1780, p. 104; and 1833, p. 52.
[368] Wesley’s Works, vol. ix., p. 104. In the year following, Mr. Downes’s widow published a letter against Wesley, which, says he, “scarce deserves any notice at all, as there is nothing extraordinary in it, but an extraordinary degree of virulence and scurrility.” (Lloyd’s Evening Post, Nov. 24, 1760.)
[369] C. Wesley’s Journal, vol. ii., p. 245.