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of these heights unnerve him, may behold a hundred varied views of the grandeur, looking either toward the falls, which seem to fill the cañon-end like a splendid white column of marble, or off to the northward, where the stupendous gorge widens out, loses some of its coloring, admits more of the forest, and finally disappears among rugged mountains.

Everywhere the view is one that places the seal of awed silence upon the lips; it never palls, never grows old. One soon sees all too much of geyser and paint-pot; of this, never. At first the sensation of savage immensity is so overpowering that the spectator gathers only a confused sense of bigness and barbaric color; but when he has made the perilous descent to the cañon bottom below the falls, when he has seen the wonder from every point of view, he begins to grasp a larger part of the whole scene, to form a picture which will remain with him.

One turns away from the cañon not with the feeling with which he left the geysers and the mud-pots, yet contented to go back to the simple, familiar beauties of the trail. Occasionally it is well to feast on a grand cañon, but these hills and streams are much the better steady living. These soothe and comfort.

Next to the natural wonders of the Park, one will be most interested in the hu

man procession which passes constantly up and down within it. Gradually, after days spent steeping one's self in the wild and lonely glory of the wilderness, he will come again to watch the people riding, tramping, all in ceaseless course, around the Park, each taking his wonders in accord with the eccentricities of his temper

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ament.

It is hardly safe in these days to define a wilderness, it contains so much that is unexpected. We must refuse to be convinced by the unsatisfied one who finds incongruity in the ugly red hotels, the yellow coaches, the galloping tourists, the kodaks. After all, every age is entitled to its own sort of wilderness, and ours seems to include the tourist and the hotel; the traveler is to-day as much a part of the Rocky Mountains as the elk or the lodgepole pine. No picture of the modern wilderness would to-day be complete without the sturdy golf-skirted American girl with her kodak, the white-top wagon, the Eastern youth turned suddenly Western, with oddly worn sombrero and spurs. It was a shock to one traveler's sensibilities (but it converted him) the day he went poetizing up a faint trail through the deep wood. "This," he was thinking, "is the forest primeval; this is the far limit of the wilderness. Surely no human foot has ever before trod upon this soft timber grass!" I think he expected momentarily to see a deer or a bear spring from its secure resting-place, when, lo and

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behold, a party of girls! Here they were miles from their hotel, tramping alone in the woods, getting the real spirit of things, and as safe,

bless them! as they would have been at home. He found he had yet to learn a few things about a modern wilderness.

But most of the tourists remain pretty snugly in their coach-seats or near the hotels. One meets them in great loads, some wrapped in long linen coats, some wearing black glasses, some broad, green

brimmed hats. Wherever they may come from, they soon acquire the breezy way of the West, and nod good-humoredly as they pass. Occasionally one sees them devouring their guidebooks and checking off the sights as they whirl by, so that they will be sure not to miss anything or see anything twice. Usually they come in trains, a dozen or twenty or even forty great coaches one after another, and when they have passed one sees no more of them until another day.

And such fun as they have, such acquaintances as they make, and such adventures as there are! One old gentleman, accompanied by his stenographer, after each excursion sat on the

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now.

And then there are the dusty campers with white-top wagons or packhorses trailing slowly along the roads or makcamp at

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the streamsides. Many of them have been

through before; many are from near-by Montana or Utah, and have come for their regular summer outing, turning their horses to graze in the natural meadows. We met one young married couple thus spending their honeymoon, looking from the front of their wagon, a picture of dusty joy.

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AT

WESLEY'S DAYS OF TRIUMPH

BY C. T. WINCHESTER

Professor of English Literature, Wesleyan University

THE METHODIST ORGANIZATION

PART II

T the outset of his career John Wesley had no thought of founding a new sect or building up any elaborate religious organization. He was intent only on carrying the gospel to those who seemed to have otherwise little chance of hearing it. His united societies, class-meetings, lay preachers, and conferences were not parts of a prearranged system, but simply the means devised or adapted from time to time, as need arose, to furnish such religious incitement and guidance as the Established Church did not-and apparently would not-afford. "Societies" such as those he founded had not been uncommon in the English Church for the previous fifty years. In the thought of Wesley they were

no innovation. When, in the summer of 1738, he formed the little society in Fetter Lane, he was doing only what he had done in Oxford and in Savannah. When he went down to Bristol in the early months of the next year, he found one or two such societies already gathered there. Late in the same year, 1739, on his return to London, finding that some differences had arisen between himself and the Moravian members of the Fetter Lane Society, he withdrew with those in agreement with him. The new society thus formed leased and repaired a tumble-down building on Windmill street, in which cannon had formerly been cast; and for nearly forty years the "Foundery" was the headquarters of Methodism in London.

Other societies soon sprang up in Lon

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don and Bristol, and then wherever Wesley's preaching extended. In 1743 there were so many of them that Wesley thought it wise to frame a brief set of General Rules" for their direction. But, as he says in the first section of these rules, "in the formation of the societies there was no previous plan or design at all, but everything arose just as the occasion offered." It was to visit these societies and to give them his personal counsel and oversight that Wesley made his continual journeyings from one end of England to the other. But, as they multiplied, there soon became need of some more constant and minute supervision. The system of "classes," which met this need, sprang up in the same unpremeditated way. The society at Bristol was one day discussing means of discharging a small debt, when some one proposed that every member should bring a penny to the weekly meeting; and when it was objected that some were too poor to give even that, he volunteered to see eleven other members every week and collect the penny where it could be afforded. Others promised to do the same thing, and thus the membership of the society. was divided into groups or classes of twelve. "Then," says Wesley, "it struck me immediately, this is the very thing we have wanted so long." He called together the collectors, or "leaders," as they were now called, and asked them thereafter to make a weekly report upon the behavior of those whom they visited. After a little it was found more convenient for all the members of a class to meet their leader at a specified time than for him to make the round of their houses-and this was the Methodist class-meeting.

The societies met on Sundays, but never at the hour of church service, and, when neither Wesley nor any other clergyman was present, spent the hour in prayer and religious conversation or exhortation. From exhortation before the society to formal preaching before it was only a step; but to Wesley it seemed a very long step. While in Bristol he learned, one day in 1739, that one of his converts, Thomas Maxfield, had been preaching before the Foundery society. He hurried up to London to stop it. But his mother-who since the death of her husband had been living in a room of the Foundery building-met him with a protest: "John, take care what you do with

reference to that young man, for he is as surely called to preach as you are." Admonished by this counsel from one whose caution on all churchly matters he knew to be quite equal to his own, Wesley reluctantly consented to hear Maxfield preach. After listening, he exclaimed: "It is the Lord's doing; let him do as seemeth to him good." Convinced in spite of deeprooted disinclination, he sanctioned the first Methodist lay preacher. Within a year there were twenty.

In 1744 Wesley invited several clergymen in sympathy with his work to meet his brother Charles and himself, with a few of these lay helpers, to "confer" with reference to the advancement and oversight of the movement now spreading so rapidly over the island. In this first Methodist Conference there were four clergymen besides the Wesleys, and four lay preachers; but in the years immediately following, the number of lay preachers very largely increased. These lay preachers, by the Declaration of the first Conference, were to be employed in cases of necessity where the services of a clergyman were not to be had. But the need of them was soon urgent. The societies were multiplying rapidly; the clergy of the Establishment were in most cases either indifferent to them or violently prejudiced against them. It was clearly needful that there should be some systematic aid given to Wesley in the instruction and guidance of these thousands of Christians at whom the Church looked askance. The lay helpers were to meet the societies in the circuits severally assigned them, exhort and preach in the absence of an ordained clergyman, receive the statements of classleaders, and report at the annual Conference.

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Wesley well understood the risks of intrusting to those he himself called handful of raw young men, without name, learning, or eminent sense," the virtual cure of souls. He felt it necessary to exercise over them what, in other circumstances, would have seemed a very exacting supervision. They were personally responsible to him, obeyed his directions, went where he sent them. He frequently gathered a number of them who could be spared from their work for a little time, and read them lectures on divinity, or discussed with them some work on philosophy

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After the portrait painted by Romney (1789), in the possession of Mr. W. R. Cassells. Half-tone plate engraved by H. Davidson

JOHN WESLEY

learning; but he allowed himself to be consoled with the reflection that the most of the rural clergy were but little better off. "How many of them," he cries, "know any Hebrew? Nay, any Greek? Try them on a paragraph of Plato. Or even see if

well as by their heroic labors, amply justified Wesley's trust. A story like that of John Nelson, for example, is a kind of humble epic.

Wesley was always very sensitive to the charge that, in sanctioning this class of

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