product of noble ancestors. The man who has good, pure blood in his veins, ought to thank God for this inheritance, even though he leaves his parents' home without a farthing. To be well-born is in itself a fortune, and John Wesley was wellborn. His father was an able, faithful, and talented preacher and a writer of note, but it was from his mother that John derived most of the great characteristics that made him so renowned. This woman, Susanna Wesley, was a marvel. She was not only the mother and nurse of her many children, but their schoolmistress and priestess as well. Her educational and religious system of instruction had some most extraordinary points, and was conducted solely by herself. The children, of whom there were thirteen at home at one time, "had the reputation of being the most loving family in the country."

Mrs. Wesley had a fine education and many accomplishments. She was beautiful of form and person, and a woman of rare energy, tact, good sense, and decision, and withal intensely religious. She so molded the character of her children in their childhood that when John Wesley finally left his parental home, at thirteen years of age, to become a student in a preparatory school, and then three years later to enter the University at Oxford, he had already received from his mother those prime qualities of method, punctuality, diligence, energy, and piety, which he afterward developed into that vast system of ecclesiasticism and doctrine now extended throughout the whole world, and popularly known as Methodism, so that Susanna Wesley has justly been called, "the mother of Methodism.” As a clergyman, John Wesley "stands out in the history of the world unquestionably pre-eminent in religious labors above that of any other man since the Apostolic age."

A single great practical life has more than once changed the aspect of the whole civilized world. A single poor, drudging mechanic has by his invention of a machine, or by the application of a force, more than once doubled the energy and wealth of mankind. Steam was as mighty in the days of Abraham as it was when George Stephenson yoked it to his engine to do

the world's work. How it has since empowered, enriched, and blessed the nations! Electricity has been lying around loose, waiting for some practical mind to use it since the very dawn of the world, and, when the man appears, it is his fate to be first regarded, as Morse was, as a cracked-brained enthusiast, and later on as one of the great minds of the age.

So John Wesley, who was one of the most practical of men, was cast out from the churches and denounced as a wild visionary, and mischief maker, and a teacher of sedition and heresy, by the very men who, ere he died, came to regard him reverently as the instrument in God's hands for rescuing England from the "virtual heathenism into which it had lapsed"; and for saving the whole Reformation movement started by Martin Luther, from the "imminent ruin hanging over it," and for again reviving that vital "religion that was dying in the world," and they proclaimed him as the greatest mind that had appeared in the religious world since the days of the Apostle Paul.

For nearly sixty years he preached on an average fifteen sermons a week; he wrote incessantly with his pen, and published hundreds of volumes of books, tracts, magazines, treatises on almost all useful subjects, classical, moral, and religious; he traveled thousands of miles on foot, on horseback, by coach; he was often mobbed, and for years was constantly threatened with death by men of violence; his life was often in peril on land and sea; he had often the largest congregation to hear him that ever were gathered in modern ages, numbering sometimes more than thirty thousand.

He erected hundreds of schools, chapels, churches; educated thousands on thousands of his countrymen, and, though having an income from his books of many thousands of dollars, he religiously and constantly gave it away to the poor, and to spread the gospel he preached, and at his death he had barely enough to bury him decently. He was as saving of his time as ever a miser was of gold; each hour had its task. His favorite maxim was, "Always in haste, but never in a hurry." His

first rule for the conduct of the thousands of men he sent forth to preach was, "Be diligent; never be unemployed; never be triflingly employed; never while away time; never spend any more time at any place than is strictly necessary."

Circumstances have much to do with developing great men, but they do not create them. John Wesley turned the most unfavorable circumstances to bring about a revolution in the religious world, which by its beneficent results entitles him to be justly ranked among the great men of the ages.

This illustrious man affords a striking example of the dignity of labor. His greatness was the result of his incessant diligence. The world honors honest labor, but despises the idler.

Character as Capital.

B. O. AYLESWORTH, D.D., LL.D., Pres. Drake University, Des Moines, Iowa.

HE age still throbs, though not so painfully, with an eagerness for industrial wealth.

But a better age is coming, the age of Character. Already the unrest of the closing century is quieted by hope in the next. Great hearts have the pulse at last of the world's Great Heart. The capital of a too strongly competitive age is becoming the capital of a less selfish time, and will have vastly more intrinsic value.

We may profitably use the terms of the old idea with which to express the new.

Commercial wealth adds to one's personality. A man plus his farm, or his lands, is something more than the man alone. He is a combination of human and material potentialities.

A man with character is more than his natural endowments and their special training. He is these plus the wealth of integrity and uprightness of which he has become possessed in the world's struggle. Genius is not character.

Moreover, capital is the working force of its possessor. The idler and the tramp are men minus working force, and become a burden rather than an aid in carrying society's burdens. The active agency in modern society is wealth-except in the ignobly rich.

So, too, character is the vitalizing, reshaping, accomplishing, self-saving, and community-saving force which one must possess in addition to heredity and environment, often in spite of them, before he may become a solvent factor in the problem of

life. A stagnant pool, a dry mill-race, or a cinder is not a more forceless thing than a characterless man.

It is, furthermore, an attribute of capital that it multiplies itseif when skillfully manipulated. This is the chief fascination of wealth. It bears its own legal rate of interest and under unusual demands often rapidly doubles and quadruples itself.

A character well begun not only steadily increases in purchasing power relative to the esteem and affection of one's fellows, but under great exigencies, and suddenly revealed opportunities, multiplies into the heroic, and into immortal worth.

If Lincoln, as a young man, could not have washed the "smartweed" from the face of the New Salem bully, whom he had soundly thrashed, having rubbed the biting weed into his pimpled face, he could not have become the most magnanimous foe any man or nation has ever known. The honesty that compelled him as a store-clerk to walk six miles after dark to make right a needy woman's miscounted change rather than wait for a chance to explain the matter later, made "honest Abe" the most conspicuous figure in the pantheon of human rights.

It is a unique function of wealth to cover the defects of a financial past, and reasonably secure its future. Losses are made good, and insurance established.

It is the noblest attribute of character that it atones for the lack or loss of itself in the years of weakness and rebellion, and increasingly fortifies against loss in more trying experiences still to come. God has compassionately established this law in his redemptive system. Yet we must not forget the psychology of grace. It is with more difficulty than in the world of commerce that lost character can be regained. But once regained it veils the past, and glorifies the future.

Men may destroy my reputation, but I must commit moral suicide before character dies. In this is its severer quality manifest. No truth, at first glance, seems so unwelcome, so crushing, as that of self-accountability. "I am to blame," are the hardest words our stammering speech ever knows.

Upon closer analysis, however, this same truth is the divinest