METHODISTS,

RANTERS AND JUMPERS.

The Arithmetic of Sects-" Love-feasts"-A Visit to the

Anabaptists.

WHEN Voltaire hazarded that opinion of his, he had not reflected that the free in

Since Voltaire wrote his essay on Sects, the following have been founded in England:-the Methodists, the New Methodists, the Jumpers, the Philadelphians, the Sabbatists, the Moravians, the Sandemanians, the Hutchinsonians, the Swedenborgians, the Johnsonians, the Haldanites, the Christian Freethinkers, and some others; so that at present, they reckon about forty-seven different sects. Whoever wishes to

quiry which is the foundation of the Protestant religion, will be a perennial fountain of new opinions, to which piety and ambition will give chiefs and followers. Man is an ape; when he is a slave, he does nothing but imitate; but when his mind is free, it is not content with copying, but goes in search of variety, of novelty, nay, even of extravagance; and delights in arriving at the same end, by a hundred different ways. In politics, how many kinds of government have nations invented when they were masters of the selection! How many different republics were there in Magna Grecia, and in Greece, before the time of Aristotle! How many differ

become acquainted with all these gradations of faith, may read the short and well-written book of Dr. Evans, a "Sketch of all the Denominations of the Christian World."

ent forms still were there in Italy, in the middle ages! How many different constitutions are there every day in Switzerland! All had liberty for their aim, but each chose a different way of obtaining it. Thus, in literature, the aim is the beautiful and the pleasing, but by how many different paths does it arrive at them! Uniformity, unanimity, is, in general, only the effect of oppression and despotism, which draws up, modifies, and arranges, all brains into one mould, in the same manner as bricks and tiles.

To make oneself the founder of a sect, is not an enterprise so very arduous. Three or four students unite together at the University of Oxford, to read the Old and New Testament methodically: they draw from them some interpretations likely to culti

vate the mind of the rude multitude, such as "instantaneous conversion," "sudden reconciliation of the sinner with God,"-a sonorous voice, a little eloquence, insinuating manners, some charity, some virtues, and in the beginning, some exaggeration and some quackery, to catch the weakminded, these are the means of very soon drawing together a crowd of proselytes. The new principles are first broached in the churches,-if they encounter some opposition there, the preachers go out into the fields, in the open air, and expound with all their might and main. The rudest and most uncultivated parts of the population are selected, such as the coal, tin, and iron miners, &c. This is an abridgment of the history of Whitfield and the two brothers Wesley, founders of the sect now