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    too much ; certainly not , if he does not adopt the greatest simplicity of plan . ' In a country town , more especially , such an attempt is in great danger of failure ; not only from a deficiency of funds to hire a building and to purchase books and instruments , but still more , from a want of lecturers on moral and physical knowledge , in a retired place ; but , most of all , from an absence of interest about literature and science , in the audiences

    generally found in country towns . In a large mercantile town there is , if I may so express myself , a circulating medium of interest and sympathy , and , in one word ^ of energy , which may , w ithout difficulty , be directed with great effect to any good public object . But in a small country town

    there is often an inertness and an apathy , which paralyze attempts at improvement , and deaden even the hope of it . Even if a plan of public improvement can be set in motion at first with all the spirit which it is possible to derive from a noble president and a respectable committee—from the sanction of mayor and aldermen , and some exemplary donations from neighbouring country gentlemen , still there is an apathy and an inertness in the audiences to be

    addressed , which cannot be permanently affected by the whole or any part of this rural apparatus . The public mind may be said , indeed , to be excited for an instant b y the shock ; but as it is not moved by any continuous stream of interest , it soon relapses into its former apathy and inertness , and no wide , and deep , and permanent effect is produced . If this be a correct account of the state of the case , it is obvious

    that we must , if possible , begin by exciting an interest in the public mind . To borrow an illustration from the science of mechanics , if we would construct a machine for disciplining the public mind , we must begin by discovering an adequate power first to set the machine in motion , and then to keep it going . And in order to do this , it will be well to inquire how the master mechanists of the human mind have contrived to move men to pursue great and good objects .

    It is impossible for an Englishman to make this inquiry without the name of Wesley immediately occurring to him ; as of one who , when the public mind was sunk into the apathy and inertness of orthodoxy and scepticism , roused it to a sense of the degradation into which rational creatures sink by submitting to their lower nature , and becoming slaves to mere animal propensities ,, and raised them to a conception of the elevation to which

    rational creatures , by following the guidance of their higher nature , and getting above the level of the brutes , may at length ascend . Ntfw , whatever was the discipline Wesley applied to the minds of his followers after they had once begun to follow him in good earnest , it cannot be doubted that he moved them at first to follow him by appealing strongly to their imaginations and feelings . So strong , indeed , were these appeals , as to produce

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    8 The D " iffusion of Knowledge amongst the People .

• Citation
  • Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Jan. 2, 1834, page 8, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2629/page/8/