JOHN WESLEY'S CHAPEL.

Otago Witness, Issue 2812, 5 February 1908, Page 43

JOHN WESLEY'S CHAPEL.

— — ♦ If you would picture such a chapel as John Wesley was at home in you should visit the little_ meeting house in Fetter lane, where his early friends, the Moravians, still worship, hidden away in one of the last of London's ancient passages, ! presenting the strangest array of decayed ! mansions, ragged gardens, poor besmirched '

shrubs, rank weeds, and a few struggling flowers, sunken palings, and flagged courtyards, all still surviving, but soon, I do not doubt, destined to be swept away. An old door under a dark archway admits one into this quaint little chapel, whose billowy flooi-s, crooked beams, creaking galleries, ! and painted rows of sloping benches testify Ito its venerable age. Adjoining it is a - small room furnished with a tab'e and

chairs, where they hold those banquets known as love-feasts, where modest cups of tea precede the spiritual conference, with a picture of John Huss, their famous martyr, looking down upon them, to keep ;,hem in mind of their heroic forefathers. A door behind the pulpit leads one up an ancient staircase into some dim chambers with wainscotted walls, upon one of which hangs the portrait of another man

who gave his all some century and a-ha f ago to found a new Moravian brotherhood, | with the Sermon on the Mount for its | gospel, a strangely fascinating community. I We go down the creaking old steps and | walk behind the crazy wooden gallery, I along a passage whose side is lined with i numbered lookers where each member keeps his books of devotion ; in a corner are the cups and saucers and the big kettle for the

feasts. Very quaint, very old-world it afi seems, coming to it from the teeming street* of these roaring days — not to be contemplated without a sigh ; and it is itself the child of conventicles which occupied thai very spot in the cruel old heresy-hunting' times — one of which Wesley used to haoat when he was still in sore trouble about hit soul — " London at Prayer,'' in the P*B Mall for November.