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THE LIFE OF
JOHN WESLEY

•?&&&.

JOHN WESLEY.
From the painting by Romney in the possession of Walter R. Cassels, Esq.,
don, England, through whose courtesy it is here reproduced.

Lon-

X
THE LIFE OF

JOHN WESLEY

BY

C. T. WINCHESTER
. i i
PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH LITERATURE IN
WESLEYAN UNIVERSITY

WITH PORTRAITS

TSzio g0tfe
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
LONDON : MACMILLAN & CO., Ltd.
1906
All rights reserved

Copyright, igo6,
By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.
Set up and electrotyped. Published February, 1906.

NortoaoU $resi»
J. S. Cushing & Co. — Berwick <fc Smith Oo.
Norwood. Mass., U.S.A.

Wo
MY WIFE

PREFACE
A word of justification is due from any one who
presumes to add another to the already numerous
Lives of John Wesley.
The early biographers — except Southey — and
most of the later ones have written as Methodists
for Methodists. With that great religious move
ment of which Wesley was the leader, I have the
most hearty sympathy; but I have endeavored to
consider his work without narrowing denominational
bias, and have emphasized certain important phases
of his character that have often received compara
tively little attention. Wesley was, indeed, pri
marily the religious reformer; but he is surely to
be remembered not merely as the Methodist, but
as the man, — a marked and striking personality,
energetic, scholarly, alive to all moral, social, and
political questions, and for some thirty years prob
ably exerting a greater influence than any other
man in England. I have ventured to hope that
the story of such a life, told in moderate compass,
may still be of interest to the general reader as
well as to the student of religious history.
I am, of course, indebted to the older Lives of
Wesley by Clarke, Watson, Moore, and Southey,
and to the later ones by Stevens, Lelievre, Overton,
and Telford; while the laborious and monumental

viii PREFACE
work by Tyerman is a vast storehouse of facts to
which all subsequent biographers must resort. Yet,
after all, his own Journal and Letters will always
remain the best, almost the only needful, authority
for the life of Wesley; it is upon them that this
book is chiefly based.
Two papers upon Wesley, by the present writer,
appeared in the Century Magazine for July and
August, 1903; by the kind permission of the Cen
tury Company, a few paragraphs from these papers
are inserted, without essential change, in the fol
lowing pages.

CONTENTS CHAPTER I
Parentage and Youth
PAGE
Epworth  i
The Wesley ancestry  2
Samuel Wesley  3
Susanna Wesley - ......... 7
Her system of family discipline .  9
Burning of the rectory  12
The " Epworth noises "  13
John Wesley at the Charterhouse  15

CHAPTER II
Oxford and Georgia
Wesley entered at Christ\ Church  18
Increasing religious seriousness  .20
Fellow of Lincoln ; studies and companions . . . .21
Development of his religious ideals ; acquaintance with Law . 24
Curate in the parish of Wroote  25
Returns to Lincoln  27
The Oxford " Methodists "  29
Wesley's acquaintance with Betty Kirkham  34
And with Mrs. Pendarves  35
Declines his father's request that he accept the Epworth living . 38
Accepts Oglethorpe's invitation to go to Georgia ... 40
Meets the Moravians on the voyage thither  43
Comparative failure in Georgia  45
Reasons for it  47
Miss Sophia Hopkey  49
Returns to London  50
ix

CONTENTS

CHAPTER HI
The Year of Transition, i 738-1 739
Discouragement on his return from Georgia
Meeting with Peter Bohler 
The experience of the 24th of May
Subsequent vacillation of feeling
Visit to Marienborn and Herrnhut
Work and experience during the winter, 1 738-1 739
Formation of the Fetter Lane Society .
Whitefield returns from Georgia ....
His outdoor preaching on Kingswood Common .
Invites Wesley to his aid .....
Wesley preaches in the open air for the first time

Si5457
59616465666869 70

CHAPTER IV
The Early Work, 1739-1742
English morals in 1740
Social conditions
The lower classes in city and country
The rising middle class
General indifference to religion .
Wesley's work in Bristol and vicinity, 1739
Wesley and Whitefield in London
Physical effects attending Wesley's preaching
Beginnings of organization .
Separation of the Methodists from the Moravians
The Foundery Society ....
The Class Meeting .....
Need of teachers and preachers .
Cennick and Maxfield, the first lay preachers
Controversy between Wesley and Whitefield
Resulting schism in Methodist societies

71 737477 798284
8790
9i 94
97 99
101103107

CHAPTER V
The Extension of the Work, 1742-1760
Wesley visits the north ......
Preaches in Newcastle and vicinity ....

109
no

CONTENTS

xi

Visit to Epworth ....
Death of his mother ....
His journeyings over England and Wales
His daily habits 
Nature of his preaching
The first " Conference "
The lay preachers ....
Wesley's encounters with mobs .
The Staffordshire riots
Causes of this popular opposition
Opposition from the Church
Pamphlets by Gibson, Bishop of London
And by Lavington, Bishop of Exeter .
And by Warburton, Bishop of Gloucester
"Wesley's " Earnest Appeal to Men of Reason and Religion "
Examination of the charges against the Methodists

PAGE "3 116 118120122 124128 I30136 141I46I48 I52154I56IS8

CHAPTER VI
Wesley's Private Life
Had no home  '62
Unfortunate marriages of his sisters  163
Had few intimate friends : Perronet, Grimshaw . . . .163
John Fletcher  166
Not indifferent to the charm of society  169
The Grace Murray episode  :74
Marriage with Mrs. Vazeille  '77
Unhappy domestic life  ¦ .180
Increasing labors and burdens . . • . • • .182
First serious illness . . • • • • • • .184
Recovers and resumes his work  T°7
His economies and charities  l89

CHAPTER VII
The Years of Success

After 1760 opposition mostly ceases .
Fanaticism and dissension among Methodists
The doctrine of " sanctification "
George Bell and Thomas Maxfield

190 191192'93

xii CONTENTS PAGE
The Calvinistic controversy  .196
Whitefield and the Countess of Huntingdon . . . .197
Toplady and Rowland Hill  199
The "minutes" of the Conference of 1770  204
Lady Huntingdon's protest  206
Fletcher publishes his "Checks to Antinomianism" . . . 208
Results of the controversy ........ 209
Wesley's remarkable liberality and tolerance . . . .210
Sane and practical type of religion in his societies . . .212
Effect upon public morals ; smuggling, bribery . . . .214
His attitude toward amusements, recreations, accomplishments . 215
Encourages popular education ; Sunday Schools . . . .217
And popular literature  218
Interest in music .  . 219
His interest in politics ........ 221
The Wilkes agitation  223
Wesley's pamphlets, " Free Thoughts on Public Affairs " . . 225
And " Thoughts on Liberty "  226
His early opinions on American affairs  228
Changed before he published his " Calm Address to our American
Colonies "  230
And his " Calm Address to the Inhabitants of England " . . 233
Explanation of his inconsistency ...... 234
Plans to perpetuate the Wesleyan organization in England ; the
" Deed of Declaration "  236
And in America .......... 237
Francis Asbury  „ 238
American Methodism at the close of the Revolution . . .241
Wesley " sets apart " Thomas Coke as superintendent of the work
in America  243
Criticism of this action  245
Inevitable tendency of Methodists to separate from the Church . 248
Always deplored and resisted by Wesley  250
CHAPTER VIII
The Closing Years
Respect and love for Wesley  252
His last visit to Ireland  253

CONTENTS xiii
PAGE
His genial temper ; love for books, music, natural scenery . . 254
Feels keenly the loss of friends ; Perronet, Fletcher . . . 256
Death of his brother Charles  257
Gradual decline of his health  259
Last circuit of England and Wales  260
Final illness  262
Death and burial  264
CHAPTER IX
The Man
Wesley a gentleman  267
His courage, courtesy, self-possession  269
Lack of humor  270
A scholar in tastes and habits ; his reading  273
His own writings ; the Journal  275
As a thinker the child of his age  276
Respect for reasoning  278
Charge of credulity  28°
Vein of sentiment characteristic of his century . . . -283
His mastery over men  287
Unselfish benevolence, sane and practical  289
Above all things a man of religion . . . . • .291
His place in history  292

JOHN WESLEY
CHAPTER I
PARENTAGE AND YOUTH
The little market town of Epworth lies on the slope
of a gentle eminence rising from the midst of that part
of Lincolnshire which, because bounded on three sides
by three little rivers and on the fourth by a canal, is
called the Isle of Axeholme. As one stands in the
churchyard, at the summit of the hill, the eye ranges
for miles, in every direction, over a flat but fertile
country, cut into green squares of wheat and pasture
land. At the beginning of the eighteenth century the
region had but recently been redeemed from the fens,
and at its borders, near the sluggish streams, was still
little better than a swamp, sodden and malarious. Its
people were much below even the average of English
rural intelligence at that time, heavy and lumpish, yet
turbulent and without the stolid respect for order and
tradition usually found in a long-settled community.
The majority of them, unlike most English country
folk at that day, were Whigs, not Tories, and had
little reverence for the parson or the squire. Few of
them could read or write; their manners were boor
ish, their speech vulgar and profane, their domestic
morals corrupt. Of religion, even of its outward and
conventional observances, they were for the most part

2 JOHN WESLEY
quite oblivious ; many of the children born in the parish
were never presented by their parents for baptism, and
there were seldom as many as twenty communicants
at the Sacrament of the Lord's Supper. To this un
inviting parish came, at the beginning of the year 1697,
the Reverend Samuel Wesley, then in his thirty-fifth
year, bringing with him his wife and four children, the
youngest an infant in arms. And in the rectory here
was born, June 28, 1703, his most famous son, John
Wesley. Samuel Wesley, rector of Epworth, came of priestly
line. His grandfather, Bartholomew, and his father,
John, were both Oxford men and clergymen, though
it seems probable that John never received Episcopal
ordination. During the troublous times of the Com
monwealth, both were in sympathy with the Puritan
cause, and both were ejected from their living by the
Act of Uniformity in 1662. Bartholomew Wesley lived
to a ripe old age, supporting himself by the practice
of physic after the church was closed to him; but
John, who was subjected to repeated imprisonments
after his ejection, broke down under the hardships of
his lot, and died at the early age of thirty-four. From
both grandfather and father Samuel Wesley inherited
the sturdy personal independent character of the
Wesley stock. His mother, to whom through her long
widowhood he was tenderly devoted, was a daughter
of the scholarly Puritan, John White, a member of
the Westminster Assembly and one of the original
patentees of the Massachusetts Colony. She was also
a niece of that witty divine, Samuel Fuller, and it is
perhaps this strain in his blood that accounts for the
quaint humor of her son.

PARENTAGE AND YOUTH 3
With such parentage and traditions it might have
seemed improbable that Samuel Wesley would ever
take orders in the Established Church. His mother
had no such expectation, and, with the aid of some
friends, sent him when he was eighteen to the famous
academy of Mr. Martin on Newington Green, with
the pious hope to see him a dissenting minister. But
the young man seems to have found neither the teach
ing nor the temper of Mr. Martin's academy much
to his liking, and was prompted by the bitter contro
versial spirit which prevailed there to examine for
himself dispassionately the grounds of nonconformity.
The result was that he decided to go to the University
and prepare himself for orders in the Established
Church. Knowing that this decision was likely to be
painful to his mother, he kept his own counsel, and
after praying long over the matter, rose early one
morning, took his clothing in a bundle, and with forty
shillings in his pocket, tramped to Oxford and entered
himself as a servitor in Exeter College. Shortly after
receiving his Bachelor's degree in 1688, he received
orders, and after a year in London, a curacy, and nearly
a year as chaplain on a man-of-war, he was recom
mended to the little parish of South Ormsby in Lin
colnshire. He had married a few months before, and
here, with his young wife,
" In a mean cot composed of reeds and clay,"
on an income of fifty pounds a year, "and one child
additional per annum," he lived until his removal to
Epworth. Life in the Epworth rectory, though not so narrow
as at Ormsby, to a man of Samuel Wesley's tastes and

4 JOHN WESLEY
aspirations could not have been easy. His income
was now only about a hundred and fifty pounds a
year; his family was large — "nineteen children in
twenty-one years," as he told his bishop — and the
rector, who was doubtless a little deficient in worldly
prudence, once at least knew the inside of a debtor's
jail. His parishioners, perhaps as ignorant and brutal
a set of half-heathen as could have been found in Eng
land, disliking his politics, vexed and harassed him,
burned his crops and hocked his cattle, and finally
burned down his rectory. But the stout little man
could not be soured or disheartened. He stuck
to his post, and by cheerful performance of his duty
at last lived down their prejudice and won a surly
confidence. As to fear, whether of mobs or lords, he
never knew what that meant. When a young man
just out of the University, sitting one day in a London
coffee-house, he saw a colonel of the Guards swagger
in, swearing like the proverbial trooper, — "Here,"
said young Wesley, calling to the waiter, "take this
glass of water to the man in the red coat and ask him
to wash his mouth out." When the coarse mistress
of the Marquis of Normandy, patron of the living in
his South Ormsby parish, persisted in calling upon
his wife, he took the obnoxious visitor by the arm and
turned her out of doors — and then resigned his living.
He had a blunt independence, a promptness —
sometimes a rashness — of decision, and a habit of
obstinate defence of whatever he thought right. Al
ways interested in public affairs, he had written, when
just out of the. University, the first pamphlet published
in England in support of the Revolution settlement
of 1688. When his wife, who did not share his loyalty

PARENTAGE AND YOUTH 5
to the Prince of Orange, persistently refused to say
Amen to his morning prayer for the king, "Sukey,"
said the emphatic rector, "Sukey, if we are to have
two kings, we must have two beds," and mounting his
horse rode away to London, where he stayed till the
death of King William next year removed the cause of
difference.1 But, like many of his brethren of the
Clergy, though a Whig under King William, he was a
Tory under Queen Anne ; and when the famous trial of
Dr. Sacheverell came on, it was he — so his son John
afiirms — who wrote for that bumptious parson the
famous speech he delivered before the House of Lords.
He coveted chiefly, however, the still air of delightful
studies, and carried with him from the University to
his remote Lincolnshire parish the tastes and habits of
a scholar. His magnum opus, a Commentary on the
Book of Job, though rather curious than valuable, is
a monument of patient industry and research. Through
all his early life he was ambitious of poetic honors also.
While an undergraduate in the University he had gained
a few honest shillings by publishing a thin volume of
boyish rhymes which had at all events the merit of
originality. At South Ormsby he wrote a sounding
epic upon the life of Christ, put into a folio volume
and dedicated to Queen Mary. Three years later came
a still bigger volume on the history of the Old and
New Testaments, inscribed to Queen Anne. And
1 This, at all events, is the story as John Wesley told it. See Metho
dist Magazine, 1784, p. 606. But Mr. Tyerman, the biographer of
both Samuel and John Wesley, rather scandalized by such conduct, is
careful to remind us that the rector had business in London at that time
as a member of Convocation, and that, as Convocation met December
31, and King William died on the 8th of the following month, his absence
from his family need not have been very protracted.

6 JOHN WESLEY
when, in 1705, all England was ringing with the praises
of Marlborough and Blenheim, Wesley was one of the
loudest of the chorus of poets who celebrated that fa
mous victory. His verses, first and last, were doubtless
rather poor verses, just good enough to be damned
by Swift in the "Battle of the Books" — where Wesley
is despatched by a kick from the steed of Homer —
and later by Pope in the "Dunciad." But, at all
events, he cherished the poetic impulse, and transmitted
it to all three of his sons. He was, withal, a genial man,
with a quick enjoyment of all the humors of life, loved
a moderate pipe and kindly talk, told a story capitally,
and in spite of his occasional obstinacy must have been
a delightful companion.
But although the rector of Epworth was always in
terested in both politics and letters, he always accounted
both subservient to his work as parish priest. He
brought to this work an earnest and active piety too
rare in the English Church of that day. His lot was
cast in a remote hamlet of the Lincolnshire fens, among
a boorish folk who despised his learning and his
piety. And here he labored for forty years, instructing,
reproving, exhorting, visiting from house to house,
knowing every soul in his charge by name, till he lived
to see the number of his communicants increased ten
fold, "not a papist or dissenter in the parish," and the
moral tone of the community cleansed and elevated.
And the heroic energy of the man dreamed of far wider
fields. He was one of the very first Englishmen to urge
active effort for the conversion of the heathen, and
offered, if provision should be made for his family, to go
alone as a pioneer missionary to the far East. His last
words of hope for his own country must have been re-

PARENTAGE AND YOUTH 7
called by his sons, in after years, with the solemn force
of prophecy, — "Charles," said the dying man to the
son at his bedside, "be steady; the Christian faith will
surely revive in these Kingdoms. You shall see it,
though I shall not."
But the dominant influence in the Epworth rectory
was not that of the rector, but of his wife. Susanna
Wesley was a woman to be regarded with some awe —
" nobly planned
To warn, to comfort and command."
Lacking in humor, perhaps deficient also in the softer
and more distinctively feminine graces, she had instead
a remarkable dignity and poise of character. In clear
ness and force of intellect, in practical judgment, in
deliberative steadiness of purpose, she was unquestion
ably the superior of her husband. A daughter of the
great Dr. Annesley, the "St. Paul of nonconformity,"
— she was his twenty-fifth child, — at the early age of
thirteen she had gone over for herself all the arguments
for dissent, and deliberately decided to enter the Church
of England. At least so the biographers say; but it
may be reasonably conjectured that the acquaintance
with young Samuel Wesley, who was just then making
a similar change, may have had something to do with
her decision.
It is certain, however, that Susanna Wesley was al
ways accustomed to do her own thinking. Her union
with her husband was one of singular beauty and loy
alty; but it did not imply any tame conformity of opin
ion, and she evidently found difficulty now and then in
harmonizing her logical conclusions with her theory of
wifely obedience. When Mr. Wesley, during one of his

8 JOHN WESLEY
long absences in London in attendance upon Convoca
tion, ventured to remonstrate with her for having gath
ered a company in the rectory of a Sunday evening in
a way dangerously near a violation of the Conventicle
Act, she gave him her reasons for the meeting, — and
very good reasons they were, — but concluded, "If you
do, after all, think fit to dissolve this assembly, do not
tell me that you desire it, but send me your positive
command." Mr. Wesley did not send it.
On political matters they were seldom in accord. If
Mrs. Wesley refused to say Amen to the rector's prayer
for King William, her refusal was entirely consistent
with her opinions. In some papers, not yet published
in full, she wrote, "Whether the praying for a usurper
and vindicating his usurpation after he had the throne
be not participating his sins, is easily determined."1
She disapproved of the War of the Spanish Succession,
which her husband had celebrated in his resonant poem
on the Blenheim victory, and when a day of fasting and
prayer for the success of the English arms was ap
pointed, she declined to join in the public worship.
"Since I am not satisfied of the lawfulness of the war,
I cannot beg a blessing on our arms till I can have the
opinion of one wiser and a more competent judge than
myself in this point ; namely, whether a private person
that had no hand in the beginning of the war but did
always disapprove of it may, notwithstanding, implore
God's blessing on it, and pray for the good success of
those arms which were taken up, I think, unlaw
fully."1 It would appear that she did not think her husband
a qualified judge on this point of conscience. To her
1 Kirk, " The Mother of the Wesleys," p. 189.

PARENTAGE AND YOUTH g
son John in Oxford, years afterwards, she wrote, " 'Tis
a misfortune almost peculiar to our family that your
father and I seldom think alike." When they thought
differently, it is hardly probable that Mrs. Wesley often
found the logic of her husband convincing. That the
happiness of their married life was quite undisturbed
by a variance of opinion so frequent and so pronounced,
is certainly a proof of mutual respect as well as of deep
affection. The education of the children was almost entirely
intrusted to Mrs. Wesley. She began it in the cradle.
Before they were a year old the babes of the Wesley
family were taught "to fear the rod and cry softly," so
that, although the rectory was as full of children as a
hive is of bees, it was quiet as a Quaker meeting-house.
As the children emerged from infancy, their hours of
work and play, their habits of dress, manners, speech,
were all regulated by strict rule, and instant obedience
was always required. "The first thing to be done with
children," said Mrs. Wesley, "is to conquer their will."
She mentions as a proof of the thoroughness with which
this was done in her own flock, that when they were ill,
" there was no difficulty in making them take the most
unpleasant medicine." In all their household ways and
speech the mother insisted upon the courtesies of gentle
life ; and it was a grief to her that the children, when,
by the burning of the rectory, they were for a time dis
persed among the families of the parish, learned there
a clownish accent and a rudeness of manner which it
took great pains to correct. At the age of five came
the solemn day when every child was taught his letters
in one day of six hours, and next morning began his
reading lessons with the first verse of the first chapter

10 JOHN WESLEY
of Genesis. She was the most tireless of teachers.
"Sukey," said the rector to her one day, "I wonder at
your patience. You have told that child twenty times
the same thing." "Had I satisfied myself with men
tioning the matter only nineteen," replied his wife, "I
should have lost all my labor. You see it was the
twentieth time that crowned the whole." The religious
training of the children, of course, received her most
careful attention. She prepared for them an admira
bly clear body of explanation upon the Catechism and
the Creed, and she was accustomed to meet them sepa
rately once a week, at a specified time, for an hour of
religious conversation and instruction. Long after
ward, John Wesley, when a Fellow of Lincoln College,
wrote to his mother begging her to give him an hour of
her thought and prayer every Thursday evening, as she
used to do when he was a boy at home.
If to this laxer age Mrs. Wesley's system of parental
discipline seem unwisely rigid, it should be said that
her patience was so exhaustless and all her require
ments so evidently dictated by love, that her children
never rebelled, but retained a grateful recollection of
the rectory life all their days. Certainly to her favorite
son, who was to be her greatest, this training was of
the utmost importance. John Wesley was the son of
his mother. From her he inherited his logical cast
of mind, his executive capacity, his inflexibility of will,
his union of independence of judgment with respect for
authority, his deep religious temper. And all these
characteristics were developed and fixed by his early
training. His precision and order, his gift of organiza
tion and mastery of details, his notions of education,
even some specific rules and customs of his religious

PARENTAGE AND YOUTH n
societies, can be traced to his mother's discipline. It
is often said that Methodism began in the University of
Oxford ; with more truth it might be said that it began
in Susanna Wesley's nursery.
In this atmosphere of strict but cheerful discipline,
both intellectual and religious, John Wesley passed his
boyhood. He was the fifteenth of nineteen children, of
whom, however, only ten survived the period of in
fancy. Of the ten, three were sons; and upon them
the hopes of their parents — especially of the father —
were centred. The daughters of the Epworth rectory,
indeed, received a better education than most young
women of that time could boast ; one of them, the high-
spirited and wilful Hetty, could read her Greek Testa
ment and served as her father's amanuensis before she
was in her teens, and in later life contributed poems to
the Gentleman's Magazine which certainly compare very
well with most of the verse printed there. But the plans
and efforts of the rector, it is evident, were mostly given
to his boys. He bore the privations of his lot cheer
fully, and insisted that the other members of the family
should bear them too, in order that he might secure for
his sons a liberal education and open to them a career.
The eldest, Samuel, thirteen years older than John, was
educated at Westminster and Christ Church, Oxford;
and by the time his younger brother was ready to go up
to school and university, he had taken orders and was
occupying a position of some responsibility and influ
ence as Head Usher in Westminster School. He
would probably have risen to higher positions in the
Church, had not the Tory party, with which he was in
active sympathy, gone out of power at the death of
Anne, and his friend and patron, Bishop Atterbury,

12 JOHN WESLEY
fallen into disgrace. As it was, he enjoyed for years
the friendship of a circle that included such names as
Harley, Atterbury, Pope, and Prior, and was himself
an excellent scholar and no mean poet.
Of the early boyhood of John Wesley only one inci
dent is recorded. On a February night in 1709 the
rectory was burned. Fifteen minutes after the fire was
discovered, the slight, thatch-roofed structure was con
sumed. The family, hurrying out in terror, left the
boy John sleeping in his attic chamber; and he was
taken out through a window only an instant before the
blazing roof fell in upon his bed. Wesley always re
tained a vivid recollection of the scene, and more than
half a century later, when, thinking himself near death,
he composed his epitaph, he describes himself as "a
brand plucked from the burning." His mother deemed
his rescue a providential indication that her son was
preserved for some great work, and resolved, as she
says, "to be more particularly careful of the soul of
this child that Thou hast so mercifully provided for."
There is, however, no evidence of anything precocious
in the religious development of the boy, but only a cer
tain staid over-deliberateness which he got from his
mother, but which to the more mercurial temperament
of the father seemed, in a lad not yet in his teens, half
amusing and half vexatious. "Sweetheart," said the
rector to his wife, "I profess I think our boy Jack
wouldn't attend to the most pressing necessities of
nature unless he could give a reason for it."
In enumerating the early influences upon Wesley one
must not omit a mention of the famous "Epworth
noises," though they occurred after he had left home
r^- the Charterhouse School in London. Through the

PARENTAGE AND YOUTH 13
months of December, 1716, and January, 171 7, the
family were disturbed by strange sounds, which they all
attributed to some supernatural agency. These sounds
were generally those of knocking upon doors and upon
the floor or ceiling of a room where some members
of the family were sitting ; sometimes there was a noise
as of a heavy chain clanking, the breaking of crockery,
the jingling of money upon the floor, a heavy tread on
the stair, or the sweep as of some trailing garment along
the floor. Repeatedly the latch of a door was lifted as
one of the family was about to enter ; and one evening
a bed on which one of the girls was seated was observed
to rise bodily from the floor. The rector himself for
the first fortnight heard nothing, and his family, fear
ing the noises might portend some disaster to him, re
frained from mentioning them in his presence. When,
however, he learned of them and attempted an investi
gation of the cause, he was made the object of special
attention by the mysterious visitant, and not only heard
the knockings constantly, but felt sure that he was
thrice forcibly pushed by an invisible power against his
desk, or the side of a door which he was entering. The
disturbances were so constant and lasted so long that
the family seem to have lost their fear of them, and the
younger girls found amusement in hunting "old Jeffery, "
as they called their goblin, from one room to another.
When Jeffery, who seemed to have Jacobite sympa
thies, was especially noisy at the reading of the morning
prayers for King George, the stout rector read those
prayers over three times and bade him do his worst.
The independent and circumstantial accounts of
these strange occurrences given in the journal of the
rector and the letters of different members of the family

14 JOHN WESLEY
to the sons Samuel and John prove that some strange
noises were certainly heard, not only by all the members
of the household, but by at least one other competent
witness — a Mr. Hoole, rector of the adjoining parish,
whom Mr. Wesley called in — and that the rector made
careful efforts to discover the cause without result. The
family were naturally a little too ready to ascribe them to
supernatural agency. Yet it must be admitted that it is
difficult to explain phenomena attested by so many trust
worthy persons and extending over so long a period as
due to pure hallucination; and almost equally diffi
cult, on the other hand, to imagine by what trickery
the sounds could have been produced, or, if there was
trickery, what could have been the motive of the trick
ster. It must be said that the matter has never yet
been satisfactorily explained.1 The most important
thing to notice here, however, is that young John Wes
ley was fully persuaded that the whole disturbance
could have no other than a supernatural cause. He
was, indeed, at a loss to assign any motive for this irrup
tion of the nether world in his father's household, and
could only suggest that it might be a penalty upon the
rector for his rash separation from his wife so many
1 The latest examination of the story is that given in Podmore's
" Modern Spiritualism," Vol. I, Ch. II. Mr. Podmore, though he has
no definite explanation to offer, thinks there is little trustworthy evidence
for anything except the knockings, and is evidently inclined to believe
these were produced by some member of the household. He regards
it suspicious that the knockings usually seem to have been associated
with one of the daughters, Hetty, to have followed her about, and have
been loudest near her ; and yet that Hetty, though nineteen at the time,
was the one of the elder daughters who never wrote to her brothers
about the noises, nor made any mention of them to any one.
It is doubtful, however, whether most readers can believe on such
evidence that Hetty Wesley played the poltergeist in this mystery.

PARENTAGE AND YOUTH 15
years before, — a theory which, as Jeffery was very im
partial in his attentions, would hardly seem to fit the
facts. But the mysterious occurrences not only fixed
thus early in John Wesley's mind a just belief in some
realities beyond our positive knowledge, but they go
far to account for that vein of credulity in the man
which even his most partial admirers must admit.
In January, 1714, on the nomination of the Duke of
Buckingham, an old friend of his father, John Wesley
was entered as a gown-boy in the Charterhouse School,
London. He remained there till he went up to Christ
Church College, Oxford, in June of 1720, as an exhibi
tioner from the Charterhouse. It is pleasant to be able
to associate Wesley's name with this venerable school so
redolent of memories of Addison, Steele, and Thack
eray ; but his years there, as well as those of his under
graduate life in Oxford, are without important record.
Unlike his younger brother Charles, who, when at
Westminster School a few years later, won the cap
taincy of the school by his pluck as a fighter, John
Wesley would seem to have been of a quiet temper, and
in the early years of his stay at the Charterhouse had
to submit to many of those exactions which the British
schoolboy has always imposed upon his juniors. He
used to say that for years he hardly knew the taste of
animal food, as the elder boys ate all the meat at table;
but to this deprivation he ascribed, in great measure, the
good health of his later years. We may be sure he
made good use of his time. Samuel, the Usher of West
minster School, who naturally exercised a kind of super
vision over both his younger brothers and assisted them
in their studies, wrote home to the anxious father, in
1719, "Jack is a brave boy, learning Hebrew as fast as

16 JOHN WESLEY
he can." And the master of the Charterhouse School,
the venerable Dr. Thomas Walker, who in the forty
years of his service there had trained Steele and Addison
and a goodly number of other men afterward eminent
in church or state, is said to have been specially at
tracted by the industrious habits and the quiet dignity
of the lad from Epworth. But it is not likely that John
Wesley, even in his boyhood, was ever without a whole
some sense of personal independence. In the last year
of his residence at the Charterhouse he called on the
famous Dr. Sacheverell with a letter of introduction
from his father who had been of service to the Doctor
in his trial ten years before. "I found him alone,"
said Wesley, in telling the story many years later, to
Alexander Knox, "as tall as a maypole and as proud
as an archbishop. I was a very little fellow, not taller"
— pointing to a very gentlemanlike but very dwarfish
clergyman who was in the company — "than Mr.
Kenedy there. He said, 'You are too young to go to
the University — you cannot know Greek and Latin
yet; go back to school.' I looked at him as David
looked at Goliath, and despised him in my heart. I
thought, if I do not know Greek and Latin better than
you, I ought to go back to school indeed. I left him,
and neither entreaties nor commands could have again
brought me back to him."
It has been said that he lost his religion at school.
His biographer, Mr. Tyerman, asserts in solemn epi
gram, " John Wesley entered the Charterhouse a saint
and left it a sinner" ; which is nonsense. There is no
foundation for the charge save a statement by Wesley,
made in 1738, which does not justify any such interpre
tation. The boy who passes from the guarded seclu-

PARENTAGE AND YOUTH

17

sion of a pious home to the temptations of a great public
school is liable to feel his principles put to rude test;
but if the boy reads his Bible and says his prayers every
day, as John Wesley affirms he did, takes the Sacra
ment with devout regularity, and keeps in constant and
absolutely frank correspondence with the solicitous love
of his parents, that boy is not growing from a saint into
a sinner. Wesley's letters to his mother, while they
make little mention of specifically religious matters,
show " Jacky," as his mother calls him, to be a sprightly,
pure-minded, affectionate lad. The truth is that dur
ing his stay at the Charterhouse and the earlier years in
Oxford, his character was ripening in healthy wise for
the decision soon to come with opening manhood. Cer
tainly his life at the Charterhouse was not unpleasant
in memory. When in London, in later years, he would
often look into the dingy little court, and recall the days
when he used to run round it three times every morn
ing for exercise, as his father had bidden him.

CHAPTER II
OXFORD AND GEORGIA
Wesley was admitted as a Commoner at Christ
Church, Oxford, on July 13, 1720. He had just com
pleted his seventeenth year. Oxford in the first half
of the eighteenth century was hardly a school either for
scholars or for saints. Its utter lack of intellectual dis
cipline is attested by such accounts as those given in
Gibbon's "Memoirs" and Adam Smith's "Wealth of
Nations"; while as to its religion, we may remember
that a little group of earnest men could not perform
some of the plainest duties of Christianity without be
ing exposed to the jeers of a majority of their fellow-
students. Of Wesley's life at Christ Church little is
known ; but there is no evidence that he ever fell into
the idleness or vice too characteristic of the Oxford
undergraduate of his day. From some of the tempta
tions that beset more wealthy Oxford men, he was
doubtless saved by his poverty. His Charterhouse
scholarship gave him forty pounds a year ; but that was
hardly enough to supply the needs even of a thrifty Com
moner. His father in those years was passing through
his worst financial straits, and it is evident from the
letters of both father and mother that it was only by
the severest economies that the family at Epworth were
able to meet John's moderate requests for money.
"Dear Jack," writes his mother, "be not discouraged;
18

OXFORD AND GEORGIA 19
do your duty, keep close by your studies, and hope for
better days. Perhaps notwithstanding all, we shall
pick up a few crumbs for you before the end of the
year." He certainly must have kept close to his studies ;
for he did a deal of work during his five years at Christ
Church, and formed there those studious habits and
scholarly tastes which he carried through life. Nor do
the occasional glimpses we get of him in those years
indicate that he was often discouraged. He turned
his hand now and then to writing verses which show no
depression, and of which it may at least be said that
they were as good as his father wrote at that age. One
of his Christ Church friends describes him as "a very
sensible, active collegian, baffling every man by the
subtleties of his logic, and laughing at them for being so
easily routed ; a young fellow of the finest classical tastes,
of the most liberal and manly sentiments, gay and
sprightly with a turn for wit and humour." x
It is probably true that, though an earnest and seri
ous young man, he gave comparatively little thought,
at this time, to his personal religious condition. When
looking back over his life in later years, he said of this
period, with that rigor of self-criticism so characteristic
of him: "I still said my prayers,- both in public and
private, and read with the Scriptures several other
books of religion, especially comments on the New
Testament. Yet I had not all this while so much as a
notion of inward holiness; nay, went on habitually
and for the most part very contentedly, in some one or
other known sins, though with some intermissions and
short struggles, especially before and after the holy
Communion, which I was obliged to receive thrice a
1 Westminster Magazine, 1774, p. 180, quoted by Telford.

20 JOHN WESLEY
year." But even on his own showing it is evident
there was nothing flippant or dissolute in the life he
remembers; at worst only that carelessness so natu
ral to the buoyant years between seventeen and twenty-
one. „
But the year 1725 marks the beginning of a new
chapter in the religious life of Wesley. He had passed
his majority. Up to this time he seems to have had no
definite plans as to the work of his life, though his
parents doubtless had expected him to go into the
Church. But as the time approached when he must
make his decision, he was led to examine more seriously
the grounds of his belief, and to consider earnestly
whether his own religious experience would warrant
him in assuming the responsibilities of a Christian min
ister. He read for the first time two of the world's
great books of religion, the "Imitation of Christ" and
Jeremy Taylor's "Holy Living and Dying." His ac
tive, independent spirit deemed some of the counsels of
the "Imitation" too narrowly ascetic — as they are —
and he revolted against its predestinarian theology ; but
both books opened to him a new view of the demands
and privileges of the inner religious life. "I began,"
he says, "to alter the whole form of my conversation,
and to set out in earnest upon a new life. I set apart
an hour or two a day for religious retirement ; I com
municated every week ; I watched against all sin, whether
in word or deed." Through the early months of 1725
he was making up his mind to take orders. His father,
at first, counselled delay, cautioning him not to enter
the priest's office to have a piece of bread; but the
mother, with better knowledge of her son, felt sure that
he would never take such obligations upon himself from

OXFORD AND GEORGIA 21
unworthy motives, and warmly advised him to take
deacon's orders as soon as he might. In the autumn
the decisive step was taken; he was ordained deacon
by Bishop Potter, September 17, 1725.
In March of the following year, 1726, Wesley was
elected Fellow of Lincoln College. The fellowship,
which was open only to candidates from Lincolnshire,
had been vacant for nearly a year ; and Samuel Wesley,
whose scanty income was sorely taxed to meet the
needs of his son, had made earnest efforts throughout
the summer of 1725 to secure it for John. He now
wrote with proud satisfaction to him, "Dear Mr. Fel
low Elect of Lincoln," though he has only five pounds
to keep his family until after harvest, "What will be
my own fate, God only knows. Sed passi graviora.
Wherever I am, my Jack is fellow of Lincoln. I wrote
to Dr. King, asking leave for you to come one, two, or
three months into the country, where you shall be
gladly welcome." Obtaining this leave of absence,
Wesley spent the summer at home, returning to assume
his duties in Lincoln College at the beginning of the
October term.
Wesley began his distinctively academic work in Lin
coln with a characteristic method and vigor that might
have shamed the indolence of the average Oxford man.
"Leisure and I," he writes his mother, "have parted
company ; " they never met again. He laid down a
scheme of work for every day. Mondays and Tues
days he gave to Greek and Latin; Wednesdays to
logic and ethics; Thursdays, to Hebrew and Arabic;
Fridays, to metaphysics and natural philosophy ; Sat
urdays, to oratory and poetry; Sundays, to divinity.
Within six weeks after his return to Oxford he had

22 JOHN WESLEY
been appointed Greek lecturer — reading a lecture on
the Greek Testament once a week to the undergradu
ates — and Moderator of the classes. This last office
was one of very considerable influence, and was a
recognition of the logical quickness and acumen of this
young Fellow of twenty-two. It was the duty of the
Moderator to preside at the Disputations or Debates,
to criticise the arguments offered, and to decide the
question in debate. These disputations in Lincoln
College were held daily, and were an important part
of the college curriculum. Wesley, who was a logician
from the cradle, evidently took great interest in them,
and remembered them in later years with satisfaction.
"I could not avoid," he says, "acquiring hereby some
degree of expertness in arguing, and especially in dis
covering and pointing- out, well-covered fallacies. I
have since found abundant reason to praise God for giv
ing me this honest art." But of even more service in
all his later years were the liberal studies which he pur
sued with such fidelity during his residence in Oxford.
Wesley was never, to be sure, a scholar in the modern,
technical sense ; he was not a man of profound attain
ments or of original research in any department of
knowledge. But his outlook had been so broadened,
and his temper so humanized by his early studies, that
he was, all his life long, a man of scholarly tastes and
habits, of genuine culture. His work was to be done
mostly with the great English lower-middle class, who
had little education or refinement ; but he never showed
in himself or countenanced in his followers any of that
narrow distrust of secular learning and letters too often
characteristic of religious reformers. His duties, when
his career had begun, left him no leisure for the still air

OXFORD AND GEORGIA 23
of delightful studies; but no one would have enjoyed
such leisure more. In fact, through all his days, in his
constant and wearisome labors, performed with and
for people of narrow horizon and meagre information,
he found refreshment and inspiration in the world's
masterpieces of literature.
But it is the development of his religious ideals and
experience that renders Wesley's life in Lincoln College
noteworthy. At Christ Church he had found his sur
roundings and companionships not helpful to his new-
formed purpose to lead a life more strict and devout.
His removal to Lincoln brought him into a society of
entire strangers; he knew, he says, not a single person
in the college. The Fellows of Lincoln were, he wrote
to his brother Samuel, well natured and well bred ; yet
he determined here to shut himself completely away
from such idle, though innocent, conversation as he had
found annoying at Christ Church, and to admit to his
companionship only those whose religious purposes and
experience were congenial to his own. With doubtful
courtesy and still more doubtful Christian wisdom, he
quietly repelled the friendly advances of all those with
whom he felt out of sympathy, and shut himself up
from the general life of the college. As he himself puts
it, "I resolved to have only such acquaintances as would
help me on my way to heaven." When any of another
sort called on him, he behaved as courteously as he
could, "but to the question, 'When will you call on
me?' I returned no answer. When they had come a
few times and found I still declined returning their
visits, I saw them no more." He seems at times to
have felt that even this cloistered seclusion of his Fel
lowship was too much in the world, and was tempted to

24 JOHN WESLEY
accept the mastership of a school in Yorkshire recom
mended to him by its absolute isolation, "so pent up
between two hills that it is scarce accessible on any
side, so that you can expect little company from with
out, and within there is none at all." There was ap
parently no sour acerbity in Wesley's temper or man
ner; a letter from one of the Fellows, sent him during
his stay in Epworth next year, speaks of his reputation
for goodness and civility, and regrets the absence from
college of so agreeable a companion. But the religious
ideal of Wesley in these days was certainly too much
that of the ascetic or recluse. This tendency was prob
ably increased by the acquaintance which he formed,
at about this time, with the writings of William Law.
Law's well-known book, the "Serious Call," was pub
lished in 1728. Wesley probably read it sometime in
that year. Its glowing fervor, that contrasts so strangely
with the lukewarm, rationalizing religious writing of
that age, intensified Wesley's religious aspirations ; while
its picture of the vanity of the worldly life of society,
drawn with the ardor of the devotee and the skill of
ithe accomplished satirist, must have strengthened his
ascetic inclinations. Law was then living at Putney
¦in the Gibbon family, as tutor to the father of the his
torian. Wesley in the summer of 1732 visited him
there, and formed a personal friendship which contin
ued for some eight or nine years. It is not true, as
Warburton sneeringly affirmed, that "Law begot Meth
odism" ; but it is certain that his works, especially the
"Serious Call," greatly deepened Wesley's sense of the
possibilities and obligations of the religious life. Some
of Law's suggestions as to habits of personal work and
devotion he at once adopted, and some of the regula-

OXFORD AND GEORGIA 25
tions he laid down for his Societies, ten years later, may
be traced to hints in the same book. It may be ques
tioned, however, whether the influence of Law did not
emphasize unfortunately that tendency to an isolated
and self-centred ideal of religious experience to which
Wesley at this time was certainly too much inclined.
It took him long to learn that this is not the true spirit
of Christianity; that he who would follow the example
and share the work of the Master must not be so ex
clusively bent on saving his own soul.
In August, 1727, Wesley left Oxford to take up resi
dence in a place that one thinks might have satisfied
any desire for retirement. His father had charge not
only of the parish of Epworth but of the adjoining
parish of Wroote, and, finding the care of both too
onerous for his advancing years, urged his son to come
to his assistance as Curate. Wesley consented, and for
the next two and a quarter years spent most of his
time at Wroote. This little village was five miles from
Epworth, in a dreary, sodden country, surrounded by
impassable bogs, and for most of the year accessible
only by boat. Wesley himself was nearly drowned
while making the passage to Epworth one day in the
summer of 1 728. The people in the parish — only about
two hundred in number — were even more ignorant and
lumpish than the average men of the fen country.
" High birth and virtue equally they scorn,
As asses dull, on dunghills born,"
wrote Wesley's sprightly sister Hetty, with rather more
truth than charity. Of Wesley's life with them there
is little recorded. He says himself that, though he
preached much in those years, he saw little fruit of his

26 JOHN WESLEY
preaching, and thinks he made the mistake of "taking
it for granted that all to whom I preached were be
lievers and that many of them needed no repentance."
If Hetty's estimate of the folk in Wroote was at all
correct, this was a somewhat curious mistake ; but the
truth probably is that if Wesley did not adapt his ser
mons to his hearers, it was because in those years he
was thinking more of his own needs than of theirs. On
the whole, this, his only parochial experience, seems not
to have been in any sense very successful; and it was
doubtless with some satisfaction that he received a
summons to return to Oxford. Dr. Morley, Master of
Lincoln, wrote him it had been decided that Junior
Fellows who had been chosen Moderators should at
tend to the duties of that office in person unless they
could present substitutes; and as there was no substi
tute for Wesley at that time, it was necessary that he
should resume his duties in the college or resign his
fellowship. He took up his residence in Lincoln again
in November, 1729, and remained there till the end of
1735- Charles Wesley, who had prepared for the Uni
versity at Westminster School, where his brother Sam
uel was Usher, was entered at Christ Church in 1726,
just before John left that college for Lincoln. At first
he was disinclined to give much thought to serious
matters, and to John's expostulations replied that he
must not be expected to turn saint all at once. But in
his case, as in that of his brother John, the life of study
and the approach to the duties and responsibilities of
active years, probably sobered him to decision. His
letters in the next two or three years prove that his life
was thoughtful and religious. In the spring of 1729

OXFORD AND GEORGIA 27
he writes to John of a "modest, well-disposed youth"
whom he has been able to rescue from bad company
and lead to a higher life. This young man, Robert
Morgan,1 and cple or two other friends of like earnest
religious purpose associated themselves with Charles
Wesley in the purpose to lead a more strict and ordered
life. The friendship of these young men was so inti
mate and the performance of all their duties, secular
as well as religious, so exact that they soon gained the
reputation of singularity. A Christ Church under
graduate dubbed them "Methodists" ; the happy nick
name was caught up at once, and before the close of
1729 seems to have become their usual designation.
Of the little group, John Wesley, when he returned to
Oxford in the fall of 1729, became at once the recog
nized leader. They fell into the habit of meeting regu
larly, most often in his room in Lincoln College. At
first their meetings were on Sunday evenings only,
then two evenings in the week, and later every even
ing. Their association was not exclusively for reli
gious purposes, for on week-day evenings they read
the classics as well as the Greek Testament. But
their religious sympathies were the real bond of fellow
ship. They discussed questions of duty, laid down a
definite scheme of self-examination, assigning to every
evening some special duty or virtue for discussion.
There were at first but four of them, the two Wesleys,
Morgan, and Robert Kirkham of Merton College, an
old friend of Wesley's undergraduate days; but the
1 1 cannot find positive evidence as to this. Certainly Morgan was
the closest friend of Charles Wesley in the following autumn. The
" young man '' cannot have been Kirkham, and there is no mention of
any other member of the society at that time.

28 JOHN WESLEY
circle soon widened. Their number varied from
time to time, once rising as high as twenty-nine; but
when Wesley left Oxford in 1735 there were fourteen.
The members afterwards to become best known were
James Hervey, author of the most popular book of
the mid-eighteenth century, the "Meditations among
the Tombs," and the most eloquent of all preachers,
George Whitefield; but one or two others probably
exerted more influence upon Wesley at the time, espe
cially John Clayton and Robert Morgan. It was Clay
ton from whom Wesley derived many of the High
Church notions he entertained at that time; it was
Morgan who introduced him to the work of practical
benevolence. One day in August, 1730, Morgan visited a con
demned murderer lying in the Castle, or jail of Oxford,
and at the same time chanced to speak with some of
the prisoners confined there for debt. He saw at once
that here was an opportunity for doing good that no
one seemed to improve. At his urgent invitation John
and Charles Wesley joined him in visits to the Castle,
and soon planned to see the prisoners there regularly
once or twice a week. Morgan next determined to
visit the sick poor of the city, and urged the Wesleys
to join him in this good office also. John Wesley seems
to have had at first a fear that in these works of active
benevolence he might be violating some proprieties or
invading the province of other men, and he wrote to
his father for advice in the matter. The reply he re
ceived left him in no doubt as to his father's approval.
"As to your designs and employments," wrote the
heroic old rector of Epworth, "what can I say less of
them than Valde probo, and that I have the highest

OXFORD AND GEORGIA 29
reason to bless God he has given me two sons together
in Oxford to whom he has given grace and courage
to turn the war against the world and the devil. . . .
Go on then in God's name, in the path to which your
Saviour has directed you, and that track wherein your
father has gone before you ! For when I was an un
dergraduate at Oxford, I visited those in the Castle
then, and I reflect on it with great satisfaction to this
day." Mr. Morgan, who has broken the ice for them,
he declares he must adopt as his son in Jesus Christ,
" and when I have such a Ternion to prosecute that war
wherein I am now miles emeritus, I shall not be ashamed
when they speak with their enemies in the gate." By
his father's advice, Wesley applied to the Chaplain of
the prison and the Bishop of the diocese for approval
of the benevolent work the Club had begun, and re
ceived from both hearty sanction and encouragement.
Before the close of the summer of 1730, the young men
had formed a plan for the systematic ministration to
the prisoners in jail and the sick and poor of the city.
They collected the poor children of the outlying vil
lages into classes and taught them the Catechism.
They deprived themselves of all but the barest necessi
ties in order to save money to purchase food and medi
cine for the destitute, or to relieve worthy persons
imprisoned for small debts. Wesley began then his life
long practice of giving away all he could save. One
year he had an income of thirty pounds; he lived on
twenty-eight pounds and gave away the two. The
next year he had an income of sixty pounds and gave
away thirty-two; and the fourth year, still living on
twenty-eight pounds, he could give away ninety-two.
In all this there was nothing that ought to have

3o JOHN WESLEY
brought upon these young men the derision of their
fellows. They did not obtrude their rules of life upon
others, or pose as better than their neighbors. At
worst they could be accused of only a certain exclusive-
ness. Yet it is a singular testimony to the temper of
the age that their piety provoked ridicule and their
charity provoked suspicion. Significantly, their min
istrations to the poor and the sick seem to have excited
more active disapproval than their distinctively religious
observances. Meetings were held among the members
of the University to protest against this new enthusi
asm. Attacks upon them were so frequent and persist
ent that, in the winter of 1730-1731, Wesley drew up
a list of queries which they were accustomed to propose
to their critics. The nature both of the attack and the
defence may be gathered from some of the most repre
sentative of these queries : —
"Whether we may not try to do good to our acquaint
ances? Particularly whether we may not try to con
vince them of the necessity of being Christians, and of
the consequent necessity of being scholars ?
"Whether we may not try to do good to those that
are hungry, naked, or sick ? In particular whether, if
we know of any necessitous family, we may not give
them a little food, clothes, or physic, as they want?
"Whether we may not contribute what little we are
able toward having the children clothed and taught to
read? "Whether we may not try to do good to those that
are in prison ?
"Whether we may not lend small sums to those that
are of any trade that they may procure themselves tools
and materials to work with ?

OXFORD AND GEORGIA 31
"Whether we may not give them, if they can read,
a Bible, Common Prayer Book, or 'Whole Duty of
Man' ?
"Whether we may not, as we have opportunity,
explain and enforce these upon them, especially with
respect to public and private prayer and the blessed
sacrament?" 1
It is readily to be believed, as Wesley says, that he
could never find, even in that age which had not yet
heard of prison reform, any person who would deliber
ately answer these queries in the negative. Some
friend had sufficient confidence in the novel form of
beneficence the young men were attempting, to give
them small sums of money in aid of their work for the
sick and the poor. But there seems no reason to think
that the great body of University men ever regarded
their activities as anything else than a temporary out
break of unfortunate enthusiasm.
The ways of this little group of Methodists were
doubtless in very striking contrast with those of other
Oxford men. They did not, indeed, parade their be
nevolence; they did not court opposition; they could
not be drawn into acrimonious rejoinder. But it was
noticed that these young fellows who were teaching the
felons in the Castle, carrying help to the slums of
Oxford, and catechising the children in the outlying vil
lages, themselves were living a life of cheerful abstemi
ousness, and of punctilious religious observance. They
rose at five in the morning. They fasted twice in the
week. They partook of the Holy Communion every
Sunday. They repeated a Collect at nine, twelve, and
three every day, and were understood to use brief
1 Introductory Letter to the Journal.

32 JOHN WESLEY
silent prayers or ejaculations hourly. Wesley himself
strove with anxious solicitude to ascertain the doctrines
and usages of the Primitive Church. His belief and
practices at this period were such as to-day would be
called marks of a rather advanced High Churchman-
ship. It is evident from his letters that he was inclined
to look with favor upon the celebration of the Eucha
rist upon the sabbath (i.e. on Sunday), and on all
saints' days, on the mixed chalice, the confessional, and
prayers for the dead. With his brother Charles he
paid several visits to William Law, whose books had
so influenced him some years before; and by Law's
advice he began to study the works of the German
mystics. His incessant labors and his rigid discipline
probably injured his health; during the summer of
1734 his strength was much reduced and he suffered
alarming hemorrhages of the lungs.
It was greatly significant of change that, in the com
placent, self-indulgent, rationalizing, cold-hearted eigh
teenth century, a little group of Oxford men should
have devised a new scheme of systematic philanthropy,
and should have set themselves to revive the spirit and
the observances of the Primitive Church. But yet it
must be said that this was not the Methodism that
within the next twoscore years was to spread all over
England. It is true that, as Wesley said in 1765, all
the essential doctrines of his later teaching were con
tained in a notable sermon he preached before the
University in 1733. It is true, moreover, that all his
life long he had a fondness for many churchly usages
which he would no longer insist upon, and was always
inclined to accept anything that could be proved to
have the sanction of the Early Church. But the type

OXFORD AND GEORGIA

33

of religious life he was cultivating at Oxford was not
really Evangelical. It was rather monastic. It was
too self-centred. It is not very strange that the little
group of Oxford Methodists did not make many con
verts among the men of the University. They were
really not intent upon making converts ; they were in
tent on saving their own souls. Even their works of
benevolence and mercy they regarded, perhaps half
unconsciously, chiefly as means of grace to themselves.
This was especially true of Wesley. He practically
separated himself from the life of the University, and
shut his doors against the companionship of the great
body of his fellow-students. "I resolved," says he,
"to have only such acquaintances as could help me on
my way to heaven." It took John Wesley long to
learn that this is not the spirit of Christianity: that
Jesus Christ would not have founded a Holy Club.
He was certainly unjust to himself when he said, as he
was used to say a few years later, that while in Oxford
he was not a Christian at all ; but he had yet to learn
the full meaning of the truth that whosoever will save
his life shall lose it. The Oxford Methodist, self-deny
ing, devout, scrupulously observant of every outward
religious requirement, certainly was a Christian, and of
a noble sort ; but he was not yet the preacher and re
former who could renew the religious life of a nation.
We are not to think of Wesley, however, in these
years as a rigid recluse. There was no sour austerity
in his nature. He was always keenly alive to the at
tractions of good society, and occasional references in
the letters of his friends attest the interest of his con
versation and the charm of his manners. There are
indications enough, too, that he was by no means proof

34 JOHN WESLEY
against youthful sentiment. That susceptibility which
was to be so marked in his later life had already shown
itself. In the first year of his Lincoln Fellowship he
formed an acquaintance with a Miss Betty Kirkham,
for whom he soon came to feel something warmer than
friendship. Miss Kirkham was the sister of his college
friend, Robert Kirkham, and the daughter of a clergy
man in Staunton, Northamptonshire. A letter from
Robert Kirkham as early as February, 1727, makes it
certain that Wesley was then on terms of intimacy with
the family, and that any regard he may have had for
Miss Betty was returned by the young lady herself,
and warmly approved by her brother. "Often have
you been in the thought of M.B.," (Miss Betty,) wrote
young Kirkham, "which I have curiously observed by
her inward smiles and sighs, and by her abrupt expres
sions concerning you. Shall this suffice ? I caught her
this morning in a humble and devout position on her
knees. ... I must conclude, and subscribe myself
your most affectionate friend, and brother, I wish I
might write, Robert Kirkham."
The acquaintance was evidently well known to the
family at Epworth, for in a letter of a week later, Wes
ley's sister Martha, upbraiding him for delay in writing
home, adds "When I knew that you had just returned
from Worcestershire where I suppose you saw your
Varanese, I then ceased to wonder at your silence, for
the sight of a woman, 'so known, so loved,' might well
make you forget me."
Wesley kept up a correspondence with Miss Kirkham
for some four years, till in 1 731 the acquaintance seems to
have been broken off. Nobody now knows why. But
conjecture is not difficult. Wesley may have hesitated at

OXFORD AND GEORGIA 35
marriage, when to marry meant to surrender his Fel
lowship and give up his Oxford work and residence;
while Miss Betty, on her part, may naturally have been
piqued at his hesitation, and tired of waiting for a mar
riage that seemed likely to be so remote. At all events,
from a condoling phrase in a letter to Wesley from his
sister Emily, it seems to have been Miss Betty who
decided the matter. Indeed, some of the family cor
respondence would indicate that even before the close
of her acquaintance with Wesley she had married a
Mr. Wilson; she died in 1732.
The Kirkhams were a clever family with an ambition
for intellectual society. Of their friends, at the time of
Wesley's acquaintance, the most noteworthy was Mrs.
Pendarves, afterwards Mrs. Delaney. This brilliant
woman, "the highest-bred woman in the world," as
Burke said of her in later years, a niece of Lord Lans-
downe, was then at the beginning of a social career in
which she formed the acquaintance of almost every
great man of the century from Jonathan Swift to Samuel
Johnson. Mr. Pendarves, to whom she had been mar
ried when she was a handsome girl of eighteen and he
was a gouty, jealous old sloven of sixty, had died some
four years earlier, and she was now an engaging young
widow of twenty-nine, living in London but spending
her summers mostly with her parents in Gloucestershire.
When a young girl she had formed a friendship with
Sally Kirkham — afterwards the Mrs. Chapone who
carried on a long literary correspondence with the nov
elist Richardson, and mother-in-law of that later Mrs.
Chapone who wrote the once famous "Letters on the
Improvement of the Mind" — and this friendship she
was now renewing. It was doubtless in the Kirkham

36 JOHN WESLEY
family, and sometime before 1731, that Wesley first
met her. A long correspondence followed, in which,
after the stilted fashion of the day, the lady signs her
self "Aspasia," Wesley is "Cyrus," and Betty Kirk
ham is "Varanese." The letters, which have never
been printed in full, are mostly concerned with reli
gious matters, but are written in a style of elaborate
courtesy which reminds us that we are in an age of
formal sentiment. The occasion of writing, in the first
place, seems to have been the mutual regard of both
writers for Varanese. The correspondence, however,
was certainly kept up some time after Miss Betty had
denied to Wesley any hope of marriage; and in the
opinion of some of his later biographers, Wesley was
not unwilling that Aspasia should accept the affections
Varanese had resigned. When Mrs. Pendarves left
England in the autumn of 1732 for a long visit to friends
in Ireland, she allowed the correspondence to lapse;
partly, as she said, from negligence, and perhaps also
partly because she deemed the friendship of her cor
respondent growing rather strained. Some three years
later, she invited Wesley to write her again; but he
declined to renew an intimacy he wisely judged of little
profit to either party. It is difficult — and not very
important — to determine the nature of his regard for
Mrs. Pendarves during these years 1730 and 1731 ; there
was always a marked vein of sentiment in his nature.
But the episode, however explained, obviously proves
that the earnestness of his life had not blinded him to
the charms of society, especially when illustrated in an
accomplished woman. The labored artificiality of
some of his letters to Aspasia is proof not so much of
insincerity as of a natural desire in this young ascetic

OXFORD AND GEORGIA 37
to show himself not inapt in the phrase of courtly senti
ment. These years which Wesley spent in residence as
Fellow of Lincoln were probably in many respects the
happiest of his life. Never again were his surroundings
so congenial. Few of all the many lovers of Oxford
have ever loved her more than he. The stately beauty
of the mediaeval town grew into his heart. When in
his eightieth year, after describing with enthusiasm
some Dutch towns he had lately visited, he adds,
"After all, they have nothing to compare with St. John's
or Trinity Gardens, much less with Magdalen river walk
or Christ Church Meadows." By natural preference
always a scholar and a recluse, he found here in Ox
ford the reverend traditions of piety and learning, the
grave and cloistered life, what a later Oxford lover has
called "the last enchantments of the middle age," that
to a temper like Wesley's are so fascinating. His life
as Fellow was ideal. He had the companionship of a
few friends congenial in tastes and in religious purpose,
and his natural sense of leadership was perhaps uncon
sciously flattered by their recognition of him as guide
and adviser. The criticisms upon him and his friends
seemed to him only that opposition which all who
would live godly in the present evil world must expect
to encounter, and a salutary stimulus to fidelity.
His life was divided between quiet study by himself
and active ministrations to others, as he would have
liked to have it divided all his days. Forty years after,
when opposition to his work had mostly ceased and his
preachers were settled all over the island, he wrote to
his brother Charles, "I often cry out, Vita me redde
priori; let me be again an Oxford Methodist."

38 JOHN WESLEY
His love for Oxford and for his life there was soon
to be proved in a striking manner. In 17^4 the aged
rector of Epworth, feeling that he had not long to live,
wrote to John entreating him to accept the living of
Epworth and continue the good work of his father
there. If John should not accept it, the living seemed
likely to fall to a fox-hunting parson of the worst vari
ety, and "the prospect of that mighty Nimrod's coming
hither," wrote his father, "shocks my soul, and is in a
fair way to bring down my gray hairs in sorrow to the
grave." The other members of the Epworth house
hold joined in the request, and his brother Samuel
wrote him warmly urging that he accede to their wishes.
But this John Wesley could not bring himself to do.
He wrote a portentously long letter to his father, in
which, after his methodical fashion, he draws out
laboriously twenty-six different reasons why he should
stay where he was. Twenty-five of them were essen
tially selfish reasons. In Oxford, he says, he can have
congenial religious companions and only those ; he can
have retirement, he is without annoyance from worldly
persons and lukewarm Christians; he is absolutely
free from the "cares of the world " ; he has the constant
enjoyment of the offices of the church — in a word, he
"can be holier in Oxford than anywhere else." More
over, in the world outside he feels that he could not for
a moment withstand the temptations to irregularity,
intemperance, and self-indulgence. It is such a re
sponse as a monk of the twelfth century might have
made to solicitations from without the cloister. And
the old father, though he professed himself a little puz
zled by his son's sophisms, answered them all with his
usual blunt common-sense : —

OXFORD AND GEORGIA 39
"Your state of the question and only argument is:
The question is not whether I could do more good to
others, there or here; but whether I could do more
good to myself; seeing wherever I can be most holy
myself, there I can most promote holiness in others.
But I can improve myself more at Oxford than at any
other place.
"To this I answer, first, it is not dear self, but the
glory of God, and the different degrees of promoting
it, which should be our main consideration and direc
tion in the choice of any course of life.
" Second. Supposing you could be more holy your
self at Oxford, how does it follow that you could more
promote holiness in others there than elsewhere ? Have
you found many instances of it, after so many years'
hard pain and labor?
"Third. I cannot allow austerity, or fasting, consid
ered by themselves, to be proper acts of holiness, nor
am I for a solitary life. God made us for a social life ;
we are not to bury our talent; we are to let our light
shine before men, and that not merely through the
chinks of a bushel for fear the wind should blow it out." 1
Wesley had no satisfactory answer to this; but he
still declined to give up his work at Oxford. It was
only next year, a few weeks before his father's death,
that he seems to have given a reluctant consent; but
it was then too late. His father died in April of 1735,
and the living went to the "Mighty Nimrod," who
seems never to have resided in the parish. It was
doubtless fortunate, say rather providential, that Wes
ley did not exchange Oxford for Epworth; but one
1 " Letters by the Rev. John Wesley and his Friends." By Joseph
Priestley, Birmingham, 1 791.

40 JOHN WESLEY
cannot admit that his reasons for refusing to do so
were of a very noble sort. Next year, on the very same
reasons, he decided to leave Oxford for a very different
field, in which his success was hardly greater than he
might have expected in Epworth.
In the summer of 1735, General James Oglethorpe
was in London soliciting aid for his new colony of
Georgia. Oglethorpe, who was a genuine philanthro
pist, as well as a gentleman and something of a states
man, had been scandalized by the horrid condition of
English prisons, and especially by the hardships attend
ing and following imprisonment for debt. He conceived
the idea of a colony in the interest primarily of those
unfortunate men who had been confined in debtors'
jails, a colony which should afford such persons an
opportunity for independence and a new trial of the
fortunes of life. He proposed also that his colony
should be an asylum for persecuted Protestants from
any part of Europe, and should be a centre of mis
sionary effort among the Indians. His scheme met
with favor from the new Society for the Propagation of
the Gospel in Foreign Parts, — the first English mis
sionary Society, — and he succeeded in securing a
handsome endowment for his colony and a grant of
land from the Crown. He had planted the colony suc
cessfully in 1732, and now returned to England to in
vite other colonists and further aid. He brought with
him a friendly Indian Chief and his train, who were
the sensation of London that summer, and stimulated
in the imagination of an overartificial society those
vague notions of the noble primitive life which Rous
seau was soon to formulate and spread over Europe.

OXFORD AND GEORGIA 41
Oglethorpe wished to find some young Englishman in
orders who would serve at once as Chaplain to the
English community at Savannah and missionary to the
Indians. Dr. Burton of Corpus Christi College, who
was well acquainted with the Oxford Methodists, rec
ommended John Wesley, and on one of Wesley's
visits to London introduced him to Oglethorpe. With
the Wesley family Oglethorpe was already acquainted.
The rector of Epworth, who had always dreams of far
missionary effort, had been heartily interested in the
Georgia Colony, and not long before his death wrote
Oglethorpe that if he were but ten years younger, he
would assuredly go himself; and John's elder brother
Samuel had given a set of Communion plate to the
church in Savannah. It was natural, therefore, that
Oglethorpe should consider favorably the nomination
of Wesley, and urge him to accept this position. Wes
ley at first declined, partly because he was still loth to
leave Oxford, and partly because he felt he ought not
to put the Atlantic between himself and his widowed
mother. But as the invitation was urgent, he consulted
with his brother Samuel, with Law, whom he still re
garded as his spiritual adviser, with the closest of his
Oxford Methodist friends, Clayton, and then went
down to Epworth to lay the case before his mother.
She had no hesitation; "If I had twenty sons," said
the brave old lady, "I should rejoice that they were all
so employed, though I never saw them more." So
assured, Wesley decided to go. He was to be mission
ary to the Indians from the Society for the Propaga
tion of the Gospel, with a salary of fifty pounds. He
persuaded Benjamin Ingham, one of the Oxford group,
to accompany him, and Charles Delamotte, another of

42 JOHN WESLEY
Wesley's friends, insisted, against the wishes of his
parents, that he be allowed to join the party. And at
the last moment, Charles Wesley, who had just taken
orders, decided to go too, as Secretary of Oglethorpe.
It is significant to notice that Wesley's reasons for going
to Georgia were essentially the same as the reasons he
had alleged a year before for staying in Oxford . In a letter
written four days before he sailed, he says explicitly, " My
chief motive is the hope of saving my own soul. . . .
I cannot hope to attain the same degree of holiness here
which I may there." In the wilds of America, removed
from the pomp and show of the world, with little oppor
tunity for foolish and hurtful desires, he will be free,
he thinks, from most of the temptations that daily beset
him in Oxford. Very curious it is to see this combi
nation of religious asceticism with that eighteenth-
century tendency to idealize the primitive life. As for
the Indians, Wesley shared to the full the fictitious no
tion of the noble savage then so current. He hoped
to learn the purity of the Christian faith by observing
its effects upon the untutored mind of the red man,
much as our students of social science take up resi
dence in the slums not so much from benevolent as
from scientific motives. He says in the letter just
quoted, "They have no comments to construe away
the text [of the gospel]; no vain philosophy to cor
rupt it; no luxurious, sensual, covetous, ambitious ex
pounders to soften its unpleasing truths. They have
no party, no interest to serve, and are therefore fit
to receive the Gospel in its simplicity. They are as
little children, humble, willing to learn, and eager to do,
the Will of God." Wesley saw reason to change his
estimate of Indian character in the next two years.

OXFORD AND GEORGIA 43
It was on the voyage to Georgia that Wesley first
met a type of religious experience that was to have
great influence upon his own. On the ship was a com
pany of twenty-six Moravians going out with their
bishop, David Nitschmann, to join a number of their
own faith who had already settled in Georgia. Wes
ley, who had laid down for himself and his three com
panions a rigid routine of daily study and devotion,
found himself strongly attracted by the demeanor of
these simple German Christians. They were ready to
perform the most humble offices without pay or even
thanks; they were always cheerful, and no neglect
could rouse them to protest, no insult provoke them to
anger. He joined them in their public devotions, and
set himself to learn German that he might converse
with them more freely. As the slow weeks of the three
months' voyage wore on, Wesley saw in them a deep
and quiet faith, an undisturbed serenity of spirit such
as he coveted but could not attain. When, at the close
of a day's storm, an immense wave broke over the ship
just as they were at their evening song, and the English
passengers were screaming with terror at the prospect
of immediate shipwreck, the Moravians continued their
singing as calmly as if they had been in the chapel at
Herrnhut. "Were you not afraid?" asked Wesley of
one of them next day. "I thank God, no," was the
reply. "But were not your women and children
afraid ?" "No," he answered mildly, "our women and
children are not afraid to die." Immediately on land
ing, Wesley sought out the Moravian pastor of Savan
nah, Spangenberg, to ask advice as to the work he was
to undertake. To his surprise, Spangenberg said : " My
brother, I must first ask you one or two questions.

44 JOHN WESLEY
Have you the witness within yourself ? Does the Spirit
of God bear witness with your spirit that you are a
child of God?" and added, as Wesley hesitated, "Do
you know Jesus Christ?" Unaccustomed to being
catechised after this fashion, Wesley could only say, "I
know he is the Saviour of the world." "Friend," re
plied Spangenberg, "but do you know he has saved
you?" and when Wesley replied, "I hope he died to
save me," pushed the further question, "Do you know,
yourself?" "I do," answered Wesley ; but he adds, in
his account of the interview, "I fear they were vain
words." Wesley and Delamotte, while a house was
being prepared for them, took lodging for a few days
with the Moravians, and were convinced that their life
was in manner and in spirit closely similar to that of
the first Christians. At the election and consecration
of a new bishop, the ceremony was so simple and at the
same time so solemn, in such striking contrast with the
pomp of the English ceremonial, that Wesley was ready
to "forget the 1700 years between and imagine myself in
one of those assemblies where form and state were not,
but Paul the tent-maker or Peter the fisherman presided ;
yet with the demonstration of the Spirit and of power."
The example and teaching of the Moravians unques
tionably convinced Wesley of the possibility of an as
sured personal religious experience to which he was as
yet a stranger. It deepened his dissatisfaction with
himself, and increased the austerity of his life. But
the simplicity of the Moravian forms did not lead him
to lay any less emphasis upon churchly observance.
Rather the contrary. During his stay in Georgia Wes
ley was an extreme High Churchman, with a longing
after Moravian quietism and assurance.

OXFORD AND GEORGIA 4S
In the first object of his visit he had little success;
his plans for work among the Indians came to nothing.
Oglethorpe, who had probably no very sentimental
view of the Indian character, told him it would be
hardly safe to venture much outside the settlements,
and insisted that his first duty was to the English colo
nists. And Wesley himself must have been disap
pointed in his notion that the Indians were waiting
"like little children to receive and obey the Gospel."
After two years' acquaintance, he gives them a quite
different character. "They are all," he writes in his
Journal, "except perhaps the Choctaws, gluttons,
thieves, dissemblers, liars. They are implacable, mur
derers of fathers, murderers of mothers, murderers of
their own children." The chiefs whom he interviewed
on his arrival told him in plain terms that at present
they had too much fighting on their hands to attend to
anything else; if ever they finished that successfully,
they might perhaps listen to him. Of course they never
did finish it. Just before his return to England, Wesley
writes with delightful naivete, that he has not taught
the Indians because he has "not found or heard of any
Indian on the Continent of America who had the least
desire of being instructed." And yet this is the man
who, in the next ten years, is to deliver his message
fearlessly to thousands who received it with howls of
anger or derision.
Nor were the results of his labor as pastor to the colo
nists altogether satisfactory. He gave himself to that
work, when he found he could do nothing for the Ind
ians, with characteristic zeal. His life was never more
austere, his observance of every churchly duty never
more punctilious. He administered the Communion

46 JOHN WESLEY
every Sunday and holy day. He held services on Sun
day at five, and eleven, and three, besides which he read
prayers in Italian at nine, in French at one, and cate
chised the children at two. He learned Spanish that
he might preach to some Spanish Jews he found in his
parish. He induced a number of serious persons to
form a little society which should meet once or twice a
week for religious conversation, and selected a still
smaller number for a more intimate union like that of
the Oxford Methodists. He gathered the children into
a school which Delamotte taught, and when some of
the more well-to-do children noticed the mean clothing
of their fellows, Wesley took Delamotte' s place as
teacher for a week and went to the school barefoot
every day to shame their pride. He visited all his pa
rishioners in person, usually choosing the heated hour
of noon for that duty because he was then most sure to
find them in their houses. He fasted thrice a week,
and lived habitually on bread and fruit. He was ap
parently insensible to hardship and bore tropical heat
and tropical rain without complaint.
Such self-denying labors could not fail of effect. It
is exaggeration to say that Wesley's mission in Georgia
was a failure. He made sincere friends and did much
good. When Whitefield visited the colony in 1738, he
wrote : "Mr. Wesley's name is very precious among the
people here. He has laid a foundation that neither
men nor angels will ever be able to shake." But
yet it is clear that, while Wesley commanded the
respect of many and the love of some, he did not gain
any real following. He could not awaken any deep or
general religious interest among the colonists. He gave
no promise of great religious leadership; the marvel-

OXFORD AND GEORGIA 47
lous results that were to follow his preaching, before the
middle of the century, all over England, could never
have been predicted from his work in Georgia. Hei
was personally unpopular, and that not altogether
among the baser sort. The dislike for him was espe
cially marked in the little settlement of Frederica, some
hundred miles south of Savannah. Charles Wesley
had gone there shortly after his arrival in Georgia ; but,
vexed by the quarrelsome temper of the people and dis
couraged by an unfortunate difference with Oglethorpe,
he had thrown up his position and sailed back to Eng
land after only six months' stay in the Colony. Wesley
visited Frederica two or three times, after the departure
of Charles, with the hope to continue the work his
brother had tried to start. But he met with nothing
but opposition, and excited so much enmity that his
life was more than once threatened. At length he, too,
gave up Frederica in utter despair of doing any good
there, and content, he says, never to see it more. In
Savannah, while there was no such violent personal
antagonism as in Frederica, his influence was not in
creasing during the later months of his stay.
For this comparative failure, it is not difficult to per
ceive some reasons. Wesley's parishioners were a diffi
cult folk. Recruited largely from the more shiftless
and disorderly classes in England, they were restive
under any attempted discipline, and did not always
accept with a good grace the authoritative rebukes of
their young pastor. Moreover, to such a community
the priestly and ascetic type of religion which Wesley
enjoined and practised must have been specially repug
nant. Too careless of all proprieties, struggling with
hard conditions in a raw, half-savage country, they

48 JOHN WESLEY
naturally viewed with impatience the attempt to impose
any elaborate ceremonial upon the crude and meagre
circumstance of their life. They were repelled by
Wesley's austerities, and irritated by his insistence upon
the requirements of a rigid sacerdotalism. They
learned with surprise and indignation that this Oxford
priest had refused to baptize an infant by sprinkling
rather than by pouring ; had refused the Lord's Supper
to several persons because they had not given previous
formal notice of their intention to communicate; that
he was endeavoring to enforce confession and penance,
and refusing the sacraments and burial to dissenters.
"We are Protestants," said one of his hearers in Fred
erica, "but as for you, we cannot tell what religion you
are of. We never heard of such a religion before; we
know not what to make of it." And perhaps the deep
est reason for Wesley's lack of hold upon the com
munity is to be found in the fact of his own spiritual
restlessness during those years in Georgia. His almost
feverish activity, his anxious performance of all out
ward duties, his extreme personal ascetism, all may in
dicate that the religion he was urging upon others had
not yet brought entire satisfaction to himself.
His decision to leave the Colony was precipitated by
a petty quarrel which can bring no reproach upon his
name, but which certainly exhibits some weaker sides
of his character. Shortly after landing in Savannah, at
the suggestion of Oglethorpe, he had been introduced
to a Miss Sophia Hopkey, niece of Mr. Causton, the
Magistrate of the Colony. It is quite clear that Miss
Hopkey, who was a sprightly and intelligent girl of
attractive person and manners, was very willing to
foster the acquaintance. She attended Mr. Wesley's

OXFORD AND GEORGIA 49
services with regularity; she chose her gowns to suit
his quiet taste ; and she took the proverbially effective
measure of caring for him through a week's illness.
Thus encouraged, it was inevitable that one of Wesley's
susceptible temperament should find his friendship
growing into intimacy; it is certain that he gave Miss
Hopkey reason to expect that he intended marriage.
At this point, his friend Delamotte, perhaps displeased
at the part the lady took in her own wooing, perhaps
dreading to lose the first place in Wesley's regard,
ventured to caution his friend and advise him to take
counsel with the Moravian Elders. Wesley weakly as
sented ; and instead of deciding the important question
himself, promised to lay it before the Moravians and
abide by their decision. The decision was adverse;
and Wesley replied, "The will of the Lord be done."
Miss Hopkey naturally resented this interference of
Delamotte and the Moravian Elders. Not choosing to
learn from Mr. Wesley his resolve to desert her, she
promptly accepted the addresses of another suitor, a
Mr. Williamson, and, after an engagement of five days,
married him. Here the matter should have ended.
Wesley may be pardoned a little personal feeling in his
estimate of Mr. Williamson, as "not remarkable for
handsomeness, neither for greatness, neither for wit, or
knowledge, or sense, and least of all for religion." But
he should not have made the mistake of visiting eccle
siastical discipline upon Mrs. Williamson, when he
might have known his action would be misinterpreted.
Forgetting that the lady could hardly be expected to
welcome the admonitions of a priest who had just
proved false as a lover, he ventured a reproof to Mrs.
Williamson for some misconduct. She proved impeni-

5o JOHN WESLEY
tent, and he felt compelled to exclude her from the
Communion. Her husband and uncle, indignant at
what they chose to consider an act of personal spite,
now brought suit against Wesley for defamation of
character. They really had no case, and very likely
knew they had not, for Wesley's action had been well
within his rights as pastor ; but they managed to draw
out the legal proceedings over four months, to unite
all the elements opposed to Wesley, and to create end
less annoyance and scandal. Wesley felt that his use
fulness in Georgia was over, and, taking the advice of
his friends, decided to return to England. He sailed
from Charleston on the 2 2d of December, 1737, and
landed at Deal on the first day of the next February.
Whitefield had sailed the day before for a brief visit of
four months to the Colony Wesley had just left.

CHAPTER III
THE YEAR OF TRANSITION
1738-1739
Wesley returned from Georgia in a mood of dis- /
couragement. The tedious six weeks' voyage home
was a period of profound depression. The hopes with
which he had gone out two years before had all been
disappointed. His mission to the Indians had failed
entirely. His influence as a teacher and preacher
among the colonists had declined. His austerities had
repelled them; his fidelity to what he thought his
priestly duty had been accounted arrogance or hypoc
risy. He was doubtless conscious of some errors of prac
tical judgment. He had sometimes unwisely imposed
his opinions upon others ; he had sometimes weakly in
trusted to others decisions which he should have made
himself. He had sacrificed to a mistaken sense of duty
a very genuine affection, and then had found his action
the occasion of a long series of petty persecutions and
scandals. The memory of his stay in Georgia could
hardly have been reassuring for future work.
But the keenest cause of disappointment Wesley
found in his own spiritual condition. By his own con
fession, two years and a half before, he had gone to
Georgia to "save his own soul" ; and his own soul was
not saved. The entries in the Journal during the last
51

52 JOHN WESLEY
days of the voyage give a clear statement of the nature
of the poignant dissatisfaction with himself. Such
passages as the following are significant as giving the
clew to some most important phases of his experience
during the next six months.
" Tuesday, Jan. 24. I went to America to convert
the Indians; but O who shall convert me? Who,
what, is he that will deliver me from this evil heart of
unbelief ? I have a fair summer religion. I can talk
well; nay, and believe myself while no danger is near;
but let death look me in the face and my spirit is
troubled. ... I now believe the Gospel is true. I
'show my faith by my works,' by staking my all upon
it. I would do so again and again a thousand times,
if the choice were still to make. Whoever sees me sees
I would be a Christian. But in a storm I think, 'What
if the Gospel be not true !' "
Five days later he declares, "I who went to Amer
ica to convert others was never myself converted,"
and brands himself a "child of wrath," and "heir of
hell." "If it be said that I have faith (for many
such things I have heard from many miserable com
forters), I answer, so have the devils, — a sort of
faith; but still they are strangers to the covenant of
promise. So the apostles had even at Cana in Galilee,
when Jesus first 'manifested forth his glory' ; even then
they, in a sort, 'believed in him'; but they had not
then 'the faith that overcome th the world.' The faith
I want is 'A sure trust and confidence in God, that
through the merits of Christ, my sins are forgiven, and
I reconciled to the favor of God.' ... I want that
faith which none can have without knowing that he
hath it."

THE YEAR OF TRANSITION 53
In expressions of such extreme self-depreciation Wes
ley, of course, did himself great injustice. He, himself,
afterward modified or retracted them, and protested
that words wrung from him "in anguish of my heart "
ought not to be taken as deliberate estimates of a per
manent spiritual condition. John Wesley in Georgia
was certainly a Christian, if any man ever was. Yet
such passages may serve to show how intense was his
desire after an inner experience different from any he
had yet attained, a "faith which none can have without
knowing that he hath it." Thirteen years before, in
his letters to his mother, he had questioned the state
ment in Jeremy Taylor's "Holy Living" — which he
was then reading — that "Whether God hath forgiven
us or no, we know not"; and insisted that such a
knowledge of pardon all those must have who believe
the Scriptures and are conscious of their own sincerity.
But he always craved something more than this "rea
sonable persuasion," and of late years the craving had
grown more intense. There was something of the mys
tic in him, as in all strongly religious natures, though
checked in his case by the practical bent of his disposi
tion. For the last three years, at the suggestion of
Law, he had been reading the writings of the German
mystics, and coveted their temper of security and con
templation. Indeed, he wrote to his brother Samuel
from Georgia, "I think the rock on which I had the
nearest made shipwreck of the faith was the writings
of the Mystics." But of all the influences tending to
increase Wesley's dissatisfaction with himself the most
potent was the example of the Moravians whose ac
quaintance he had made during his Georgia mission.
He had been trying to observe the usages of the early

54 JOHN WESLEY
Christian Church; these men reproduced its spirit.
Their quiet in danger and patience in trial, their steadi
ness of religious feeling, rebuked his restless longings.
It was an emotional experience he craved, a calmness
and elevation of feeling rather than any mere intellec
tual conviction. And after all his labors, he seemed no
nearer attaining it than when he left Oxford.
To trace with accuracy the inner experience of Wes
ley during the next three months is needless, if it were
possible. Nor need we be careful to fix any point of
crisis which deserves to be called his "conversion";
but it is of interest to perceive what was the object of
his desire, and how he attained it. For the experi
ences through which he passed in the first six months
of that year 1738 unquestionably determined his future.
The moody, discouraged John Wesley, who landed at
Deal in January of that year was a very different man
from John Wesley the confident evangelist of a year
later. Wesley reached London on the third of February.
Four days later he met the man to whom he always
ascribed his emergence from doubt and despondency.
Peter Bohler was a young Moravian graduate of Jena,
who had just been sent by Zinzendorf as a missionary to
the Carolinas, and on his way thither was stopping to
pay a visit to his Moravian brethren in England. Wes
ley, glad to meet another member of that church for
which he had so high an esteem, welcomed him most
cordially, and found lodgings for him with some of his
own friends in London. Shortly afterward the two
went down to Oxford together ; and for the remaining
weeks of Border's stay in England Wesley lost no op
portunity of conference with him. Though ten years

THE YEAR OF TRANSITION 55
younger than Wesley, Bohler assumed at once, and
perhaps justly, the position of religious superior, and
Wesley listened to his teachings with the eager humility
of a disciple. What Bohler had to teach will doubtless
seem to most readers of the Journal only the familiar
and central doctrine of justification by faith — a faith
which is not an assent of the intellect merely but an
experience, a confident personal reliance upon the di
vine Goodness. Such a faith must inevitably bring to
its possessor a sense of safety and assurance; if you
have not the assurance, you have not the faith — in
deed, the assurance, Bohler taught, is the faith. This
assurance is not to be gained by obedience and good
works, needful as these are ; it is the gift of God. More
over, Bohler urged, this assurance of faith is given
instantaneously ; it is not a growth, it is a bestowment.
This teaching, Wesley, characteristically, did not ac
cept without question. "Brother," said Bohler to him
in Oxford, "this philosophy of yours must be purged
away;" and in writing to Zinzendorf of Wesley's case
he said, "Our mode of believing in the Saviour is so
easy to Englishmen that they cannot reconcile them
selves to it; if it were a little more artful, they would
much sooner find their way into it." And even after
he admitted that Border's teaching as to the nature and
effect of faith was supported by Scripture and attested
by the experience of witnesses whom Bohler brought to
him, yet Wesley would not claim such experience for
himself. Contrary to what is sometimes supposed,
there was not the first element of fanaticism in Wesley's
nature. His temperament was, rather, cool and logical ;
he never thought himself to find emotions in conscious
ness which were not there, or read off his convictions

56 JOHN WESLEY
in terms of feeling. If such emotional experiences
as Bohler described were of the essence of faith,
then he avowed he had no faith; and he concluded
therefore that he ought not to preach. But just here
Bohler gave him counsel worth all the rest of his teach
ing: "Preach faith," he said, "till you have it, and
then because you have it, you will preach faith." This
was, in effect, to subordinate mere personal experi
ence to the great duty of preaching the Gospel; and
was wiser advice than Bohler himself knew.
How well Wesley followed this advice in the next
three months any reader of the Journal may see. He
spoke from a pulpit whenever a pulpit was offered
him; but this was only a small part of his preach
ing in those weeks. He had not, indeed, yet come
to think formal worship proper anywhere but in a
church ; but he could teach anywhere. He went
back to London; he went to Manchester to see his
old Oxford friend Clayton; he went to Salisbury to
see his mother, and to Tiverton to see his brother
Samuel; he was called back to Oxford by the ill
ness of his brother Charles — and on all these jour
neys, wherever he stopped, in the inns for dinner or
at night, with fellow-travellers on foot or horseback,
with people whom he met by the roadside, he lost no
opportunity of warning, exhorting, directing men wher
ever he found them. It is not difficult to see in the brief
records of these months the growth of a genuinely evan
gelical temper. Wesley is a missionary as never before.
He no longer thinks of his efforts for others as a means
to his own holiness. The man is forgetting himself in
his work. Hitherto the most strict of ritualists, we find
him saying that he cannot any longer confine himself

THE YEAR OF TRANSITION 57
to the public forms of prayer, "neither do I purpose to
use them any more, but to pray indifferently with form
or without as I may find suitable to particular occa
sions." And if he still thinks himself to be waiting
for some experience not yet attained, he frequently has
that best experience of being carried out of all regard
for himself in a rapture of love for God and his fellow-
men. "May g. I preached at Great St. Helen's to a very
numerous congregation, on 'He that spared not his own
Son, but delivered him up for us all, how shall he not
with him freely give us all things.' My heart was
so enlarged to declare the love of God to all that were
oppressed by the devil, that I did not wonder in the
least, when I was afterward told, 'Sir, you must preach
here no more.'"
This is not the language of the Oxford Methodist,
the ascetic ritualist bent on saving his own soul. This
is the voice of John Wesley, the evangelist and reformer.
Yet it was not until nearly a fortnight after this date,
on the 24th of May, that he believed himself to have
attained the faith for which he was waiting. The pas
sage in the Journal is a locus classicus in the annals of
Methodism : —
"In the evening I went very unwillingly to a society
in Aldersgate Street where one was reading Luther's
preface to the Epistle to the Romans. About a quarter
before nine, while he was describing the change which
God works in the heart through faith in Christ, I felt
my heart strangely warmed. I felt I did trust in Christ,
Christ alone for my salvation; and an assurance was
given me that he had taken away my sins, even mine,
and saved me from the law of sin and death."

58 JOHN WESLEY
It is not likely that any one to-day, whatever may be
his theory as to the cause of such an experience as this,
will pronounce it merely enthusiastic, or valueless for
the uses of after life. To do so would be to forget the
decisive moments in the lives of Augustine, Luther,
and hosts of other religious leaders. The most recent
psychology, on the contrary, pronounces these sudden
transitions from a lower to a higher, a perturbed to a
restful spiritual state, however caused, to be no proof
of morbid or abnormal psychical conditions, but rather,
in countless instances, to mark the ingress of new truth
and new motives otherwise inaccessible.1 Yet any one
who reads Wesley's Journal for the year 1738 must per
ceive that the most essential proof of his spiritual develop
ment, through this period of transition, is not any such
temporary exaltation and repose of feeling, memorable
though that was in all his life, but rather the growth of
the deep persuasion at once of the divine goodness and
of human need, which has been the inspiration of great
religious reformers in every age. It was much to have
gained that composure of spirit he had so long desired ;
1 " Some of you, I feel sure, knowing that numerous backslidings
and relapses take place, make of these their apperceiving mass for in
terpreting the whole subject [of conversion], and dismiss it with a
pitying smile as so much 'hysterics.' Psychologically, as well as
religiously, however, this is shallow. It misses the point of serious in
terest, which is not so much the duration as the nature and quality of
these shiftings of character to higher levels. Men lapse from every
level — we need no statistics to tell us that. Love is, for instance, well
known not to be irrevocable, yet, constant or inconstant, it reveals new
flights and reaches of ideality while it lasts. ... So with this conver
sion experience : that it should, even for a short time, show a human
being what is the high-water mark of his spiritual capacity, — this is
what constitutes its importance. And, as a matter of fact, all the most
striking instances of conversion . . . have been permanent." William
James, " The Varieties of Religious Experience," p. 257.

THE YEAR OF TRANSITION

59

it was more to have forgotten even the desire in unselfish
love for others.
It was but natural that Wesley himself should at first
overemphasize the importance of his experience. He
fell into the serious error of pronouncing such emo
tional states to be the only and necessary tests of Chris
tian character. In an informal religious gathering at
the house of his old friend Mr. Hutton, he astonished
the company by rising to his feet and declaring that up
to Wednesday of the previous week he had never been
a Christian. "Well, then," was the just reply of Mrs.
Hutton, "you have been a great hypocrite." Samuel
Wesley, always the coolest and most judicious of the
three brothers, urged with much truth that such extrava
gant statements were likely to mislead and discourage
many earnest people. In fact, as may be seen from the
Journal in the following months, they sometimes discour
aged Wesley himself, leading him to mistake a tem
porary dulness of feeling for proof of a lapse in faith.
We find him writing, under date of January 4, 1739, in
a mood of depression apparently quite as deep as that
during the voyage from Georgia a year before: "My
friends affirm I am mad because I said I was not a
Christian a year ago. I affirm I am not a Christian
now. Indeed, what I might have been I know not,
had I been faithful to the grace then given, when ex
pecting nothing less, I received such a sense of the for
giveness of my sins as till then I never knew. But that
I am not a Christian at this day, I as assuredly know
as that Jesus is the Christ. For a Christian is one who
has the fruits of the Spirit of Christ, which (to mention
no more) are love, peace, joy. But these I have not.
I have not any love of God. I do not love either the

60 JOHN WESLEY
Father or the Son. Do you ask how do I know whether
I love God? I answer by another question, 'How do
you know whether you love me ? ' Why, as you know
whether you are hot or cold. You feel at this moment
that you do or do not love me. And I feel this mo
ment, I do not love God ; which therefore I know, be
cause I feel it. . . . Though I have used all the means
of grace for twenty years, I am not a Christian." 1
But Wesley soon learned not to interpret too seriously
these vacillations of feeling. Even during that year
1738, in his more carefully considered public utterances
he seldom ventured to pronounce mere temporary emo
tions a test of love or faith. In a memorable sermon
on Faith, preached in St. Mary's, Oxford, only three
weeks after the 24th of May, he guards his statement
of the assurance that accompanies faith, by the admis
sion that it is given "perhaps not at all times, nor with
the same fulness of persuasion." In his old age he
wrote, "When, fifty years ago, my brother Charles and
I, in the simplicity of our hearts, taught the people that
unless they knew their sins forgiven, they were under
the wrath and curse of God, I wonder that they did
not stone us. The Methodists know better now."
It is true that the Wesleys did teach, all their days,
that, in a very real sense, men might know their sins
forgiven. They preached a religion that could not only
be professed and believed but experienced. Therein is
the secret of the success of the whole Methodist move
ment. That confidence speaks bold in Methodist ser-
TIn the Journal this passage is prefaced by the statement, "One who
had the form of godliness many years wrote the following reflections ;"
but there can be no doubt that Wesley was expressing his own mood at
this time.

THE YEAR OF TRANSITION 61
mons and rings glad in Methodist song. It was the
one most unfortunate result of the Moravian influence
that Wesley for a time tended to confuse this assur
ance with the evidence of fluctuating personal feeling.
But it was only for a little time. After 1739 we never
find in his Journal such passages as that just now quoted.
Many readers of the Journal have probably been sur
prised to notice that, during the last fifty years of his
life, there is hardly a reference to his own emotions.
He tells you a good deal about the experiences of
others; for himself, he tells you where he went, to
whom he preached, what he saw, what he did, what
he read; he very seldom tells you how he felt. He
certainly was not one of those Christians who always
live with an anxious finger on their spiritual pulse.
His faith is a healthy, settled confidence, undisturbed
by shifting moods.
Meantime, in the summer of 1738, Wesley, feeling
deeply his indebtedness to the Moravians, determined
to see them in their own community. He left London
early in June, and journeyed by way of Amsterdam,
Cologne, and the Rhine to Marienborn, about thirty-
five miles from Frankfort. Here Count Zinzendorf
was living as the head of a company of about ninety
persons, most of whom were in training for work as
missionaries. Wesley stayed here a fortnight, eagerly
studying their discipline, and hearing an extended ser
mon from Zinzendorf, in which the teaching seems to
have been somewhat at variance with what he had
learned from Bohler. If tradition speaks truly, the
Count treated the young English seeker after truth in
somewhat lofty fashion. It is said that he one day set
Wesley to dig in his garden, and after an hour's heated

62 JOHN WESLEY
work suddenly summoned him to enter a carriage and
visit a nobleman in the vicinity. When Wesley asked
a little time to bathe and change his clothing, the Count
replied, "You must be simple, my brother!" Wesley,
at all events, certainly has little to say of Zinzendorf in
his Journal ; one gets the impression that he did not
find the great man altogether congenial. From Mari
enborn, Wesley went on to the principal Moravian set
tlement at Herrnhut. In this remote and peaceful
village, on the edge of Bohemia, lying among corn
fields and gardens and shut in by a girdle of wooded
hills, Wesley passed a delightful fortnight. The com
munity, clean, industrious, methodical, devout, showed all
the virtues of the monastic life without any of its un
natural austerities. The brethren had a house set apart
for strangers, and here Wesley was entertained. He at
tended the daily evening service of noble-music, Scripture,
and prayer, the daily conference at eleven in the morn
ing for the exposition of a passage of Scripture in the
original, and the conferences for strangers at which
questions of doctrine were discussed. And, best of all,
in long private conversations with members of the com
munity, he heard and wrote down in his Journal the
stories which these plain folk, one after another, gave
him of their own experiences. He records no less than
eight such narratives. Most of all, he found profit in
the counsels of that remarkable man, the planter of the
Herrnhut settlement and first Protestant missionary to
Greenland, — Christian David. Wesley held long con
versations with him, and heard him preach four ser
mons, one of which is recorded in the Journal.
In such a place and with such men Wesley declared
he could gladly have spent the rest of his life. It was

THE YEAR OF TRANSITION 63
with genuine reluctance that he turned his face again
toward his work at home. He left Herrnhut on the
14th of August and reached London a month later. On
the whole, his visit, while it strengthened' the Moravian
influence upon him, had broadened as well as deepened
his conception of the religious life. He had gained
abundant testimony to the reality of that personal ex
perience in which he was now supremely interested;
but he had learned also that this experience, always
the same in its essentials, takes different forms in dif
ferent persons. He had seen the teaching of Bohler
supplemented, if not contradicted, by the lives of some
of Bohler' s Moravian brethren. He was, therefore, a
little more careful about extreme statements himself,
and more doubtful about the wisdom of making any
definite phase of emotional experience the test of
Christian character. He had seen, moreover, some
tendencies among the Moravians that he did not alto
gether approve. In a letter written to them five days
after his return to London, after dwelling upon their
piety and virtues, he propounds the following ques
tions : —
"Is not the Count all in all among you?
"Do you not magnify your own Church too much?
"Do you not use guile and dissimulation in many
cases ?
"Are you not of a close, dark, reserved temper and
behavior?" The letter, to be sure, was never sent; but it indi
cates what was in Wesley's mind at the moment. It is
easy to understand the reference to the arrogance of
Zinzendorf. Wesley never formed a very favorable
estimate of him ; but the charges in the last two queries

64 JOHN WESLEY
are surprising. They were probably unjust ; but they
suggest that Wesley perceived in his Moravian breth
ren some traces of that spiritual exclusiveness and pre
tension which ultimately produced his rupture with
them. The work of Wesley during the remaining months of
1738 and the first months of 1739 was mostly that of
the religious adviser and confessor. He preached in
churches whenever opportunity offered; but most of
the London pulpits were closed to him. By the end of
1738 there were not more than three or four churches
in London in which he was allowed to preach. This
fact that he was so promptly excluded from the pulpits
of London is often said to be a proof of the decay of
vital religion in England. And so it is. Yet there is
something to be said in defence of the action of the
churches. The new zeal of Wesley, as we have seen,
and as he himself afterward confessed, often found ex
pression in forms that must have seemed to those not
in sympathy with him extravagant and censorious. He
did not, in fact, always maintain a modest or concilia
tory temper. In a correspondence with William Law
during the summer of 1738, he ventured to rebuke and
correct the venerable teacher to whom he owed so
much, in a tone of inexcusable positiveness, neither
just nor courteous. Samuel Wesley, writing to Mrs.
Hutton with reference to his brother's extravagances,
owned a fear that perpetual intenseness of thought
and want of sleep may have disordered Jack's intellect.
The doctrines Wesley was preaching were doubtless,
when properly stated, as he said, only those held by
English divines ever since the Reformation ; yet, in his
extreme and mandatory forms of statement, they were

THE YEAR OF TRANSITION 65
sure to provoke dissent. It is not surprising that a
good many of the clergy, by no means worldly minded,
should decline to be censured a second time from their
own pulpits by this young stranger from Georgia who
seemed attempting to show that the Christianity they
preached, and he had himself until recently professed,
was not Christianity at all.
But most of Wesley's influence in the latter part of
this year 1738 was exerted through another form of
organization destined to play a very important part in
all his later work. Both in Oxford and in Georgia, as
we have seen, he had favored the union of religious per
sons in groups or private societies for mutual counsel
and encouragement. Societies of this kind, it should
be understood, were no device of Wesley's; they had
existed in the English Church for more than fifty years.
There were at that time several in London, in which,
as we learn from the Journal, Wesley spoke and ex
pounded the Scriptures during the months following his
return from Germany. These were Church societies;
but in May Wesley had formed — or, at all events, had
been prominent in forming — a little society of a some
what different sort. It was suggested by Peter Bohler ;
and its conditions of membership, the plan of dividing
its members into small groups, or "bands," of not less
than five or more than ten, each band meeting by itself
twice a week and all together on Wednesday evenings,
its monthly love-feast, its insistence that the members
should have no secrets from one another, even in per
sonal matters, — all these features were patterned closely
after the Moravian usage at Herrnhut. And most of
its members were London Moravians. Indeed, it was,
to all intents and purposes, a Moravian brotherhood

66 JOHN WESLEY
rather than a Church society. The regular weekly
meetings of this society were held in a room in Fetter
Lane ; and it became for a time the centre of Wesley's
London work. By the time of his return from the
continent in September, it had grown from ten mem
bers to thirty-two, and the next New Year's Day he
records that a love-feast held at Fetter Lane was at
tended by seven ministers — all of them his old Oxford
friends of the Holy Club — and sixty laymen. Thus
teaching and expounding in the Societies and in private
houses, reading prayers and exhorting in prisons and
workhouses, preaching in the three or four London
churches yet occasionally opened to him, with two
short visits to Oxford, Wesley passed the time until at
the end of the next March, 1739, a new and wider field of
labor opened before him.
During the winter of 1 738-1 739, the representative
of the Methodist movement most prominent in the eye
of the public was not John Wesley but George White-
field. In the previous year, 1737, while Wesley was
in Georgia,. Whitefield, though a young man of only
twenty-one just out of the University, won sudden
and most extraordinary reputation as a preacher. In
Gloucester, his native place, and in Bristol, crowds filled
the churches to hear him every day in the week. He
had accepted Wesley's call to come out to Savannah,
and when he went up to London to solicit aid for the
Georgia mission, he found eager throngs awaiting him
there. In three months he preached a hundred times
in London and collected a thousand pounds. Wesley,
influenced probably by his own failure, had advised
him at the last moment not to go to Georgia; but he

THE YEAR OF TRANSITION 67
wisely disregarded the advice, and his reception in the
colony was in striking contrast to that accorded Wes
ley. He made friends everywhere; and after a stay
of six months, returned with the cordial good will of the
colonists, to take priest's orders and to collect moneys
for the orphanage he had founded in Savannah. He
reached London early in December of 1738, and was
warmly welcomed by Wesley, who hurried up from
Oxford to greet him.
But Whitefield found that, while the people were as
eager as ever to hear him, the churches were not now
so ready to receive him. The clergy generally re
garded him with suspicion as the friend and disciple of
the Wesleys. He was told by the Bishop of London —
who had just been reproving Wesley — that his teach
ing was tinctured with enthusiasm. He managed to
preach a number of times in London, but by the end of
January all the pulpits of the city were closed against
him. Then, shut out of London, he went down to
Bristol where he had been so gladly received a year
and a half before. But here, also, he found, to his sur
prise, that he was to be silenced. He was informed
that he could not preach in St. Mary Redcliffe's, or
any other Bristol church without a license from the
Chancellor of the city ; the Chancellor refused to grant
a license until after hearing from the Bishop of the
diocese, and advised him to leave the city. "Why did
you not require a license from the clergyman that
preached last Thursday?" asked Whitefield. "That
is nothing to you," was the cool reply. The Dean of
St. Mary's, when asked whether Whitefield might preach
for the orphanage in Georgia, "could not tell," and
postponed definite answer on the plea of urgent busi-

68 JOHN WESLEY
ness at that hour. Thus denied the pulpits of Bristol,
Whitefield suddenly took a most important resolution.
Four miles northeast of Bristol was a rough tract of
country called Kingswood, inhabited by a class of men
who never saw the inside of a church, and never heard
the voice of a preacher. The colliers of Kingswood
were perhaps the worst specimens of the English popu
lace. Ignorant, lewd, profane, and brutal, they were
the terror of the law and the despair of philanthropy.
It was to these people that Whitefield now turned. On
February 17 he preached in the open air on Kings-
wood Common. About a hundred grimy, brawling
colliers had assembled to hear him ; when, three weeks
later, he preached for the fifth time, there were ten
thousand. He had found a new pulpit, from which no
ecclesiastical authorities could exclude him; and an
audience no church could ever have collected.
The decision once taken to preach in the open air,
there were opportunities enough to speak and no lack
of hearers. A gentleman gave him the use of a bowl
ing-green in the heart of Bristol, and here he addressed
audiences of eight to ten thousand. He preached in a
dozen different places outside the city and in neighbor
ing towns, and in some instances as many as twenty
thousands person are said to have gathered to hear him.
Filled with enthusiasm at the success of this new form
of missionary effort, he was eager to carry his message
to the unchurched multitudes of London. But he did
not wish to leave the thousands who had been hearing
him all uncared for. He bethought himself of Wesley,
whose gifts of instruction and organization he knew to
be superior to his own, and wrote to London urgently
requesting Wesley to come to Bristol and take charge

THE YEAR OF TRANSITION 69
of the great work begun there. Wesley hesitated. His
time was fully and profitably occupied in London.
His many friends protested against his leaving them.
His brother Charles was especially urgent that he must
not go. Uncertain what he ought to do, he referred
the matter to the Fetter Lane Society; but they were
divided in their counsels, and the question was at last
decided, after the Moravian fashion, by opening the
Bible at random and observing the significance of the
first passage that met the eye. Wesley says he had
felt the more reluctant to go, when, some days before,
he had tried this biblical sortilege by himself, and
opened upon the verse, "And devout men carried
Stephen to his burial and made great lamentation for
him" ; it is not very clear how he could find opposite
leading in the passage that decided the Fetter Lane
trial, "And Ahaz slept with his fathers, and they buried
him in the city, even in Jerusalem." In this case, as
in most similar ones, it is easy to conjecture that the
divine will was interpreted in accordance with the in
clination of the seeker.
Wesley arrived in Bristol on Saturday, March 31.
Next day he heard Whitefield preach in the open air;
and disliked it much. He could hardly reconcile him
self to it, he says, having all his life been so accustomed
to insist rigidly upon all points of order and decency
that he thought the saving of souls almost a sin unless
it were done in a church. But if he was to continue
Whitefield's work, there seemed no other way. Next
day, Monday, April 1, at four in the afternoon, with
great reluctance, and feeling that he was making him
self vile by such a breach of all proprieties, he stood on
a little eminence just outside the city, and spoke to

70 JOHN WESLEY
three thousand listeners. With unconscious prophetic
truth he took for his text: "The Spirit of the Lord is
upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the
Gospel to the poor. He hath sent me to heal the broken
hearted ; to preach deliverance to the captives, and re
covery of sight to the blind ; to set at liberty them that
are bruised, to proclaim the acceptable year of the
Lord." What were the results of that sermon we do
not know; but we know that within the next month
Wesley preached again and again in the open air, till
his audiences during the month aggregated forty thou
sand persons. That Monday was a fortunate day for
him and for the world. A new chapter in his religious
life is beginning. He has passed out of the feverish,
introverted temper gendered by the excessive Moravian
influence. Henceforth we find in his Journal no more
doubts, no more unhealthy self-examinations. His
soul is saved, because he has found his work. John
Wesley, the ascetic, the uneasy, self-questioning mystic,
has passed into John Wesley, the evangelist and re
former, his parish the world and his message to all
sorts and conditions of men.

CHAPTER IV
THE EARLY WORK
1 739_I 742
All historians of society are agreed that both the
morals and the religion of England, in 1740, were in
need of reform. If the little circle of people immedi
ately about the court were less openly dissolute than
in the Restoration period seventy-five years before,
their manners were more vulgar. A sodden coarse
ness characterized what called itself the best society.
King George II united the morals of a rake with the
tastes of a boor. Queen Caroline, a woman of great
native force of character, while not herself chargeable
with infidelity, made the gross vices of her husband the
subject of broad jests, and, on the testimony of the
Duchess of Marlborough, — herself a proverb for coarse
ness, — seldom was in her drawing-room half an hour
without saying something shocking. Robert Walpole,
the prime minister and ablest statesman of his age,
had no tastes above those of the cock-pit and the stable,
sneered at virtue in man or woman, scandalized even
that age by the boisterous debaucheries of his country
house at Houghton, and lived in avowed adultery
through the greater part of his career. Under the
reign of Anne, the urbane satire of Steele and Addison
had done something to bring into fashion, for a time,
a decent social morality and at least some outward
71

72 JOHN WESLEY
respect for religion ; but despite these influences, what
called itself fashionable society grew steadily more lax
in morals and negligent in manners through the second
quarter of the century. A period of commercial pros
perity only made morals worse. All the loud, ostenta
tious vices that often accompany a rapid increase in
wealth had probably never before been so prevalent in
English society as during the reign of the second George.
The dress, the equipage, the entertainments of the upper
classes all showed a glaring extravagance untempered
either by taste or by morality. Cards were the usual
form of entertainment in all social assemblies, and the
stakes were very high. Lady Cowper, one of the maids
of honor, excused herself from play at one of the draw
ing-rooms because no one thought of putting down
less than two hundred pounds. The mania for gaming
in all forms pervaded society. Ladies did their shop
ping where with every purchase they were given a ticket
for a raffle; public enterprises were supported by lot
tery schemes in which everybody bought shares; and
the whole nation for some months went mad over the
gigantic South Sea Bubble that beggared nobles and
drove scores of deluded speculators to suicide. Fash
ionable amusements were either coarse or vapid. The
stage was mostly given over to farces and spectacles.
Music, the one form of art in which the King took any
interest, received very little encouragement; Lord
Chesterfield once retired from a scantily attended per
formance of one of Handel's oratorios before the Court,
with the witty excuse that he feared he was disturbing
his Majesty's privacy. A more favorite form of fash
ionable amusement in the theatres and public gardens
was the masquerade or masked ball, often known as

THE EARLY WORK 73
the "ridotto." They furnished opportunity for viola
tions of all propriety so flagrant that Miss Chudleigh,
one of the Queen's maids of honor, hardly provoked
remonstrance when she appeared one evening, almost
entirely naked, in the character of Iphigenia. Yet in
spite of the denunciations of the clergy and of protests
from the Grand Jury of Middlesex, they continued to
be given till after the middle of the century.
The public manners of good society were everywhere
very lax. Horace Walpole tells a characteristic story
of five lords and three pretty young ladies who accepted
the invitation of Lady Caroline Petersham to spend an
evening at Vauxhall. One of the lords was "very
drunk" all the time and pestered the ladies with his
maudlin attentions ; Lady Caroline minced seven chick
ens and stewed them in a dish over a lamp, while the
vivacious converse of the ladies drew the attention of
the whole garden, and Sir Harry Vane "drank the
healths" of the crowd that assembled around their
booth.1 In such places of public resort drunkenness
was hardly a matter of reproach, and profanity, loud
and open, might often have been heard on the lips of
fine ladies, unabashed and unrebuked. How vapid
and how coarse was the talk of lords and ladies in
smaller companies or at home may be seen in the bit
ter satire of Swift's "Polite Conversation." About the
middle of the century this universal rudeness produced,
in a certain section of society best represented by Lord
Chesterfield, a tendency to reaction which expressed
itself in an elaborate artificiality of speech and manner ;
but the temper thus veiled was essentially immoral
and often, indeed, essentially vulgar. It is doubtless
1 Walpole to Montagu, June 23, 1750.

74 JOHN WESLEY
unjust to draw inferences as to a whole class from
instances of depravity so exceptional as to receive con
temporary notice and record ; but the concurrent testi
mony of history and literature forces us to believe that
never before1 had what called itself the best society of
England shown less refinement, intelligence, or purity
than at just the moment when John Wesley began his
work. At the opposite social extreme was the great mass of
ignorant, restless, half-brutalized population which we
have learned to call "submerged." This element was
relatively no larger then than now, but now society is
better policed, and the crime and savagery of its lowest
section more effectively repressed. The picture of the
under side of life in England during the second quarter
of the eighteenth century is appalling. Drunkenness
was almost universal. Mr. Lecky considers the sudden
growth of the passion for gin drinking which took pos
session of the English people about 1725 to be the most
important fact in the history of the century, "incom
parably more so than any event in the purely political
or military annals of the country." Parliamentary
measures of taxation intended to diminish the evil were
met by riots and proved altogether inoperative. In
1750 London physicians reported fourteen thousand
cases of illness, most of them hopeless, due to the use
of gin. The next year Fielding declared this liquor to
be actually "the principal sustenance (if so it may be
called) of more than one hundred thousand people in
the metropolis" — and this when, it will be remem
bered, the entire population of London was under
eight hundred thousand. Every sixth house in Lon
don was a gin shop. Of course crime increased pro-

THE EARLY WORK 75
portionately. The parks and gardens where the lower
classes resorted were the scenes of vulgar debauchery
and violence. When Whitefield first ventured to speak
in Moorfields, one of the worst spots in London, his
friends predicted that he would never come out alive.
After nightfall, London was at the mercy of footpads
and desperadoes. Indeed, assault and robbery were
not uncommon on the London streets in broad day
light. Just outside the city, in Hampstead or Hackney,
coaches were stopped almost every day and their pas
sengers plundered. It was the heroic age of highway
robbery; Jack Sheppard, Jonathan Wild, and Dick
Turpin, all three ended their career on the gallows be
tween 1724 and 1740. The laws were savage but inef
fectual. The infliction of the death penalty alike for
murder and for petty theft tended to increase crimes of
violence. Public executions at Tyburn were a form of
popular recreation attended by great crowds from all
classes; and as many as a score of criminals were
sometimes turned off in a single morning. The prisons,
which were mostly occupied by poor debtors, were
sinks of filth, stench, and disease such as it is now
difficult to conceive.
Throughout the country things were little better.
Cock-fighting and bull-baiting were still the favorite
amusements of the lower class, and every prominent
town could furnish a mob of lewd and shiftless fellows
ready for any brutal excitement. There were as yet
few good roads to connect the larger towns and to serve
the spread of intelligence. The agricultural laboring
class, though not turbulent, were isolated, ignorant,
stolid. It is significant that Wesley, who had known
these people in Epworth and Wroote, always deemed

76 JOHN WESLEY
the rural peasantry almost inaccessible to good influ
ences. Referring in his Journal to the poetic encomi
ums often passed on a country life, he exclaims : "What a
flat contradiction is this to universal experience. Our
eyes and ears may convince us there is not a less happy
body of men in all England than the country farmers.
In general their life is supremely dull ; and it is usually
unhappy too." Wherever any form of industry called
together large numbers of ignorant, unskilled work
men, the restraints of orderly society were almost en
tirely removed; the colliers of Yorkshire and the
miners of Cornwall were little better than hordes of
wild men. For this lawless mass of humanity, in city
and in country, that surged about the foundations of
society, decent, order-loving folk had only hatred and
threats of punishment. Philanthropy was hopeless of
them. It was noticed that those charitable and re
forming societies which had been organized in the reign
of Anne had accomplished nothing for them. The
church seemed powerless to take religion to them; it
was certain they would never come to the church.
Yet it was among these people that the first Metho
dist preachers found attentive audiences. A few weeks
before Whitefield began to preach to the Kingswood
colliers, in a Bristol riot they were "playing such mad
pranks that one would doubt there were any law still in
being." Six months later, hundreds of them were en
rolled in Wesley's societies, and were supporting a
school established for them. Moorfields, which White-
field called truly enough "a stronghold of Satan," in
two years became a stronghold of London Methodism.
If the lowest classes in England grew better through
the last half of the century rather than worse ; if respect

THE EARLY WORK

77

for law and reverence for religion penetrated to those
masses at the bottom of society upon the decency and .
order of which the stability of the social structure so
largely depends ; if a rabid revolt against all established
things, such as disgraced the worst period of the French
Revolution, was impossible in England; the historian
must pronounce that this improvement was due, in no
small degree, to the influence of the Methodist move
ment. But it is neither in the highest nor in the lowest orders
of society that we must look for the greatest results of
Methodism. The most important fact in English his
tory during the eighteenth century is the rise of a new
middle class. Active, pushing, practical, largely occu
pied in trade and the various forms of skilled labor, the
men of this class were increasingly interested in public
affairs, and it was evident that they would sometime
hold the balance of political power in England. They
were crowding into the cities and changing the ratio of
urban to country population. They were growing
wealthy, too ; some considerable portion of the national
debt England had been piling up during the reigns of
William and Anne was already in their hands, and it
was largely their money that was to fight England's
battles for the next fifty years. To them belonged the
future ; on them, in no small degree, depended the fate
of constitutional government and the permanence of
ordered society. Neither political party could afford to
slight them; but by virtue of their humble birth and
their commercial and mechanical pursuits they were
naturally prejudiced against the landed aristocracy and
in sympathy with the Whigs. Though rather narrow
in ideas, they were active-minded and not unintelligent ;

78 JOHN WESLEY
they were coming to be a reading class. For them the
pamphlet was written ; many of the able pamphleteers,
like Defoe, were themselves of this class. Indeed, it is
easy to trace in all the literature of the time a more
democratic cast. The new school of fiction, for exam
ple, beginning with the story of a maid-of-all-work in
Richardson's "Pamela," finds its themes and its char
acters almost exclusively in the life of this middle class.
The average morality of people in this grade of society
was probably quite as healthy as that in the higher
ranks, but they had perhaps even less regard for reli
gion. Living mostly in cities and large towns, removed
from the traditional reverence which lingers longest in
the shadow of the country church, they rather prided
themselves on their emancipation from conventions.
Many of them were dissenters; but many more were
virtually without any religion. Yet to men of this
stamp the positive demands and promises of Method
ism made a powerful appeal. These were the people
who filled up Wesley's societies and furnished all his
lay preachers.
But while you can say a great many unhandsome
things truly enough against the morality of English
society of the mid-eighteenth century, the gravest charge
against that society is not that it was immoral, but that
it was irreligious. The majority of the English people
were then, as they always have been, decent and virtu
ous folk; but they were not religious. The religious
man is the man filled with a sense of the presence of
God and of the force of spiritual laws here and now,
convinced of an immediate relation between himself
and the Supreme Being. This and this only makes a
truly religious man in any age and in any country. And

THE EARLY WORK 79
this is precisely what we do not find in the men of this
eighteenth century. There were scores of deaneries
and hundreds of rectories all over the land that were
the abode of a sincere and comely churchmanship ; but
even the best men, men like Addison or Bishop Gibson
and Bishop Butler, indubitably sincere men, were not
in this highest sense religious. The test of excellence,
for the eighteenth century, in religion as well as in poli
tics, art, literature, was reason, moderation, good sense.
Everything was required to justify itself before the logi
cal intellect. Religion must, first of all, be rational,
free from superstition and from fanaticism. There
were, moreover, reasons why this temper of the age
should show itself especially in religion. The heats of
controversy ever since the Reformation in England had
wearied people of all pronounced expression of religious
opinion. The reaction against Puritanism at the time
of the Restoration had not been followed by any very
general decline of morality, but it had produced a dis
trust of all lofty ideals in politics and in religion. We
have had enough, men said, of New Lights and New
Models; now let us follow our reason like men of
sense. They were afraid, above all things, of extrava
gant pretensions, of anything that savored of enthusi
asm. The very word "Zeal" was a red rag to all Eng
lishmen for seventy-five years. It is said that the two
texts on which most sermons were preached in England
during the first half of the eighteenth century were, "Let
your moderation be known to all men," and "Be not
righteous overmuch." The school of Deists at the be
ginning of the century had attacked Christianity as
irrational; the Churchmen who defended it had been
so anxious to prove it rational that they had left little

80 JOHN WESLEY
supernatural in it. Great stress was laid on the moral
evidences of Christianity and its harmony with natural
religion ; very little was said as to its distinctively divine
and supernatural warrant. The older and more evan
gelical language fell into disuse, or was used with little
of its olden meaning. There was a special dread of
any statements that seemed to depreciate the reason
or to substitute individual emotional experiences for
rational proof. This distrust was felt very keenly by
some of the most devout Churchmen, and explains their
sincere opposition to the teaching of Wesley and his
preachers. Bishop Butler, whose "Analogy" had just
been published, said to Wesley as he was beginning his
Bristol preaching in the spring of 1739, "Sir, the pre
tending to extraordinary revelations and gifts of the
Holy Ghost is a horrid thing, a very horrid thing."
Yet the orthodox churchmanship of England at that
moment needed nothing so much as that intimate per
sonal assurance of spiritual verities which it timidly
branded as enthusiasm. Its belief was an uncertain bal
ance of probabilities. Its motives were at bottom pru
dential. Its preachers were denouncing the "folly" of
an evil life, and exhorting their hearers to make the
best of both worlds. Such a religion could not speak
with authority. It could not touch the deeper springs
of action. It might be discussed, believed, even prac
tised; to talk of "experiencing" it would be meaning
less. Moreover, a religion with so little of the conta
gious warmth of certainty could make no converts,
could stir no missionary impulse. "What is your reli
gion, my lord?" some one asked Lord Bolingbroke.
' ' The religion of all sensible men, ' ' was the reply. "Yes,
but what is that?" "Ah, that is what no sensible man

THE EARLY WORK 81
ever tells." The anecdote is told of different persons,
and may be apocryphal ; but it illustrates well enough
the limited and individual character of the convictions
most men held upon religious subjects. It is clear that
the religion of the time had little hold upon the lives
even of those who professed it. Party politics had
gathered about it; its solemn observances had been
made the condition of admission to civil office. A
prime minister could take the sacrament in St. Paul's
to qualify for office, and then go home to write an essay
against the credibility of revealed religion. The bitter
irony of men like Dean Swift and the despairing pro
test of men like Bishop Butler alike attest that the spirit
and power of religion seemed to them well-nigh worn
out of the country. Most people simply didn't think
about it. With the more reflective class a cold and
shallow optimism, like that in the writings of Pope and
Bolingbroke, took the place of faith in God and love
to man. Such words as sin, and sorrow, and love were
not in their vocabulary. The world was full of evils,
doubtless, they said, but the philosopher will not mag
nify them. No extravagant desire, no enervating sym
pathy ; either one savors of enthusiasm. It may not be
the best of all possible worlds ; but, at all events, we can
make the best of it.
" The world is very ill, we see,
We do not comprehend it :
But in one point we all agree —
God won't, — and we can't, mend it.
Being common sense it can't be sin
To take it as I find it ;
The pleasure, to take pleasure in,
The pain — try not to mind it."
These lines of a modern poet x might not inaccurately
g 1 Arthur Hugh Clough.

82 JOHN WESLEY
express the temper of thousands upon thousands of
decent and virtuous folk when Wesley began his work.
On the baser classes, not so decent or virtuous, neither
the promises nor the warnings of Christianity seemed
to have any influence.
Such was the world in which John Wesley began his
preaching in 1739. He remained in Bristol until the
middle of June, and for two years thereafter divided his
time mostly between that city and London. With his
methodical habits, he formed a plan of work in Bristol
which occupied him almost every hour for every day in
the week. Every morning he read prayers in a chapel
at Newgate; in the evening he expounded the Scrip
tures in some one of the "Societies," of which there
were several in Bristol. He had a schedule of appoint
ments to preach in the open air, every afternoon, in
places in or near Bristol, and on Sundays he usually
preached five times. Thus he preached on an average
twelve times a week, besides speaking in the Societies.
It is estimated that he preached over five hundred
times in the last nine months of that year, and only
five times in churches. He built a chapel in the Horse
Fair, near the centre of Bristol, which would provide a
convenient meeting-place for two of the largest societies,
and serve as a headquarters for Methodist work in the
city. He had intended to vest the ownership of the
chapel in eleven trustees; but on being advised by
Whitefield and other friends that this might put the
building altogether out of his control, he changed his
mind, and with the consent of the trustees, cancelled
the deed, and had the title of the property vested in him
self. It was the mode of procedure usually followed in

THE EARLY WORK 83
similar cases through all the earlier years of his preach
ing, so that in the next twenty years he became sole
proprietor of scores of Methodist Chapels all over the
island. Interested as he always was in the education
of the people, he carried through a plan proposed by
Whitefield to establish a school at Kingswood for the
children of the poor colliers. Wesley secured money,
erected a building, and opened the school early in 1740.
He enlarged Whitefield 's plan by providing instruction
evenings and in the early morning hours for colliers
who were obliged to be in the pits all day.
In the meantime, before midsummer of 1739, White-
field's open-air preaching in London had become the
sensation of the town. His audiences were even vaster
than they had been in Bristol; and he was listened to
with equal admiration by the great folk at Blackheath
and the lowest London populace in Moorfields. The
concourse in the latter place is said on some occasions
to have numbered no fewer than sixty thousand; and
Whitefield himself states in his diary that he once
preached at Hyde Park Corner to the incredibly large
audience of eighty thousand persons. When he spoke
on Kennington Common there were not boats enough
on the Thames to carry over the crowds that flocked
thither. Inevitably there was criticism and opposition.
The Methodists were charged with disturbing public
order, with turning worship into tumult and riot. It is
said that Whitefield's audiences, however large, always
listened to him attentively; indeed, they must have lis
tened if they heard anything. Yet such vast crowds in
the open air, made up largely of people not accustomed
to keep their emotions under restraint and now swayed
by the most dramatic of orators, could hardly be ex-

84 JOHN WESLEY
pected to observe a churchly decorum. It is not strange
that this mode of preaching, which until very lately had
seemed to Wesley an inexcusable violation of the rev
erent proprieties of worship, should be bitterly opposed
by most of the clergy. Whitefield did not use the lit
urgy; his prayers were extemporaneous; and he cer
tainly employed in the delivery of his sermons all the
arts both of the actor and the popular orator. He was
indubitably sincere and intensely in earnest ; but many
candid people, churchmen and dissenters, in sympathy
with his purposes, had to admit that they could find
but little content of clear and sound thought in his ser
mons, and that he frequently allowed himself violent or
extravagant language unbecoming in a preacher of the
Gospel. The good Dr. Doddridge, who heard him on
Kennington Common, thought him a sincere, "but a
weak man — much too positive, says rash things, and is
bold and enthusiastic. I think what he says and does
come but little short of an assumption of inspiration or
infallibility." And Dr. Watts, in an interview with the
eloquent young field preacher in August of this year,
felt it necessary to warn him against the irregularities
and imprudences which youth and zeal might lead him
into. In truth, the permanent measurable results of
Whitefield's preaching seem to have been disproportion
ate to its temporary influence. It was of incalculable
value in turning the serious attention of so many thou
sands to matters of religion; yet when one considers
how vast were the multitudes that followed to hear the
preacher, one is surprised to find no evidence that any
considerable number of them joined the churches or
any of the religious societies in London. Whitefield
was a preacher and little else; he had not the gift to

THE EARLY WORK 85
confirm and teach and shepherd his converts. In this
respect, as in many others, he was in striking contrast
with Wesley.
It was this very superiority of Wesley as teacher and
pastor, however, that specially exposed him to ecclesi
astical censure. He was doing the work that, in a very
special sense, belonged to the parish priest. Bishop
Butler said to him in Bristol, "Sir, since you ask my
advice, I will give it freely — you have no business here ;
you are not commissioned to preach in this diocese.
Therefore I advise you to go hence." Samuel Wesley,
who could not bring himself to approve the action of
his brothers, only a few days before, his death wrote
to his mother: "My brothers design separation. They
are already forbidden all the pulpits in London ; and to
preach in that diocese is actual schism. In all likeli
hood it will come to the same all over England, if the
bishops have courage enough. ... As I told Jack,
I am not afraid the Church should excommunicate him
(discipline is at too low an ebb), but that he should ex
communicate the Church. It is pretty near it." It is
idle to deny that the conduct of Wesley and Whitefield
was irregular. There was no provision in the polity of
the Church of England for such work as they were do
ing. To preach in the fields, to abridge or abandon the
liturgy, to organize within the parishes of Church of Eng
land priests "societies" and "bands," fashioned after a
Moravian model and governed by rules of their own
devising, to persist in teaching which, whether in har
mony with the doctrines of the Church or not, was dis
approved and disavowed by the bishops of the dioceses
where they taught, — all this was certainly in disregard,
if not in defiance, of ecclesiastical order and discipline.

86 JOHN WESLEY
Wesley's only defence was that he must obey God
rather than man. He had no thought of leaving the
Church and no wish to violate its discipline. The doc
trines he taught were, he claimed, only those which the
Church of England had always professed, but now for
gotten. His violations of discipline were forced upon
him ; he preached in the fields only because he was not
allowed to preach anywhere else. In a letter written
in the summer of 1739 to a friend who charged him
with intermeddling "with souls that did not belong to
him," he states his position at length and with much
feeling : —
"God in Scripture commands me according to my
power to instruct the ignorant, reform the wicked,
confirm the virtuous. Man forbids me to do this in
another's parish ; that is, in effect to do it at all : seeing
I have now no parish of my own, nor probably ever
shall. Whom then shall I hear: God or Man? . . .
I look upon the world as my parish ; thus far, I mean,
that, in whatever part of it I am, I judge it meet,
right, and my bounden duty to declare unto all that are
willing to hear the glad tidings of salvation."
It was the misfortune of the Church that its authori
ties could not perceive the sore need at that time of
just such a man as this ; that they could not overlook
any extravagances or minor errors for the sake of that
assured faith and intense devotion which could put new
warmth and vigor into the Church and lead thousands of
unchurched people into a righteous and pious life.
The fear of fanatical excitement from the influence
of the Methodists was heightened, and to a certain
extent justified, by a series of singular physical effects
attending the preaching of Wesley, in and about Bris-

THE EARLY WORK 87
tol, during this summer. At the meetings in societies
or in private houses, scenes like the following, described
in the Journal, were for a time not infrequent : —
"April 21. At Weaver's Hall a young man was sud
denly seized with violent trembling all over, and in a
few moments sank to the ground. But we ceased not
calling upon God, till he raised him up full of peace
and joy."
"May 21. In the evening I was interrupted at Nicho
las Street almost as soon as I had begun to speak by
the cries of one who was pricked at the heart and
strongly groaned for pardon and peace. Yet I went on
to declare what God had already done in proof of that
important truth that he is 'not willing that any should
perish, but that all should come to repentance.' An
other person dropped down, close to one who was a
strong assertor of the contrary doctrine. While he
stood astonished at the sight, a little boy near him was
seized in the same manner. A young man who stood
up behind fixed his eyes on him, and sank down him
self as one dead ; but soon began to roar out, and beat
himself against the ground, so that six men could
scarcely hold him. His name was Thomas Maxfield."
"June 22. In the society one before me dropped
down as dead, and presently a second, and a third.
Five others sank down in half an hour ; most of whom
were in violent agonies. In their trouble we called upon
the Lord and he gave us an answer of peace."
About sixty such cases of physical prostration, some
few painful and prolonged, but most of short duration,
are recorded in the Journal. In some instances such
symptoms may have been simulated, and in many
more the hysterical excitement may have been half-

88 JOHN WESLEY
unconsciously welcomed by the subject as a sign of
genuine repentance. It is significant that when Charles
Wesley, on one occasion, announced before beginning
his sermon, that any "stricken down" during the
preaching would be quietly removed from the room, no
one was stricken. Yet most of the cases recorded in
the Journal are indubitably genuine. The careful
reader will notice, however, that the seizures seldom
occurred at any of Wesley's services in the open air,
but generally, though not always, in small and crowded
rooms; and that they were nearly all confined to the
vicinity of Bristol, and to a period of a few months in
the summer of 1739. It is not true that they charac
terized the Methodist movement, or that they accom
panied the preaching of Wesley throughout his career ;
indeed, they were not experienced by any considerable
number of his converts even in that year. It is singular
that no such results attended the preaching of White-
field, though far more impassioned than Wesley's.
Whitefield, in fact, wrote to expostulate with Wesley
for encouraging such physical manifestations. But
Wesley never did encourage them. Nor was his
preaching drastic and minatory; he did not terrify
people with lurid pictures of future punishment; on
the contrary, "it is evident from the Journal that his
preaching was concerned almost entirely with the invi
tations and promises of the Gospel. Yet while Wesley
was less eloquent than Whitefield, he spoke by prefer
ence, not like Whitefield to vast audiences, but to
a small company gathered immediately about him.
Whitefield sought to sway a multitude as one man;
Wesley sought to influence immediately individual men.
It is evident that his calm and simple but direct and

THE EARLY WORK 89
intense address must have been very impressive. He
expected that men who came to hear him as drunkards,
thieves, brawlers, would go away converted — thence
forth to be pious and righteous men. And they did,
by hundreds. Preaching like Wesley's had not been
heard in England for near a century; and it is not at
all strange that it should have been sometimes attended
by such physical phenomena as have always been fre
quent in periods of strong emotional excitement. And
if these phenomena do not prove the teaching that
seems to occasion them to be true, they certainly do
not prove it to be false or even fanatical.
Wesley himself undoubtedly believed these strange
experiences to be due to supernatural influence, some
times divine, sometimes diabolical, and sometimes with
a curious logic, he seems to ascribe them to both. Yet
he was careful not to vouch for their supernatural char
acter. He says: "I relate just what I saw. Some of
the circumstances seem to go beyond the ordinary
course of nature. But I do not peremptorily deter
mine whether they were supernatural or not. Much
less do I rest upon them either the proof of other facts,
or of the doctrines which I preached." To his brother
Samuel, who was much disturbed by what he heard of
John's preaching, he wrote protesting that his work
should not be judged by any such strange physical ac
companiments, whatever be their cause, but rather by
the fact that in hundreds of instances, in his meetings,
the lion had been changed to the lamb, the drunkard
to the sober man, the spirit of despair to the spirit of
hope and peace. These, he says, justly, are my "liv
ing arguments."
The truth is, Wesley's own temperament was so cool

90 JOHN WESLEY
and self-possessed that he often overestimated the sig
nificance of emotion in hearers of a more unrestrained
disposition. He measured these outward expressions by
the strength of the causes he knew would have been
necessary to produce them in himself. It is quite true
that only something very like a miracle could ever have
made him fall in convulsions, or lose in any wise his
self-control; he did not realize that the average man,
without culture and the restraint that comes of long
obedience to the conventions of society, can be violently
moved without any very unusual agency.
In August of 1739, Whitefield left England for an
other visit to America. After this Wesley naturally
found it necessary to be oftener in London, though his
brother Charles was in an especial sense in charge of
the work there, and was recognized as the pastor of the
Moravians and Methodists of London. Wesley had no
thought of founding a new sect, or building up any elabo
rate religious organization. He was intent only on
carrying the Gospel everywhere, and especially on car
rying it to those who seemed to have otherwise little
chance of hearing it. But the religious movement
which was now beginning to have influence and recog
nition — friendly or hostile — over a great part of the
south of England, evidently needed some direction and
control. Hundreds of people were beginning a reli
gious life who had never seen the inside of a church,
and with whom the regular parish clergy had little sym
pathy. It was important that they should have some
uniform and intelligent teaching, and some sort of help
ful religious association. Little by little, without in
tending to make or to assume any such position, Wesley

THE EARLY WORK

9i

found himself coming to the leadership of a definite,
closely centralized organization.
The first step toward such an organization was the
separation of the Methodists from the Moravians. The
Fetter Lane Society, as we have seen, was originally
composed largely of Moravians, and their doctrine
and discipline provoked at first no dissent from the other
members. But as the number of members increased
from the preaching of the Wesleys and Whitefield, there
began to be discord. This tendency was increased
when a Moravian pastor from Jena, named Molther,
appeared on the scene late in 1739 and attempted to
impose his views upon the society. Molther advocated
a pronounced form of quietism. If the brethren had
not yet received the desired gift of faith, — and he in
duced many of them to be in doubt of it, — they were
instructed to wait for it in quiet. Molther discouraged
all active effort, all use of the "means of grace." Indeed,
there were, he said, no means of grace, grace being the
immediate gift of God. Reading the Scriptures, speak
ing or exhortation, even prayer and the Lord's Supper,
were means on which the soul might come to depend, and
so were not helps but hindrances to the attainment of
faith ; while the confirmed believer was at liberty to use
these and any other religious ordinances and exercises,
but equally at liberty not to use them. To Wesley such
doctrine as this was a dangerous heresy. Whatever
theories of Christian experience he may have held at
various times, his test of the religious life was always
outward and practical. He could have little patience,
therefore, with teaching that seemed to cut the nerve of
all useful activity, and to enjoin an attitude of passive
expectancy or enjoyment. And any sympathy with

92 JOHN WESLEY
this quietism was doubly impossible for him now that
he had entered upon his more active evangelistic work.
The Moravians, on the other hand, looked with dislike
on the public and aggressive methods of Whitefield
and the Wesleys, and disapproved the tumult and
physical excitement that accompanied their preaching.
Moreover, they were jealous of the predominance of
the Wesleys in the Fetter Lane Society, and charged
them with arrogance and self-seeking. Alarmed at the
growing differences in the Fetter Lane Society, Wesley
came up to London in June with the hope to compose
them. But his efforts then, and during longer visits in
the course of the next year, were of little avail. Many of
his converts, who had been devout and active, now, under
the Moravian influence, had come to doubt whether
they were ever in the faith, and were disposed to "be
still" till they found out. They not only gave up the
ordinances of religion themselves, but persuaded others
to do so, and shocked Wesley by talking of "the folly of
running about to church and sacrament." The meet
ings of the society were either disputatious or dull and
lifeless. "Nothing of brotherly love among them,"
says Wesley of one evening, "but a harsh, dry, heavy,
stupid spirit. For two hours they looked one at an
other, when they looked up at all, as if one-half of them
was afraid of the other." Molther, who since his ar
rival had learned to preach in tolerable English, in the
spring of 1740 practically assumed the leadership of
the society. He was earnest and conscientious, but
more arrogant than became his years and knowledge,
and he at once assumed, as Bohler had done, the supe
rior attitude toward Wesley of spiritual counsellor.
But Wesley had learned much for himself in the past

THE EARLY WORK 93
year, and was not likely to take the position of humble
disciple before this young divinity student. They had
two long conferences, in which, as might have been
expected, they did little but to reaffirm with greater
emphasis each his own opinions. Wesley labored by
preaching and by private counsel and expostulation to
check the heresy; but the Molther faction was too
strong within the society, and at last, at the middle of
July, 1740, he was informed that he could no longer
preach in the Fetter Lane rooms. The next Sunday
evening, at the close of the love feast, he rose in his
place and read a paper in which he had set down
briefly the points at issue between himself and his Mo
ravian brethren ; and after protesting that he had done
all in his power to convince them of their error, solemnly
declared that he must withdraw from them, and invited
any like minded to accompany him. Without another
word he left the room, and eighteen or nineteen fol
lowed him. From that hour the Moravian and the
Methodist movement were separate. One must regret
a sharp difference between bodies of Christians who
had so much in common. Yet the separation, one can
now see, was sure to come sooner or later, and it was
fortunate for Methodism. It is probably true, as Wes
ley claimed, that the doctrines of Molther and his sup
porters were not sanctioned by the general authorities
of the Moravian Church ; but the genus of Moravian-
ism and that of Methodism were essentially different.
The tendency to isolation and clannishness, the intro
spection and overemphasis upon inner spiritual states,
the insistence upon quiet and distrust of active evan
gelical effort, — all these characteristics of the Mora
vian temper would have ill suited with the work

94 JOHN WESLEY
Wesley and his preachers had to do in the next half-
century. The "eighteen or nineteen" who withdrew with John
Wesley from the Fetter Lane Society found another
and yet more memorable society waiting to receive
them. Near the close of 1739, eight or ten persons ear
nestly desirous of leading a religious life came to Wes
ley, who was then in London, with a request that he
would meet them regularly for prayer and counsel. He
agreed to do so, as long as possible, and named Thurs
day evening as the time for such meeting. As he says,
in telling the story, "The first evening about twelve
persons came; the next week thirty or forty. When
they were increased to about a hundred, I took down
their names and places of abode, intending, as often
as it was convenient, to call upon them at their houses.
Thus, without any previous plan, began the Methodist
Society in England, — a company of people associating
together to help each other to work out their own salva
tion." This was the first of those United Societies, which
were the units of the great Methodist organization that
was soon to spread over the island. This society found,
almost as soon as it was formed, a place of meeting
which was to become famous in the annals of Method
ism. In the autumn of 1739 the weather was unusu
ally cold, and Wesley, who had been preaching in the
open air, accepted the invitation of two gentlemen in
London, then unknown to him, that he should preach
one November Sunday in a building then unused and
vacant. Thirty years before, an accidental explosion
had wrecked this building, in which cannon were then

THE EARLY WORK 95
being cast for the government, blowing off the roof, and
killing several workmen. The authorities then decided
to remove the ordnance works to Woolwich, and left this
old Foundery in ruins. This was the gaunt and ruinous
structure in which Wesley preached, and which he de
cided shortly after to purchase and refit as a preaching
place and centre for his work in London, such as he
had recently secured in Bristol. Money was borrowed
to be repaid by subscriptions as fast as possible ; some
partial repairs were made to render the place habitable,
and it was at once put to use for preaching and the
meetings of the society. It stood on Windmill Street,
near Finsbury Square, in a region where Wesley had
frequently preached. When the alterations and re
pairs were completed it furnished a preaching room
with benches on the floor and in the galleries running
round the sides, that would accommodate some fifteen
hundred people. The men sat in the side galleries
and on one side of the main floor, the women on the
other side and in the front gallery. Behind this room
there was a "band room" seating some three hundred.
One end of this room was seated, with desks, for a
school; at the other end was an office or "Book Room"
where Wesley's publications were sold. On the second
story, over the band room, apartments were fitted up
for Wesley's use, and here his mother passed her last
years. An adjoining house was used for Wesley's as
sistants. Chapel, band room, parsonage, school, book
store, dispensary, loan office — this building was for
thirty-eight years the headquarters of Methodism and
centre of all its varied forms of religious and charitable
work. And almost every day, through all those years,
its little bell called London Methodists to some service

96 JOHN WESLEY
of prayer or praise or preaching. This was the home
of the society to which those who had withdrawn from
Fetter Lane now joined themselves.
The London Society, reenforced by these seceders
from Fetter Lane, and free from the dissensions of the
last year, now grew rapidly; by the close of 1741 it
numbered more than a thousand members. Meantime
a similar organization was being effected in Bristol.
There were in that city when Wesley first visited it sev
eral small societies ; it was for the special use of two of
them that he had built the Horse Fair Chapel. The
other Methodists in Bristol were now united with these
into one society, like that in London, meeting in the
new chapel. The Kingswood people formed a society
by themselves, meeting in their schoolhouse. These,.
with one formed about this time in Bath, were the only
societies formally organized up to the end of 1740.
Persons were admitted to these societies only by Wes
ley and his brother Charles, and were given "tickets,"
attesting their membership and good standing. These
tickets they were required to have renewed every quar
ter. Members idle or disorderly, or proving to be
indifferent to a religious life, after warning and exhor
tation, were dropped. Thus at first the Wesleys main
tained a direct supervision of the societies, and strove to
have individual knowledge of the needs and the con
duct of all their members. But this soon became im
possible. In London Wesley soon found it necessary
to appoint certain members of the society to visit the
sick and the poor, and to report weekly. But there
was evident and growing need of some more constant
and detailed religious supervision and counsel than the
Wesleys could possibly give. It was impossible for

THE EARLY WORK

97

them to meet personally, even once a quarter, the two
thousand or more Methodists scattered through London
and Bristol. The system of "Classes" which met this
need sprang up in a quite unpremeditated way; it was
not a device but a fortunate suggestion. One day
early in 1742, the Bristol Society were discussing means
to pay the debt that still remained on their chapel.
One of the members proposed that every one should
bring a penny to the evening meeting; and when it
was objected that some were too poor to give even that,
he volunteered to see eleven other members, during
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 fell into groups of
twelve. "Then," says Wesley, "it struck me immedi
ately, this is the very thing we have wanted so long."
He called together the collectors, or "leaders," as they
were thereafter called, and asked them to make a
weekly report upon the behavior of those whom they
visited. After a little it was found inconvenient for the
leader to meet the members of his group at their own
houses; many of them, being apprentices or servants,
had no houses of their own. It was arranged that they
should all meet him weekly, at a specified hour and
place; and this was the Methodist "Class Meeting."
The class leaders were appointed by Wesley, and met
him at least once a quarter to give a detailed report of
the condition of those intrusted to their charge. It was
largely to receive these reports, and to give to the lead
ers his personal counsel and oversight that Wesley, in
the next forty years, made his continual journeyings
from one end of England to the other.
This plan was not received at first without some

98 JOHN WESLEY
natural opposition. Dissatisfied members claimed that
they had not assented to any such supervision when
they joined the societies ; that they themselves had no
voice in the election or dismissal of the leaders; that
those leaders were often incompetent, neither wiser nor
better than those they assumed to lead. But Wesley
replied that it would be folly to refuse to adopt so good
a plan simply because they had not been wise enough
to think of it earlier; that while he refused to intrust
the appointment of leaders to any one else, he was always
ready to hear complaints if well supported, and if it
seemed necessary, to replace unsatisfactory leaders by
better ones. And experience amply proved Wesley to
be right in his estimate of the value of the class meeting.
It is difficult to conceive a form of association more
profitable for the early Methodists, — however it may
be for the later ones, — more likely to promote a prac
tical, everyday religion, than this meeting, in small
groups, of people of similar tastes, occupation, and social
position, for counsel upon all matters pertaining to the
daily conduct of life. And Wesley saw, of course, that
by the appointment of the leaders and by his plan of
quarterly visitation, he could maintain that close per
sonal supervision of all the societies which he rightly
deemed necessary to the unity and coherence of the
movement now growing so rapidly. Wesley was not
ambitious; never man had less of the selfish lust of
power. If he slowly and half unconsciously perfected
one of the most completely centralized ecclesiastical
systems ever devised, it was because he felt himself
deeply responsible for the instruction and guidance of
the multitudes converted by his preaching, and found
himself left almost alone to care for them. If for years

THE EARLY WORK

99

he held all the reins of power in his own hands, it was
because there was no one else to hold them. One of
the greatest administrators that ever lived, he could
touch nothing without leaving upon it the stamp of his
own energetic individuality; but he did nothing from
the motive of personal aggrandizement.
One thing more was needed to complete the network
of Wesley's institutions. To this Wesley soon felt him
self forced. It must be remembered that the Metho
dist organization was, in Wesley's thought, entirely
within the English Church. His societies were not,
like the dissenting bodies, formed to provide for preach
ing and the administration of the sacraments ; they were
purely private associations for religious culture. It is
true, as we have seen, that Wesley had strained ecclesi
astical discipline rather severely by forming such soci
eties without any reference to the parochial clergy or
episcopal control, requiring of their members no formal
recognition of the Church, and building meeting
houses for their use, the ownership of which vested in
himself. Yet he still held that there was nothing in
their constitution or usages essentially in violation of
the canons of the Church. The societies met on Sun
days, but never at the hours of church service. At
these meetings there was preaching if Wesley or any
other clergyman in orders was present and would
preach; if not, the hour was spent in prayer and reli
gious conference and exhortation. But by the end of
1740, Wesley and his brother Charles were almost the
only clergymen in London or Bristol who would take
part with the Methodists. Whitefield was in America.
Of his other old Oxford friends who were in orders

ioo JOHN WESLEY
Clayton, the High Churchman, now resident in Man
chester, was out of sympathy with Wesley, Ingham
was in Yorkshire and just about to go over to the Mora
vians, whom Gambold had already joined. The in
creasing number of Methodists were left largely without
the ministrations of the clergy. Wesley always encour
aged them to attend church in the parishes where they
resided, and some of the London society did communi
cate in their own parishes; but they were slow to pre
sent themselves where they were evidently not wel
come. In the autumn of 1741, Wesley was offered by
a French clergyman the use of his small church in
Wapping, and there he and his brother, for five succes
sive Sundays, administered the Sacrament of the Lord's
Supper to members of the Foundery Society, over a
thousand in all. Charles Wesley performed the same
office for the Kingswood colliers in their school build
ing, and declared, good Churchman as he was, that if
there were no other place allowed, he would have ad
ministered that Sacrament in the open air.
Still more serious, if possible, was the lack of author
ized teaching and preaching. From exhorting before
a society to formal preaching before it, would seem only
a step; but to Wesley it seemed more than doubtful
whether any layman ought to take that step. The
master of the Kingswood School was one John Cennick,
the son of Quakers, who had passed from a reckless
youth, through an experience very like Bunyan's, to a
cheerful and active manhood. There was a vein of
poetry in him, and two of his hymns, — "Children of
the Heavenly King" and "Thou Dear Redeemer, dying
Lamb," are still widely sung. Cennick is said to have
preached before coming to Kingswood; and he cer-

THE EARLY WORK 101
tainly spoke publicly several times in the autumn of
1739, with the approval of Wesley. Perhaps his posi
tion as teacher was thought to give some warrant for
his more public exhortations; at all events, Wesley
seemed to think Cennick' s action afforded no prece
dent for the next case of lay preaching. Thomas Max-
field, whose conversion had been attended by such
striking physical excitement,1 had gone from Bristol to
London as the companion or servant of Charles Wes
ley. One day early in 1740, word came to Bristol that
Thomas Maxfield had been preaching before the Foun
dery Society. Wesley in alarm hurried up to London to
stop such presumption. But his mother — who had
recently taken up residence in a room of the Foundery
building — met him with a protest, "John, take heed
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 what seemeth him good. What am I that I
should withstand God?" Convinced, in spite of deep-
rooted disinclination, he sanctioned Maxfield as a
lay preacher. Within a year there were twenty lay
preachers. Of course this innovation met with the warmest op
position, especially from the authorities of the Church.
The Archbishop of Armagh said to Charles Wesley
some years later, "I knew your brother well; I could
never credit all I heard respecting him and you; but
one thing in your conduct I could never account for —
1 See p. 87.

102 JOHN WESLEY
your employing laymen." "My Lord," said Charles,
"the fault is yours and your brethren's." "How so ? "
asked the Archbishop. " Because you hold your peace,
and the stones cry out." "But I am told," urged
the primate, "that they are unlearned men." "Some
are," said Charles, and added with ready wit, "and so
the dumb ass rebukes the prophet." , Both John and
Charles Wesley were always very sensitive to the charge
that in sanctioning this class of helpers they had vio
lated the laws of the Church. To touch that point,
John avowed, was to touch the apple of his eye. He
persistently, and no doubt justly, claimed that there
was nothing in the constitution of the Established
Church to forbid such lay preaching; he would never
consent that the preachers should call themselves min
isters, administer the sacraments, or assume any priestly
functions. "They no more take upon themselves to
be priests than kings," he said. At first it was under
stood that they were to be employed only in cases of
necessity when the services of a clergyman were not to
be had. But the principle once yielded, the need of
such helpers was soon urgent. With their assistance, the
work of Wesley, thus far mostly confined to London and
Bristol and vicinity, could now be spread rapidly over
,the island. Wesley's itinerant career was about to begin.
But just as Wesley's plans for a wider extension of
his work were taking definite shape, a theological
difference alienated for a time his friend and colleague
Whitefield, and caused a division in the forces of
Methodism which, unfortunately, was to be perma
nent. So long as Wesley and Whitefield were intent
almost wholly upon the effort to induce men to turn

THE EARLY WORK 103
from sin to righteousness of life, there was little dan
ger that their harmony of purpose should be disturbed
by any difference on points of dogma. But when,
at the next stage of the work, it became necessary to
instruct their converts, any marked divergence of
opinion on doctrines they deemed essential was sure
to show itself. The two men, it soon became evident,
had taken up opposite positions upon that unsolved
and insoluble question of the relation of the Divine
Will to human destiny. Whitefield had always in
clined to that view of this question which is identified.
with the name of Calvin; and this inclination had
been much strengthened by his visits to America,
He had made the acquaintance of Jonathan Edwards
and most of the other eminent divines in the colonies.
He was in New England during the "Great Awaken
ing " of 1739-1741, and was deeply impressed by the
type of religious life and thought he saw there. Be
fore his return to England in the summer of 1741,
he had adopted in its most positive form the doctrine
of election. Wesley, on the other hand, even in his
undergraduate days, had wrestled with the problem
and reached an exactly opposite conclusion. As he
said in a letter to his mother, as early as 1725: "An
everlasting purpose of God to deliver some from dam
nation does, I suppose, exclude from that deliver
ance all who are not chosen. And if it was inevitably
decreed from eternity that such a determinate part of
mankind should be saved, and none beside them, a
vast majority of the world were only born to eternal
death, without so much as a possibility of avoiding
it. How is this consistent with either the Divine
justice or mercy?"

104 JOHN WESLEY
His work as an evangelist had greatly strength
ened that conclusion. It seemed to him impossible
to present to men a Gospel which it had been divinely
determined most of them could not accept, — a mock
ery to proclaim the justice, much more the love, of a
God who had eternally decreed that a majority of his
creatures should sin and be punished therefor. White-
field, on his side, deemed it an insult to the sover
eignty of God to declare that he had provided a plan
for the salvation of all men which had proved a fail
ure; to admit that the Divine Will was balked and
defeated by man's disobedience. To say that men
would not accept the salvation God willed them to
receive, was more disrespectful to the Divine Maj
esty than to say they could not. If God willed all
men to be saved, why, then, he urged upon Wesley,
all men must be saved, or God's plan be frustrate.
Moreover, the doctrine of election, so far from caus
ing in the believer, as Wesley said it must, a kind of
pride in the divine favoritism, is a cause of deepest
humility. For he is saved precisely not because he
is better than his fellow-men, not because he has done
anything to merit or earn his salvation which they
might have done if they would; he is saved because
of "free, distinguishing grace." In short, each man
saw his own side of the argument, and could not see
the other. They could not agree that in this, as in
every other of the great vexed questions of the ages,
there is truth on both sides, — truths that could only
be reconciled if our little wisdom could penetrate to
the Counsels of Omniscience.
It may seem singular that in this controversy, Wes
ley, the logician, should hold by experience and the

THE EARLY WORK 105
moral instincts, while Whitefield, the impassioned
orator, should be with the logicians. But Wesley
viewed this and every other question from the stand
point of human need. In this world of sin and sor
row, he was not anxious to prove a theodicy; he was
anxious to help mankind. He was a logician, but he
was first of all an evangelist; and the evangelist,
though he may think like a Calvinist in his study,
must preach like an Arminian in the fields and the
streets. Into the details of the controversy we » need not
enter at length. Wesley had been so careful to avoid
all occasion of dispute, that a member of the London
Society who was an ardent believer in predestination
accused him of not preaching the whole truth because
he never mentioned that doctrine in his sermons.
Thus challenged, Wesley thought it best to declare
himself publicly, and in the summer of 1739 preached
a sermon on "Free Grace." Whitefield, just then
setting out for America, besought him not to publish
it; but Wesley, helped to a decision, it is said, by
casting a lot which said "Preach and print," decided
he must, and printed the sermon. A copy was sent
to Whitefield in Savannah, and called out from him
immediately a long letter of eager protest and expos
tulation, followed in the next few months by three or
four others in the same strain. He is "ten thousand
times more convinced of the truth of election" than
when he was in England, but he deprecates all dispute ;
he "would rather die than see a division" between
Wesley and himself, yet "how can I avoid it," he
cries, "if you go about, as your brother Charles once
said, to drive John Calvin out of Bristol?" To all

106 JOHN WESLEY
which Wesley replied in calmer tone that there were
bigots for predestination and bigots against it, and
that Whitefield and he must be content, for a time,
to hold different opinions on that subject. But
Whitefield's temper, as seen in his later letters, was
growing less conciliatory, and on the voyage home he
prepared a reply which he printed immediately on his
arrival, in March, 1741, — in spite of the advice of
Charles Wesley, " Put up again thy sword in its
sheath." The pamphlet contained little argument;
but it made the controversy personal, and embittered
it by introducing some charges against Wesley which
had nothing to do with the matter in debate. A fort
night later the two friends had an interview. Wesley
met Whitefield's impetuous protests by stating, in his
usual calm and methodical fashion, his own griev
ances. The pamphlet, he said, need not have been
printed; but if printed, it certainly should not have
introduced his name, still less should it have contained
such irrelevant and injurious personal matter as must
make some breach in their friendship inevitable.
The period of estrangement that followed was not,
indeed, of long duration. Six months afterward,
Whitefield, with his warm-hearted frankness, asked
pardon of Wesley for the ill-judged personal refer
ences in his pamphlet, and their correspondence was
renewed. But there was never again quite the old
confidence between them; and their work hereafter
was to be done mostly in separation.
The schism in the Methodist societies had already
begun before Whitefield's return. John Cennick,
the young Kingswood schoolmaster, had accepted
Calvinistic views, and in the later months of 1740

THE EARLY WORK 107
was spreading dissatisfaction among the members
of the Bristol Society at what he chose to think the
dangerous teaching of the Wesleys. With a droll
self-importance he wrote to Whitefield complaining
that Charles and John Wesley were preaching like
atheists against predestination among the frightened
sheep, and he alone, in the midst of this plague, sat
solitary like Eli, wondering what would become of
the ark. On going to Bristol, Wesley found that all
sorts of rumors had been set afloat concerning him
self and his brother. He expostulated with Cennick
for thus accusing them behind their backs, and foment
ing trouble in the society. Cennick, however, denied
that he had made any private accusations against
Wesley and, on being confronted with his letter to
Whitefield, protested before the society, with charac
teristic assurance, that there was nothing but truth
in the letter, and that he had no wish to retract it.
Wesley waited a week for the offenders to change
their attitude, and then at a meeting of the society
read a paper declaring that, unless they should openly
confess their faults, "several members" would be
dropped, "not for their opinions, nor for any of them
(whether they be right or wrong), but for scoffing at
the word and ministers of God, tale-bearing, back
biting and evil speaking; for their dissembling, lying,
and slandering." Cennick was hardly likely to plead
guilty to such charges as these, and a few days after
wards he withdrew from the society, with fifty-one
others, protesting to the last that he was a martyr
for the doctrine of predestination. He was doubtless
sincere; but he was rather pragmatic and disputa
tious, and sometimes mistook his obstinacy for his

108 JOHN WESLEY
duty. The action of Wesley in the circumstances,
though severe, was just, and certainly was wise. The
usefulness of the society would have been destroyed
at once, if it had fallen into factions and lost confi
dence in its leader.
Wesley was careful to affirm, and with perfect truth,
that none were expelled from his societies for their
opinions; yet it was but natural that, for the future,
those who held to the views of Whitefield should ally
themselves with him. As Wesley put it, "There were
now two sorts of Methodists: those for particular,
and those for universal redemption." If he lost
thereby many adherents, those who remained were
more closely united in sympathy with him and each
other, and his work in the next twenty years gained
greatly from such union, in effectiveness and consist
ency. Thus, by the summer of 1742, Wesley found him
self at the head of a definite religious movement, with
a large body of devoted followers, organized in a sim
ple but most efficient manner which kept them under
his constant supervision, and with an increasing num
ber of loyal helpers selected by himself and under his
direction. And all this as a result of no ambitious
plans of his own, but rather of a series of events which
he could not deem other than providential.

CHAPTER V
THE EXTENSION OP THE WORK
I 742-I 760
Up to the year 1742 Wesley's work had been con
fined mostly to the vicinity of London and Bristol.
He had preached in Windsor, Bath, Southampton,
and various other places in the south of England,
but he had not yet visited the north. He was now
to spread the influence of Methodism rapidly in that
direction. Within the next ten years his societies
were dotted thickly over all the northern counties.
One of his earliest lay preachers was John Nelson,
a Yorkshire stone-mason who was converted while
working at his trade in London. Nelson was a big,
good-natured giant, full of good sense as well as of
religion, and being withal an excellent stone-mason,
when he went home to Yorkshire, he gave his fellow-
villagers in Birstall a good notion of Methodism, and
soon gathered a little society there. It was at the in
vitation of Nelson that Wesley, in May, 1742, started
for the north. He stopped on the way at Donning-
ton Park, the seat of the Countess of Huntingdon,
to see an old friend, Miss Cowper, then in her last
illness, and reached Birstall on a Wednesday even
ing. That night he had a long conference with Nelson
and next day preached twice to his people, meeting
109

no JOHN WESLEY
many of them for individual counsel. On Friday
he pushed on to Newcastle, — reading Xenophon's
" Memorabilia " as he went, — reaching there in the
late afternoon. As he rode into the town he was
shocked at the wretchedness and vice that filled the
streets. So much drunkenness, cursing, and swear
ing even from the mouths of little children he had
never heard before in so short a time. Here evidently
was a place that needed him. At seven o'clock Sun
day morning he walked to the meanest part of the
town, and, standing with his servant John Taylor at
the end of a street, began to sing the Hundredth
Psalm. Three or four people lounged out to see what
was going on, and as the crowd soon grew to as many
hundreds, Wesley began to preach; before he was
through, there were twelve or fifteen hundred. At
the close of his sermon, as they stood gaping in blank
astonishment, he said: "If you desire to know who I
am, my name is John Wesley. At five in the even
ing, with God's help, I design to preach here again."
That evening the audience must have been ten times
as large as in the morning, for Wesley — who had
preached to great crowds — declares that he had
never seen so many people together, and that, though
his voice was strong and full, he could not make the
half of them hear. He preached to them on the text,
"I will heal their backslidings, I will love them freely; "
and when he was through the poor people crowded
upon him with expressions of joy and gratitude till
he was "almost trodden under foot out of pure love
and kindness." He escaped to his' inn by a side
street, but numbers of them were there before him,
beseeching him not to leave them, or at least to stay

THE EXTENSION OF THE WORK in
a few days more. He was obliged to deny them, as
he had promised to be back with Nelson again on
Tuesday; but that Sunday convinced him that New
castle must be a centre of his work in the future. Four
months later Charles Wesley came down to Newcastle
for a time, and in the late autumn John himself returned
and spent six weeks there. Nowhere had the results
of his preaching been more encouraging. The people
flocked to hear him, and there was little or none of
the riotous opposition he often had to encounter else
where. Some instances of the physical prostration
that had accompanied his first preaching in Bristol
are mentioned in the Journal; but in general there
was remarkably little unhealthy excitement of any
kind. As Wesley himself phrases it, "I never saw a
work of God so evenly and gradually carried on."
Among the most interesting entries in the Journal
at this time are those which record his visits to the
small mining towns in the vicinity of Newcastle,
Chowden, Pelton, Burtley, Placey. The poor col
liers of this northern region were, if possible, more
ignorant and lawless than those at Kingswood had
been. Placey had a bad preeminence. Its inhabit
ants were all colliers, knowing nothing of any kind
of religion, and the despair and dread of all decent
persons. Sunday was their weekly festival, when
men, women, and children turned out to dance, play
at ball or chuck-farthing, cursing, swearing, fighting,
in an orgy of drunken hilarity. Yet when Wesley
rode out one day, in the teeth of a blinding storm of
sleet, and preached to these people morning and after
noon, they listened attentively, and in the next four
days many of them began a different life. Years

ii2 JOHN WESLEY
after Wesley said with a touch of fond pride that his
honest, simple-hearted colliers of Placey were a pat
tern to all his societies. He nowhere found more
earnest or consistent Christians than many of these
"wild, staring, loving" folk of the north; but they
were very unconventional. One afternoon while he
was preaching in Pelton, an old collier, unaccustomed
to hear such good things, in the middle of the sermon
began shouting amain, "for mere satisfaction and
joy of heart." Their usual mode of expressing ap
proval was by slapping Wesley on the back, which,
he says, "somewhat surprised me at first."
Wesley was deeply moved by the poverty and
wretchedness of the lowest classes throughout this
mining region. One day as he was going to preach
on a common near Chowden, twenty or thirty chil
dren ran about him, staring like some dumb, hungry
animals. They were only just not naked. The
eldest, a girl of fifteen, had only a piece of ragged
blanket hung upon her, and a dirty cap on her head.
"My heart was greatly enlarged toward them," says
Wesley; "they looked as if they would have swallowed
me up." He could never see poverty like this with
out making efforts to relieve it, and his religion was
always blossoming into wise plans of practical benevo
lence. Before leaving Newcastle, on this his second
visit, he had contracted for the erection of a large
building that should provide an orphanage and school
for destitute children, and serve as a centre for the
charitable as well as the religious work of Method
ism in this section. An ex-mayor of Newcastle
offered him a plot of ground for forty pounds, and
Wesley, with only twenty-seven shillings on hand,

THE EXTENSION OF THE WORK 113
laid the corner-stone, in full assurance that the seven
hundred pounds needed would be provided. And
they were. A handsome beginning was made a fort
night later by a generous Quaker who wrote that,
having seen in a dream Wesley surrounded by a large
flock of sheep that he didn't know what to do with,
he sent a check for a hundred pounds to help house
them. The building was finished within a year, and
from that day to this the Newcastle Orphanage has
been one of the most useful institutions of English
Methodism. When returning from his first visit to Newcastle,
Wesley stopped at Epworth. The place must have
seemed to him desolate. His father had been dead
seven years, and no representative of the scattered
family was living near except his brother-in-law, John
Whitelamb, who was now rector of the little parish
of Wroote, where, years before, Wesley had served
as his father's curate. The stout old rector of Ep
worth had not been followed by the "Mighty Nimrod"
whose succession to the living he so much dreaded;
but the curate, a Mr. Romley, was no friend to the
Methodists. Wesley reached Epworth on Saturday
evening, and not knowing whether there were any
left in the parish who would not be ashamed of his
acquaintance, took lodging in the village inn. But
a servant of his father's, with two or three other old
women, found him out at once. To Wesley's ques
tion whether there were now in Epworth any intent
to lead a religious life, she answered promptly: "I
am, by the grace of God, and I know that I am saved
through faith. And many here can say the same
thing." It seems clear, indeed, that Wesley found

n4 JOHN WESLEY
in Epworth and the surrounding villages, little groups
of people whose religion was in marked contrast with
the spiritual apathy of their neighbors. He records
with quiet satisfaction a call he made, three days
later, upon a justice of the peace in a village a few
miles away, before whom a wagon load of these "new
heretics " had lately been arraigned. "But what
have they done?" asked the justice of their accusers.
"Why, they pretend to be better than other people,
and, besides, they pray from morning till night."
"But have they done nothing besides?" "Yes, sir,"
said an old man, "an 't please your worship, they have
convarted my wife. Till she went among them she
had such a tongue ! And now she is quiet as a lamb. "
"Carry them back, carry them back," said the jus
tice, "and let them convert every scold in the town!"
But the Methodists were generally not in favor with
either the squires or the parsons. The morning after
his arrival, Wesley courteously offered to assist in the
church service either by preaching or reading the
prayers; but the curate gave him a blunt refusal,
and improved the occasion by preaching a flaming
sermon himself, that afternoon, on the perils of enthu
siasm. At the close of the service, John Taylor,
standing by the church door, announced to the audi
ence, as they came out, that Mr. John Wesley, not
being allowed to speak in the church, designed to
preach in the churchyard at six that evening. At
that hour a large company gathered, drawn partly,
no doubt, by curiosity, but partly also, we may believe,
by loving memory of their old rector, to hear his son
who was so widely known as a Methodist. Standing
on his father's tombstone, by a corner of the church,

THE EXTENSION OF THE WORK

"5

Wesley preached to them from one of his favorite
texts. "The Kingdom of Heaven is not meat and
drink, but righteousness and peace, and joy in the
Holy Ghost. " When he closed, so many of his hearers
urged him to stay longer, that he reversed his decision
to go on the next morning, and remained a week.
Every day he preached and exhorted in the villages
near by, every evening he preached in the Epworth
churchyard, and there were scenes of such Method
ist enthusiasm as doubtless scandalized the curate.
One evening a gentleman in the neighborhood, who
had not been inside a church for more than thirty
years, drew up in his carriage with his wife, and
alighting stood in the fringe of the crowd during all
the preaching, motionless as a statue. Noticing him,
Wesley said abruptly, "Sir, are you a sinner?"
"Sinner enough!" said the man, with a choking voice,
and stood still staring upwards, till his wife and ser
vants got him into his carriage and carried him home.
Ten years later, Wesley met him again, a happy old
man, awaiting "without a doubt or fear" the welcome
time of his departure.
Whitelamb, a rather feeble, placid little man who
had married Wesley's deformed and crippled sister
Mary, after her death fell into a state of religious in
difference which had alienated him from the Wesleys.
He heard Wesley, and now wrote a touching letter,
full of a regard that was almost veneration, urging
his brother to visit him in his loneliness. Wesley
accepted the invitation, and next Sunday preached
morning and evening in the little church at Wroote,
hastening back in the evening to his last service in
the Epworth churchyard. A vast throng from all

116 JOHN WESLEY
the region crowded the churchyard to hear his part
ing words, and when the three hours were over, said
Wesley, "We hardly knew how to part." These
twilight sermons in the Epworth churchyard brought
back to him with thrilling vividness, as they must to
many of his listeners, memories of the long and patient
ministry of the father whose dust reposed beneath
his feet. As he was leaving next day he wrote in the
Journal: "O let none think his labor of love is lost
because the fruit does not immediately appear ! Near
forty years did my father labor here ; but he saw little
fruit of all his labor."
It is pleasant to think that Wesley's mother lived
long enough to hear of this visit of her favorite son
to the old home where she too had labored for forty
years, in hardships and privations that would have
worn out a weaker woman, sharing every trial of her
heroic husband with a patience and fortitude quite
the equal of his own. Wesley had been in Bristol
only a fortnight after his return from the north, when
he learned that his mother was seriously ill at her
rooms in the Foundery. He hastened up to London,
reaching there in time to be with her during the last
three days of her life. Charles was absent in the
north, but the five surviving daughters, who now
lived in or near London, could all be with her in the
closing hours. When the peaceful end came, John
and his sisters, standing around her bedside, fulfilled
the request of her last words, "Children, when I am
released, sing a hymn of praise to God." It was
July 23, 1742. She was buried, not in a churchyard,
but in that "Necropolis of Dissenters," Bunhill Fields.
John Wesley, standing by her grave, a vast company

THE EXTENSION OF THE WORK 117
gathered round, pronounced with broken voice the
words, "I commit the body of my mother to the earth,"
and then preached to what he calls "one of the most
solemn assemblies I ever saw, or expect to see on
this side eternity."
With his visit to Newcastle begins Wesley's itinerant
life. Thereafter it becomes difficult to follow him.
We shall not try to do so. He had no abiding place.
Rooms were set apart for him in the Foundery, but
he seldom occupied them more than a few days at a
time. He is always on the road, passing from one
end of the island to the other. The record of these
years, given in the Journal, considered merely as labor
of body and mind is astonishing. It is estimated
that in the last fifty years of his life he crossed the
Irish Channel over fifty times and travelled over two
hundred and fifty thousand miles on land — the equiv
alent of ten times round the globe — visiting remote
fishing villages in Cornwall and mining towns in
Yorkshire which the railways have not even yet reached.
And all his journeying up to 1773 was done on horse
back. No man knew the roads and lanes of England
half so well as he. Indeed, when he began his travels,
there were no turnpike roads in the north of England,
and the London coach went only as far as York. His
Journal records more than one instance of a journey
of eighty or ninety miles on horseback in one day.
Later, when he travelled by post-chaise, he sometimes
covered even longer distances. In 1778, he left Con-
gleton one Wednesday afternoon for a brief visit to
Bristol, stayed in the latter town two hours and was
back in Congleton again on Friday afternoon — two

118 JOHN WESLEY
hundred and eighty miles in forty-eight hours —
"and no more tired (blessed be God) than when I
left." On the other hand, the wretched roads, even
in the latter part of the century, especially in the fen
country, often made travelling by carriage almost
impossible. The Journal reports divers accidents
from that cause — an axle breaks, a wheel comes off,
his chaise sticks fast in a slough or a snow bank, or
is nearly swamped in a stream, and on one occasion
he is forced to leave it altogether and take to a boat.
In his riding he met numerous accidents that might
have easily been fatal; but he always escaped with
out serious injury, and often improved the opportu
nity of doing good to some one else. Riding out of
London one morning, the saddle slipped to his mare's
neck, and he fell over her head to the ground, while
she ran back to Smithfield. Some boys caught her
and led her to him, and bystanders helped him fix his
saddle, cursing and swearing at every word. "I
looked to one and another," says Wesley, "and spoke
in love. They all took it well and thanked me much;
and I gave them some little books which they prom
ised to read carefully." At another time when his
horse threw him heavily and the people ran from a
cottage to help him, thinking his leg was broken,
Wesley found that they were members of his society
who had gone astray, and took the occasion to give
them kindly persuasion and advice that brought them
back again. Once, while he was riding in Bristol,
his horse "suddenly pitched on her head and rolled
over and over" ; but Wesley got only a little bruise
from which he felt no pain, and in the next hour
preached "to six or seven thousand people." One

THE EXTENSION OF THE WORK

119

of his biographers1 says that he was "a hard, but
unskilful rider." But if the distances he had to
travel made him a hard rider, he was merciful to his
beast, and insisted that others should be. One of
the directions given to his lay preachers was: "Every
one ought, 1. Not to ride hard. 2. To see with his
own eyes his horse rubbed, fed, and bedded." As to
his skill as a horseman, any ungracefulness in his
seat was doubtless accounted for by the fact that he
always had a book in his hand. His saddle was his
study; most of his wide miscellaneous reading was
done on horseback. Indeed, there seemed no other
time to do it. He always rose at four in the morning ;
preached whenever possible at five, and was often on
the road again before eight, following his morning
sermon sometimes by five others in the same day,
riding ten or twelve miles between each one and the
next. In the fifty years of his itinerant life, he preached
over forty thousand times, an average of some fifteen
sermons a week. It is doubtful . whether the annals
of the century can show another record of such tire
less methodical activity.
In 1743 Wesley was just forty years of age, in the
early maturity of all his powers. Some symptoms
of constitutional weakness in his college days had
been followed by twenty years of almost perfect health.
The sensational account he gives of his symptoms
during a few days of fever and indigestion in 1741 is
proof enough that he was generally a stranger to pain.
His enormous power of work was due, not merely to
his strict methodical habits, but still more to a tem-
1 Hampson, "Life of Wesley," III, 191, quoted by Telford, 195.

120 JOHN WESLEY
perament remarkably steady and self-possessed. He
never hurried; he never worried. He had no wear
ing anxieties. On his eighty-fifth birthday he writes
in his Journal that he has never lost a night's sleep,
sick or well, on land or sea, since he was born ; though
here his memory slipped slightly, as was natural at
eighty-five, for fifteen years before he notes that while
crossing the English channel he has lain awake all
night for the first time in his life. The correct record
seems to be one night in eighty-five years. He was
agile, short and slight of figure, a little man never
weighing over about a hundred and twenty pounds.
In defiance of the fashion of that bewigged age, he
wore his own hair, long, parted in the middle, and
falling upon his shoulders with just the suspicion of
a curl. His countenance betokened a singular union
of firmness and benignity; and many of his contem
poraries speak of the keen and searching expression
of his eyes, which he retained to old age. A recent
noble commemorative poem 1 begins with the lines : —
" In those clear, piercing, piteous eyes behold
The very soul that over England flamed."
In manner he was a pattern of courteous dignity;
dress, bearing, the very tone of his voice, bespoke a
certain austere refinement.
As a preacher, if he is measured either by the imme
diate effects or by the permanent results of his ser
mons, it must be said that he had no equal in his
century. Yet the effect of his preaching is somewhat
difficult to explain, unless we explain it, as he himself
did, by the truth of what he said, and the divine enforce-
1 By Richard Watson Gilder.

JOHN WESLEY.
From the painting by Williams, photographed at Didsbury College, Didsbury,
England, by permission of the Rev. J. S. Simon.

THE EXTENSION OF THE WORK 121
ment of that truth upon his hearers. For his sermons
certainly owed nothing to the exterior graces of the
rhetorician or the orator. He had none of Whitefield's
dramatic power. Nor did he covet it. He used to
speak with just a little contempt of what he called
"the amorous style of praying and the luscious style
of preaching," which that great pulpit orator allowed
himself. Later in life he wrote, "I cannot admire
the French oratory. I despise it from my heart.
Give me the plain nervous style of Dr. South, Dr.
Bates, and Mr. John Howe. Let who will admire
the French frippery. I am for plain sound English."
The matter of his sermons, if we may judge from those
he printed, was absolutely simple, and the manner
rather expository and argumentative than emotional.
Dr. Kennicott, then an undergraduate, heard him
preach in Oxford in 1744, and describes him as "neither
tall nor fat, for the latter would ill become a Method
ist. His black hair, quite smooth and parted very
exactly, added to a peculiar composure in his counte
nance, showed him to be an uncommon man. His
prayer was soft, short, and conformable to the rules
of the University. His text was Acts iv, 3. He
spoke it very slowly, and with an agreeable emphasis. "
Young Kennicott thought Wesley oversevere on the
morals of the University, but concludes, "Had these
censures been moderated, I think his discourse as to
style and delivery would have been universally pleas
ing to others as well as to myself. He is allowed to
be a man of great parts."
His sermons delivered in the open air must have
been largely extemporaneous, and doubtless were less
carefully prepared than those he printed. Yet here,

122 JOHN WESLEY
as in the pulpit, he was always fearful of any extrava
gances of statement, and especially of anything strained
or fulsome in manner. "Don't scream, Sammy,"
he wrote to one of his young preachers, "never
scream." Whether preaching in St. Mary's at Ox
ford, or under the open sky in the vast natural am
phitheatre at Gwennap in Cornwall, he was always
the same quiet, refined, but plain-speaking man.
His power over vast audiences seemed to lie in his
intense but quiet earnestness, and his intimate and
sympathetic knowledge of the needs of his hearers.
Said John Nelson, when first he heard him: "He
made my heart beat like the pendulum of a clock.
I thought he spoke to no one but to me. This man can
tell the secrets of my heart ! " It is significant that
while Wesley was subjected to almost all other sorts
of abuse, his preaching was never charged with hypo
critical extravagance, or caricatured as that of White-
field constantly was.
Nor is it true, as sometimes alleged by historians
of that century,1 that the preaching of Wesley and
his followers owed its effect to the crude but vivid
presentation, before ignorant and vicious men, of
the tortures of future punishment. Of Wesley, at
least, nothing could be more false. It is clear from
his Journal that he rarely, if ever, appealed to terror.
The nature of his sermons can be readily inferred
from his favorite texts. Those from which he preached
most frequently were the following: —
"The Spirit of the Lord is upon me because he
hath appointed me to preach the Gospel to the poor."
1 e.g. Leslie Stephen's " History of English Thought in the Eigh
teenth Century," Ch. XIX, Sect. 6.

THE EXTENSION OF THE WORK 123
"I will heal all their backslidings. I will love them
freely." "The Son of Man is come to save that
which was lost." "We love Him because He first
loved us." "Being justified by faith we have peace
with God through our Lord Jesus Christ." "I am
not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repent
ance." "Ho every one that thirsteth, come ye to
the waters." "The Kingdom of God is not meat
and drink, but righteousness and peace and joy in
the Holy Ghost." "The Son of Man hath power on
earth to forgive sins."
On all these texts, as may be seen in the Journal,
he preached repeatedly; while there is hardly to be
found a single instance of a sermon not based upon
some passage which, like these, states some provision
or promise of the Gospel. It is evident that if Wes
ley led those tradesmen and colliers and smugglers
to feel that they were sinners and needed somehow
to get rid of their sin, he did it not by threats, seldom
even by warnings. He preached, rather, the love of
God to man, because his own heart was filled with a
great love and pity for his sinning and suffering fel
lows. Whenever possible he tried to follow his preach
ing by familiar and kindly advice to his individual
hearers. He used to say he could never understand
how any minister could be content unless he knew
all his flock by name, not excepting the servants. That
was impossible with his vast flock; but it is safe to
say that he was personally acquainted with thousands
of his converts all over England. By 1770 no man
in Europe knew so many of his fellow-men by name,
or had left the charm of his smile and voice in so
many hearts. And the temper of his preaching is

124 JOHN WESLEY
proved clearly enough by the fact that when he died
he was doubtless the best beloved man in England.
During the year 1742 and 1743 Wesley made five
journeys to the north with Newcastle as his objective
point, and in the opposite direction went down into
Cornwall quite to Land's End, with a run over to the
Scilly Islands. In these journeys with one or two
short trips to Wales, he records in the Journal
preaching in over seventy towns and villages, in
many of them more than once. Methodist socie
ties had now been gathered in so many places, that
Wesley felt it wise to call others to his aid, and to
form some plan of methodical visitation and over
sight. Accordingly he requested several clergymen
in sympathy with his work to meet his brother Charles
and himself, with a few of the lay helpers, in order
to "confer" with reference to the advancement and
direction of the work now spreading so rapidly over
the island. This first Methodist Conference met
in the Foundery, the last five days of June, 1744.
Besides the Wesleys there were only four clergymen
present, and these from obscure and widely sepa
rated parishes — Piers, Vicar of Bexley, Hodges, rec
tor of Wenvo in Wales, Taylor, vicar of Quinton in
Gloucestershire, and Meriton from the Isle of Man.
Four lay preachers were invited, Richards, Maxfield,
Bennett, and Downes. Wesley probably had then no
definite plan for future meetings of this sort; but
this proved to be the first of a series of Annual Con
ferences which have continued to this day, and have
determined largely the doctrine and polity of Method
ism. Considerable time was spent in this, as in

THE EXTENSION OF THE WORK

™5

following Conferences, in the discussion of points
of doctrine and experience. These discussions were
carried on with the most admirable frankness and
openness of mind. Every one was to speak his own
judgment freely. The Conference of 1747, three years
later, entered upon its records the following minute : —
"In our first Conference it was agreed to examine
every point from the foundation. Have we not been
somewhat fearful in doing this? What were we
afraid of? Of overturning our first principles?
Whoever was afraid of that, it was a vain fear. For
if they are true, they will bear the strictest examina
tion. If they are false, the sooner they are over
turned the better. Let us all pray for a willingness to
receive light."
Where can be found a better statement of the gen
uinely liberal attitude toward all truth than this decla
ration of the little company of early Methodists?
The conclusions of successive Conferences were not
always entirely consistent with each other; but the
result of such deliberations in the course of a few
years was the progressive elaboration of a body of
practical divinity, clearly stated and attested by ex
perience, that might serve as a sufficient creed of
. Methodism. But the attention of this first Conference was occu
pied chiefly with questions of discipline and prac
tice, especially with the status and work of the lay
preachers. Of these there were now above forty.
Wesley, with the approval of the other members of
the Conference, drew up a set of twelve rules for their
guidance, which, slightly changed in phrase, remained
in force all his life. Some of these are excellent max-

126 JOHN WESLEY
ims for general application; others were framed with
special reference to the dangers and temptations to
which Wesley knew these humble men would be ex
posed. The following examples may serve as speci
mens of both kinds : —
"4. Believe evil of no one. If you see it done, well ;
else take heed how you credit it. Put the best con
struction on everything. You know the judge is al
ways supposed to be on the prisoner's side."
"5. Speak evil of no one: else your word especially
would eat as doth a canker. Keep your thoughts
within your own breast till you come to the person
concerned." "6. Tell every one what you think wrong in him, and
that plainly, and as soon as may be, else it will fester
in your heart. Make all haste, therefore, to cast the
fire out of your bosom."
"7. Do nothing as a gentleman: you have no more
to do with that character than with that of a dancing-
master. You are the servant of all, therefore
"8. Be ashamed of nothing but sin: not of fetching
wood or drawing water, if time permit; not of clean
ing your own shoes or your neighbor's."
"12. Act in all things not according to your own will,
but as a son in the Gospel. As such, it is your part
to employ your time in the manner which we direct:
partly in visiting the flock from house to house (the
sick in particular); partly in such a course of Read
ing, Meditation, and Prayer as we advise from time to
time. Above all, if you labor with us in our Lord's
Vineyard, it is needful you should do that part of the
work which we prescribe, and at those times and
places which we judge most for his glory."

THE EXTENSION OF THE WORK 127
Three years later the whole of England and Wales
was divided into seven circuits, and each lay helper
was assigned to a round of places within a circuit.
The preacher whose name headed the list of any cir
cuit was called the "assistant" — now termed "Super
intendent" — and was given general oversight of the
charges within that circuit, reporting at the Annual Con
ference. As the number of the preachers increased
and their work developed, successive Conferences
defined their duties in more detail. They were to
rise at four in the morning, to preach not more than
twice a day, except on Sundays, to avoid carefully
anything rude or awkward in gesture and phrase,
to stick to the text and not attempt to "allegorize or
ramble," to sing no hymns of their own composing.
They were always to pay special attention -to the in
struction of children, to denounce dram drinking
and Sabbath breaking, and to use their best endeav
ors to prevent and punish smuggling and bribery
at elections.
Wesley well understood the risks of intrusting to
those he himself called "a handful of raw young men,
without name, learning, or eminent sense," the virtual
cure of souls. It was, he admitted, only to be justified
on the plea of necessity. He felt it imperative to exer
cise on them what, in other circumstances, would have
seemed a very exacting supervision. As is seen in the
last rule quoted above, they were to be personally re
sponsible to him, to obey his orders, go where he sent
them. He selected them with care and required every
one to serve as a "local preacher" before he could be
come an "itinerant." He frequently gathered a num
ber of them who could be spared from their work a

128 JOHN WESLEY
little time and read them lectures on divinity, or dis
cussed with them some work on philosophy or rhetoric.
He gave them individual suggestions as to the manner
of their preaching, and criticised sharply their faults.
He had a scholar's regret for their lack of learning,
but he allowed himself to be consoled by the reflection
that most of the rural clergy were 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 they can hobble through the Latin of
one of Cicero's Letters?" In the truest sense, Wesley
denied that his preachers were ignorant men. "In the
one thing which they profess to know, they are not igno
rant. I trust there is not one of them who is not able
to go through such an examination in substantial, prac
tical, experimental divinity as few of our candidates for
holy orders even in the University — I speak it with
sorrow and shame — are able to do."
Certain it is that most of these comparatively un
lettered lay preachers, by their native judgment and
force of character, as well as by their devoted piety and
tireless labors, amply justified Wesley's trust. Drawn,
for the most part, from the humbler class of society,
they won the confidence and understood the needs of
that class as the regular clergy never could. Stout of
heart and of hand, the record of their heroic effort and
still more heroic endurance reads like an epic of the
people. Specially noble was their patience under phys
ical insult which most of them would have been well
able to return in kind. Thomas Olivers, on his big
bay horse, — which he used proudly to say had carried
him over a hundred thousand miles, — when sur
rounded by a mob in Yarmouth, pushed his way down

THE EXTENSION OF THE WORK 129
one of the narrow "rows" to a main street, and then,
disdaining to put spurs to his horse and fly from the
howling crowd, dodging the sticks and stones thrown
at him, walked his horse deliberately down the street
and made, as he says, a "very orderly retreat." Thomas
Walsh, "the apostle of Ireland," whose enthusiastic de
votion burned his life out at the age of twenty-eight,
when thrown into prison at Bandon by the rector, who
was also the magistrate, stood at his grated window
and preached to the crowd outside. Alexander Mather,
a converted baker, nearly killed by a mob in Boston a
year before, had the house pulled down over his head
while preaching in Wolverhampton, by a rabble led on
by an attorney of the place. Mather made no attempt
at resistance, but next day quietly told the attorney he
might take his choice between rebuilding the house at
his own expense or being tried for his life. The attor
ney decided to rebuild. Honest John Nelson, hustled
by a mob in Nottingham, was taken by a constable for
examination before an alderman. "Why can't you
stay at home?" asked the alderman; "you see the mob
will not suffer you to preach here." "I didn't know
this town was governed by the mob," replied Nelsori;
' ' most towns are governed by the magistrates . " " Don' t
preach here," snapped the. alderman, as Nelson went
on to remind him of the morals of the city. "But God
opened my mouth," said John, in telling the story to
Wesley, "and I did not cease to set life and death be
fore him," until at last the alderman, not knowing what
to do with him, directed the constable to see him safely
back to his house. "This," adds Nelson, "seemed a
great mortification to the constable, but he was obliged
to do it." Another time he did not escape from his

130 JOHN WESLEY
persecutors so easily. A big brute who had vowed to
kill him, with a rabble of "gentlemen" at his back, set
upon Nelson at a place a little outside of York. Stout
stone-mason John, who, with his back against a wall
and his good hammer in hand, might have punished any
half dozen bullies in York, rather than provoke a gen
eral melee, suffered himself to be beaten into uncon
sciousness, when the gentlemen, led by the parson's
brother, trampled on him "to tread the Holy Ghost out
of him," dragged him through a lane by his hair, knock
ing him down as often as he attempted to rise, and
proposed to throw him into a well. At this point, how
ever, a woman passing by protested, calling a number
of the "gentlemen" loudly by name. Finding them
selves recognized, the ruffians skulked off, and Nelson
was taken into a house, and after a night's rest recov
ered sufficiently to ride away.
Throughout the first decade of Wesley's itinerant
work, he and his preachers were constantly assailed by
mobs. For six or eight years after 1742, there is hardly
a month in which the Journal does not record some vio
lence of that kind. At the very beginning of his out
door preaching in Bristol and London the rabble had
annoyed him; but the magistrates of those cities soon
took the matter in hand and protected him from further
serious disturbance. Early in 1740, the mayor of Bris
tol dispersed a mob that was growing formidable, ar
rested their leaders, and placed them in custody. All
attempts to excuse themselves by defaming Wesley he
promptly silenced. "What John Wesley is, is nothing
to you. I will keep the peace ; I will have no rioting in
this city." The London magistrates were slower to
interfere, and in the course of the year 1741, the Foun-

THE EXTENSION OF THE WORK

J3i

dery was several times invaded by a brawling crowd,
which it took all Wesley's force and tact to quiet. But
at the close of that year, Sir John Ganson, chairman of
the Middlesex bench, called on Wesley and informed
him that, if proper application were made, all the Mid
dlesex justices had been ordered to protect him from
the annoyances to which he had been subjected. A
few arrests were made, and thereafter there was no
trouble from mobs in London. Wherever, indeed,
throughout the island, the magistrates were ready to do
their duty, Wesley was seldom disturbed ; but in most
of the provincial towns and the rural villages, the mag
istrates and too often the rural clergy were in more or
less openly avowed sympathy with the rioters. It is a
significant fact that from the most lawless and church-
less classes Wesley met little but kindness. It was
more often the squire and the parson that he had to
dread. The wild, half-savage colliers of Kingswood
and Newcastle welcomed him gladly; while in scores
of country places he was hustled by mobs who knew
the parson hated Methodists and was not likely to
repress very sternly any measures to drive them out
of town.
Sometimes these disturbances were only the rough
horse-play of a crowd used to boisterous or cruel sports,
drawn together by the unusual spectacle of a field
preacher. At Penfield, for example, the rabble brought
a bull they had been baiting, and tried to force the ani
mal through the audience and upon the table by which
Wesley stood. At Whitechapel they drove cows among
the congregation. In other places they blew horns,
rang the church bells, sent the town crier to bawl in
front of the preacher, or hired fiddlers and ballad sing-

132 JOHN WESLEY
ers to drown his voice. Even in some instances of
serious violence, the leaders of the mob apparently had
no special animosity to Wesley or his preaching; they
were simply spoiling for a fight, it did not much matter
with whom, and the presence of the obnoxious Method
ists furnished occasion for a tumult at which the
magistrates would be likely to wink. In most cases,
however, the mobs were evidently malicious, bent on
driving out the Methodists, and willing to inflict as
much injury as they dared. The coolness of Wesley
in such encounters was amazing. His brother Charles,
though he schooled himself to meet insult, confessed
that he was naturally timid. But John Wesley never
knew what fear meant. Danger could not even quicken
his pulse. He would have made the coolest of officers
in action. Before the angriest mob, the quiet little
man never lost his perfect self-possession. He says in
the Journal, simply, that he has always found it best
to face a mob. A British crowd usually respects a
gentleman, and it always admires pluck. Wesley's
figure was slight, and his presence not commanding;
but his calm self-control, joined with an unruffled cour
tesy, made him almost invariably master of a crowd.
He had a certain stamp of distinction which they in
stinctively recognized. Meeting one^ afternoon in Red-
cliffe Square a noisy throng that threatened rough
treatment, after a word or two of greeting, he said,
"Friends, let every man do as he pleases, but it is my
manner when I speak of the things of God, or when
another does, to uncover my head," which he did; and
the crowd instantly did the same. "Then," says he,
"I exhorted them to repent and believe the Gospel."
Whenever possible he tried to single out the leaders of

THE EXTENSION OF THE WORK

*33

a disturbance and addressed them personally. At St.
Ives, in Cornwall, for instance, as he was preaching in
the evening, the mob of the town broke into the room,
roaring and striking as if possessed with devils. "I
would fain have persuaded our people to stand still,"
says Wesley, "but the zeal of some and the fear of
others had no ears. So that, finding the uproar increas
ing, I went into the midst and brought the leader of
the mob with me up to the desk. I received but one
blow on the side of the head ; after which we reasoned
the case till he grew milder and milder, and at length
undertook to quiet his companions." At Plymouth,
after talking quarter of an hour and finding the vio
lence of the rabble increasing, he walked down into the
thickest of them and took their captain courteously by
the hand. The fellow immediately said: "Sir, I will
see you safe home. No man shall touch you. Gentle
men, stand back! I will knock down the first man
that touches him." "And so," says Wesley, "he
walked to my lodgings, and we parted in much love."
But the crowd had followed them, and Wesley stayed
in the street a half hour and talked with them till they
went away, he says, in high good humor. At Bolton a
howling crowd, filled with such rage as he had never
seen before in any creatures to be called men, followed
him full cry to the house where he was to stay, and he
had barely time to get inside before the street was
thronged from end to end. Just as the stones began
to come through the windows, the mob burst in at the
door and filled the lower rooms. Wesley came down
from his chamber, walked into the thickest of the tu
mult, called for a chair, and began to talk. In a mo
ment they were still, "ashamed, melted down, and

134 JOHN WESLEY
devoured every word " ; and Wesley records in the
Journal his thanks for the providence that brought "all
the worst drunkards, swearers, Sabbath-breakers, and
mere sinners of the place" to hear the Gospel. Not
infrequently his coolness brought him odd champions.
In a turbulent meeting in London, a big Thames water
man lifted up his brawny front, and squaring himself to
the audience called out: "That gentleman says nothing
but what is good. I say so; and there is not a man
here that shall say otherwise !"
In Wesley's accounts of these disturbances there is
often a dry humor, all the more effective because quite
unconscious. On one occasion when a violent rabble
were assaulting the house where he was staying, the
ringleader in his zeal had managed to crowd himself
into the house just before the doors were shut against
his followers, and thus found himself, alone with Wes
ley, a mark for the stones the mob were pouring in at
all the windows. He was hit once in the forehead, and
cowering behind Wesley, cried out, "We shall be killed !
What shall I do ! What shall I do ! " "Pray to God,"
Wesley advised, and adds in telling the story, "He took
my advice and began praying as he had never done
since he was born." On another occasion, while stay
ing at a little Methodist inn at Holyhead, their meeting
was disturbed by a certain Captain G., a "clumsy, over
grown, hard-faced man," whose countenance reminded
Wesley of the ruffians in Macbeth he had seen at Drury
Lane when a boy at the Charterhouse. Early in the
evening, Captain G., with a drunken rabble at his heels,
had burst in the door, beaten the landlord and kicked
his wife, and blustered about the house in a vain at
tempt to find Wesley. Later on, he returned more

THE EXTENSION OF THE WORK 135
drunk than ever, but as he came in at the door the land
lord's buxom daughter, standing by with a pail of water,
drenched him from head to foot. Unused to this ele
ment and shocked by such sudden cooling, he stood
stock still and shouted "Murder! Murder!" while
the landlord quietly slipped behind him and bolted the
door. Thus locked in with the minister, the valorous
captain turned very humble, but was not allowed to go
out until he had pledged his word of honor to make no
more disturbance.
The most vicious mobs Wesley had to face were in
Cornwall and Staffordshire. When he was in the
Cornish town of Falmouth, in the summer of the rebel
lion year 1745, when the whole country was in hourly
terror of invasion, a foolish rumor was spread that he
was a papist and emissary of the Pretender. An im
mense mob surged about the house where he was call
ing upon an invalid, shouting at the top of their voices :
"Bring out the Canorum! Bring out the Canorum!"
They forced the outer door, and only a thin partition
separated them from the room where Wesley was
standing. At that moment he himself thought his life
not worth an hour's purchase. A number of burly
privateersmen put their shoulders against the inner
door and forced it open. As it fell in, Wesley stepped
out and calmly said: "Good evening. Here I am.
Which of you has anything to say to me? To which
of you have I done any wrong? To you? To you?
To you?" And so, continuing speaking as he stepped
forward, he reached the middle of the street, and then
addressing the crowd said, "Neighbors, do. you wish
to hear me speak?" "Yes, yes," the crowd yelled,
"Let him speak; he shall speak; nobody shall hinder

136 JOHN WESLEY
him." A few sentences so far placated the captains of
the rabble that they swore nobody should hurt him,
and some gentlemen of the place, emboldened by this
assurance, ventured to accompany Wesley to his lodg
ing. It was thought unsafe, however, for him to go
into the street again, and he was advised to take boat
at the rear of the house where he was staying and leave
town by water, his horse being sent on to meet him at
a landing-place some miles away. Some of the crowd
learned of his escape and ran along the shore to inter
cept him. As he landed, one of the fiercest of them
stood to meet him at the head of a steep passage lead
ing up from the water side. Wesley walked straight
up to him, and said quietly, "I wish you good night,
sir." "I wish you was in hell," growled the bully,
while Wesley mounted his horse and rode on to his next
preaching place. "I never saw the hand of God so
manifest as here," was Wesley's own comment upon
his danger and deliverance.
But nowhere were the Methodists subjected to such
wanton and malicious outrage, and probably nowhere
was Wesley himself in so much peril as in the Stafford
shire towns of Darleston, Wednesbury, and Walsal.
A Methodist society had been formed in Wednesbury,
at first with the approval of the vicar of the parish.
But one or two of the Methodists, with what Wesley
calls "inexcusable folly," by speaking evil of the vicar
and the Church, had turned their sympathy into bitter
opposition. The baser class, the cock-fighting, bull-
baiting rabble of this black country, needed only this
encouragement to begin a determined persecution of
the Methodists. In June, 1743, there was a week of
almost continuous riot. Nearly every Methodist house

THE EXTENSION OF THE WORK 137
in the three towns had its windows broken out, and in
many cases the furniture broken or burned; trades
men's shops were gutted; men were beaten senseless,
and thrown into gutters, their wives and daughters ter
rified by profane threats of murder, and in some few
instances injured by stones or beaten with clubs.
When application for protection was made to a magis
trate in Walsal, he told the Methodists they were them
selves responsible for the disturbances and refused their
application. Later on, he was seen among the rioters,
swinging his hat and shouting huzzas. The curate of
Walsal looked on with approval.
Wesley was in London when he heard of these out
rages, and hurried to Staffordshire to do anything in his
power to stop them. But another appeal to a magis
trate proved as futile as the first, and the Methodists
were obliged to give up public preaching in that neigh
borhood for the remainder of the summer. In Octo
ber, however, Wesley went down again, and preached
one day at noon in the market place without opposition.
But an hour or two sufficed to raise the mob. By four
o'clock they surrounded the house where he sat writing,
and shouted, "Bring out the minister, we will have the
minister!" Wesley asked for a parley with their
leader and invited him to call in also two of his most
angry companions. They came into the house, foam
ing with rage; but in two minutes Wesley had them
quiet as lambs. He then went out with them to the
midst of the crowd, and standing on a chair, asked
them what they wished of him. "We want you to go
with us to the justice," they shouted ; and when Wesley
expressed his entire readiness to do that, they ap
plauded his pluck, "crying out with might and main,

138 JOHN WESLEY
'He is an honest gentleman, and we will spill our blood
in his defence.'" They set out, accordingly, through
the rain and the dark — for the night was closing in —
for the house of Justice Lane. But this worthy, who
a week before had issued a general warrant for the
apprehension of any of "those disorderly persons styl
ing themselves Methodist preachers," now found it
convenient to be in bed, though the hour was early,
and refused to come out. His son, however, appeared
at the door, and asked what was the charge against the
prisoner. One of the crowd — who were now evi
dently not very ill natured — replied, "To be plain, sir,
if I speak the truth, all the fault I find with him is that
he preaches better than the parson." "Nay," said
another, "but it is a downright shame; he makes peo
ple rise at five in the morning to sing psalms. What
advice would your worship give us?" "Go home,"
said young Lane, "and be quiet." But they were out
for a night of it, and decided to take Wesley before a
justice in the next town of Walsal. Halfway there,
they met a mob from Walsal, and at once improved
the opportunity to spill a little blood in defence of their
prisoner. Wesley's bodyguard put up a good fight,
one woman, as he noticed, knocking down four men;
but they were tired and outnumbered, and Wesley be
came the spoil of Walsal. This second mob dragged
him through the streets of their town, yelling "Knock
him down! Knock his brains out!" One lusty fel
low behind him struck at him several times with a
stout oaken club, which, as Wesley says, if it had but
once hit on the back of his head, would have saved the
crowd further trouble. Another ruffian came rushing
through the press, his arm raised to strike, but sud-

THE EXTENSION OF THE WORK 139
denly dropped it and only stroked Wesley's head, say
ing, "What soft hair he has ! " At last Wesley got per
mission to speak, before they proceeded to extremities,
and when, after a few words, they were about to hustle
him on again, he began to pray. At this, the captain
of the mob, a brawny prize fighter from the bear gar
den, suddenly turned and said, "Sir, I will spend my
life for you. Follow me, and not a soul here shall touch
a hair of your head." And thus convoyed, barely es
caping cudgels and stones, avoiding a hostile crowd
that held a bridge by taking a by-path over a dam,
Wesley at last reached his lodgings safely, "having lost
only a flap of my waistcoat and a little skin from one of
my hands." Through it all, Wesley says, he had the
same presence of mind as if he had been in his own
study. Only once it came into his thought that if they
should throw him into the river it would spoil the pa
pers in his pocket; for himself, he had on a thin coat
and light boots and was confident he could swim
ashore. Next morning as he rode through the town on
his way to Northampton, he met with such cordial ex
pressions of sympathy that he could scarcely believe
last night's experiences to be real. As for the big prize
fighter who had championed him, five days later he
was admitted to the society and was a loyal Methodist
for fifty years. When Charles Wesley asked him what
he thought of his brother John, "Think of him !" cried
he; "I think he is a mon of God, and God was on his
side when so many of us couldn't kill one mon."
Certainly it is not superstition to find something
supernatural in the religion which enabled these hum
ble Methodists to bear with such patience the indigni
ties to which they were subjected. For these men were

140 JOHN WESLEY
not cowards. Most of them came from that tough
English peasant class which, from the days of Robin
Hood down, has always been able to give a good ac
count of itself wherever any fighting is to be done. It
was admitted that there were no better soldiers in the
English army than the Methodists who at Fontenoy
went into battle singing Wesley's hymns. Wesley him
self always liked a soldier — discipline and energy were
in the blood of him; and it was with some pride that
he heard a Colonel at Canterbury say he would rather
command five hundred Methodists than any regiment
in the army. But Wesley knew that any attempt to
resist persecution would only expose his people to the
charge of disorder and greatly increase their hardships.
Had they struck a single blow for themselves, they
would have given some color to, the false accusations
so often made against them and roused popular feel
ing to frenzy. He advised them to seek the protection
of law, whenever possible, but not to resort to violence
in retaliation or even in self-defence. It is impossible
not to admire and wonder at the self-control of people
so well able to defend themselves, and prone by all the
instincts and traditions of their class not to take a blow
without returning it. Only in the rarest instances was
the provocation too great for endurance. One day as
Wesley was leaving the preaching place in Norwich
with John Hampson, the brawniest of his lay preachers,
some ruffians began to threaten them. Wesley urged
Hampson to retire, but the preacher answered in his
big voice, "You let me alone, sir; if God has not given
you an arm to quell this mob, He has given me one,
and the first man that molests you here, I will lay him
dead!" Sometimes Methodist women did not feel

THE EXTENSION OF THE WORK 141
themselves strictly bound to non-resistance ; or, a sym
pathetic bystander would interfere in behalf of the
preacher. As Wesley was preaching in Bawden, an
Irish town, a clergyman — a little drunk, Wesley chari
tably thinks — with a very large stick in his hand began
to make disturbance, when two or three resolute women
by main strength pulled him through the house into a
garden ; and as he began to make maudlin love to one
of them, she gave him a ringing cuff that brought him
to his senses. Another assailant came on in great fury ;
but the town butcher, not a Methodist, knocked him
down as he would an ox. " This," says Wesley, "cooled
his courage, and so I quietly finished my discourse."
How shall we account for this widespread and ma
lignant opposition during the years 1740 to 1745 ? We
may, of course, answer this question summarily, as
Wesley did, by quoting the words of the Master, "If
ye were of the world, the world would love its own;
but because ye are not of the world, therefore the world
hateth you." And doubtless this is the fundamental
and inclusive reason. Sin and righteousness are eter
nally at odds; and every reformer, unless he be con
tent to effect what Carlyle calls "a heaven and hell
amalgamation society," need expect little but opposi
tion from those whom he endeavors to reform. Yet it
is possible to discover certain reasons for the special
malignity with which the early Methodists were every
where assailed. The opposition may seem, indeed,
wanton and inexplicable. The Methodists were every
where honest, industrious, orderly, law-abiding folk.
The virtues that make good citizens and good neigh
bors were the indispensable conditions of membership
in their societies. Wesley himself, so far from being

142 JOHN WESLEY
an inflammatory orator inciting people to mischievous
fanaticism, was an educated gentleman, courteous in
manner, judicious and temperate in speech. He urged
on his hearers loyalty both to the Church and State.
The best friend of the poor, he was active in all philan
thropic and charitable work, and especially interested
in all that pertained to the welfare of the lower and
more unfortunate classes. Such people, led by such a
man, it should seem, ought from the first to have won
love rather than provoked angry contempt; and it
certainly might have been expected that the legal au
thorities would protect them rather than screen their
adversaries. Doubtless, as has been already said, a good deal of
the rioting must be laid to the charge of that turbulent
element at the bottom of society which is always ready
for any form of rough or brutal excitement. They
baited Wesley's preachers as they would bait a bull;
not because they had any hatred of the preachers or of
the bull, but because they liked the sport. The world
is better policed now ; but even yet any revolution that
breaks the crust of society is liable to disclose an ele
ment of sheer brutality; in rural England, at the mid
dle of the eighteenth century, that element was very
large, and only a little way below the surface. More
over this ignorant and brutalized class is always stu
pidly conservative. They have an obstinate prejudice
against any aggressive novelty, and are sure to resent
the assumption of superiority implied in any attempt
to teach or to reform them. In this case, the inevitable
prejudice was increased when members of their own
class, in considerable numbers, separated themselves
from their old companionship, united themselves in

THE EXTENSION OF THE WORK 143
societies, and professed a new kind of religion better
than the parson's or the squire's. Such a prejudice
naturally grows into the envy and malice that, in the
upper classes, led a man to sneer, in the lower classes
to strike. Yet the opposition in the lowest classes
would hardly have dared to be violent, had it not been
tacitly, and in some cases openly, encouraged by the
clergy and the magistrates. Everybody knew that the
Church frowned upon the Methodists. Wesley, it is
true, urged his people to go to church; but usually
without much success. The Church had always neg
lected them ; it was inevitable that they should neglect
the Church. The parish clergy, in almost every in
stance, looked with dislike and suspicion on the irregu
lar societies, with a form of organization unknown to
the Establishment, neglecting the ritual, preached to by
unschooled rustics who owned allegiance only to an itin
erant Fellow of Lincoln College. The very existence
of such societies implied that the Church had been re
miss in its duty. The Methodists in many instances,
in spite of the exhortations of Wesley, probably re
turned this dislike, and were guilty of serious indiscre
tions in their language with reference to the clergy of
the Church. Refusing to accept the position of dis
senters, they seemed to the clergy resolved to remain
an element of ignorance and faction within the Church
which they condemned. English magistrates, in the
first half of the century, at all events in the country
and the provincial towns, were pretty sure to think as
the clergy thought on all churchly matters, and were
almost uniformly at one with them in their dislike of
Methodists. From such opinions entertained by their
superiors, it is easy to see that the vicious and ignorant

144 JOHN WESLEY
rabble would draw encouragement for any outrages
their envy or malice might suggest. The Methodists
were practically defenceless. One other cause, pecul
iar to that time, probably increased, in many instances,
the aversion to Methodists. Wesley and his preachers
were frequently suspected of being papists; and in
those years just before the rebellion of '45, the first
suspicion of Romish leanings rendered any man an ob
ject of dread and often provoked insult. The Method
ists, at first thought, would seem to have resembled
Puritans much more nearly than papists; yet there
were not wanting some things in their organization and
methods that might awaken apprehension in ignorant
and prejudiced people. Their societies, if not secret,
were private, meeting usually by night in private houses ;
the class-meeting was understood to be a modification
of the Romish confessional. Who were these lay
preachers, staying for a short time in a place and then
moving quietly on elsewhere? And who was the
smooth, courteous cleric to whom they were all said
to be personally responsible, and who was constantly
passing from one end of the island to the other ? It all
looked very like some sort of order or brotherhood;
and of religious orders and brotherhoods the English
people for more than a century had been very mistrust
ful. In the early months of 1744, when England was
expecting immediate invasion, the report was circulated
that Wesley had recently been seen with Charles Ed
ward in France ; and, absurd as the rumor was, Wesley
hesitated to give it color by leaving London just at a
time when all Roman Catholics had been ordered out
of the city by royal proclamation. In March of that
year he prepared a Petition to the King, in the name of

THE EXTENSION OF THE WORK 145
the Methodists, "a people scattered and pestered and
trodden under foot," defending them from any asper
sions on their loyalty and asserting in unqualified terms
their allegiance to the Church and the Crown, and their
abhorrence of the doctrines of Rome. He withheld
this paper, it is true, but only because his brother
Charles urged that it seemed to admit the Methodists
to be, in some sort, a sect. Charles Wesley, himself,
in one of the Yorkshire open-air services that summer,
happened to introduce into his prayer the request that
"the Lord would call home his banished" — and found
himself immediately summoned before a magistrate on
a charge of favoring the Pretender. As the witness
failed to appear, the magistrate, after keeping him wait
ing eight hours, told him there was nothing against
him and he might go. "But," said Wesley, "this is
not sufficient. It is no trifling matter. Even my life
is concerned in this charge." And only when the jus
tice acknowledged in explicit terms that his loyalty was
unquestionable, would he take his leave. In fact, both
the Wesleys were the stanchest of patriots; but in a
time of unusual apprehension, any hints as to the Rom
ish practices or sympathies of the Methodists were natu
rally caught up by the turbulent populace as a pretext
for insult and outrage.
After about 1750 the assaults of mobs grew fewer,
and gradually ceased altogether. Many of the class
from which the mob were drawn were now themselves
members of Wesley's societies, while the general re
sults of the Methodist movement in temperance, hon
esty, order, and thrift were now so manifest that there
was no longer any pretext for popular opposition. As
Wesley said, "When the clergy and gentry would no

146 JOHN WESLEY
longer lead or pay the mob, the poor rabble became
quiet as lambs." When disturbances now and then
occurred, they were promptly quieted by the magistrates,
or by those whom Wesley calls his "unawakened hear
ers," — a class to whose aid in keeping order he often
acknowledges his obligations.
But for the vulgar opposition of mobs, Wesley felt,
after all, very little concern. From them he expected
nothing better. When a boy in his father's rectory he
had probably learned a good deal about the temper of
the English lower classes, and he knew how to meet it.
He was confident, moreover, that the hostility of those
classes would cease as they came to appreciate his work,
and that he should find among them, as he did, his
warmest supporters. But it was a difficult thing to
encounter the opposition, always bitter and often con
temptuous, of those from whom he had a right to
expect sympathy and encouragement, if not active co
operation. For more than a score of years, the Church,
blind to her great opportunity, had no sympathy for
him, no recognition for his work. Her pulpits were
closed to him, her clergy regarded him with suspicion,
often with the most outspoken hostility. The latest
bibliography of the Wesleyan Movement 1 gives the
titles of three hundred and thirty-two Anti-Methodist
books and pamphlets published before 1762, and nearly
all of them are by Churchmen. Nor was the opposi
tion usually reasoned and temperate. Wesley's temper
and motives were wilfully misinterpreted, his work
misrepresented, his character vilified. Naturally con-
1 Anti-Methodist Publications issued during the eighteenth century.
By Rev. Richard Green, London, 1902.

THE EXTENSION OF THE WORK 147
servative and order-loving, he was accused of upsetting
all reverend traditions and becoming usages; clear
headed, logical, hating enthusiasm, he was accused of
spreading an irrational frenzy over the country and turn
ing the heads of the vulgar; the most frugal and the
most generous of men, he was accused of preaching
the Gospel for gain, and grasping the scanty contribu
tions of the poor; always loyal to his King and his
Church, he was accused of being a Jesuit, a papist in
disguise, and probably an emissary of the Pretender.
And these accusations came not from the ignorant and
credulous populace, nor yet from the contemptuous
world of fashion and licentiousness; they came from
those who should have been his helpers and allies;
some of the worst of them came from bishops of his
own Church.
His logical habit of thought, strengthened by his long
training as Moderator of the classes in Lincoln College,
made Wesley a skilful debater; but he had no liking
for controversy. He knew that there is no such foe to
charity. And he knew that theological controversy is,
of all kinds, the most bitter. In his first strictly polemic
tract — a reply to Rev. Josiah Tucker of Bristol — he
deprecates the temper which usually leads either party
to a debate to think that, like a soldier, he must injure
his opponent as much as he can ; and he avows that he
enters into a personal discussion with great fear, not
of his adversary, but of his own spirit. In another
pamphlet he quotes with approval the saying of an old
divine that "God made practical divinity necessary;
the devil, controversial." "But," he adds, "it is some
times necessary; if we do not resist the devil, he will
not flee from us." Obviously so. To have remained

148 JOHN WESLEY
silent under the multitude of accusations brought
against him during the early years of his wider work
would have been a confession of weakness or of error.
For mere personal defamation, indeed, he cared little ;
but he was keenly sensitive to charges, coming from
eminent men in his own Church, that impugned his
teaching and undermined his influence for good. But
it is proof of his Christian courage and Christian self-
restraint that in all his controversial writing — with,
perhaps, a single very excusable exception — he did
not lose his temper, and would not be goaded into bit
terness or discourtesy.
Of the multitudes of pamphleteers who had their
fling at the Methodists, only four or five were deemed
by Wesley of sufficient importance to demand personal
reply. The most prominent of his early critics, and
the one whose opposition Wesley himself most regretted,
was Gibson, Bishop of London. Gibson was a learned
and pious man, but timid, conciliatory, and now getting
into the seventies. His memory ran back toward the
troublous times of the Commonwealth and Restoration,
and he was fearful of anything that might again disturb
the dignified quiet of the Church. He always contrived
to find some Media via that would lead him out of con
troversy, and on all disputed matters was inclined to
the opinion of Sir Roger de Coverley, that "much might
be said on both sides." When John and Charles Wes
ley called on him, in 1738, to inquire whether the reli
gious societies were conventicles or not, the bishop, says
Charles, "warily referred us to the law." Of course,
the interpretation of the law in the case was just the
question that the Wesleys wished decided, as Gibson
very well knew; but when pressed for a definite an-

THE EXTENSION OF THE WORK 149
swer he refused to commit himself. To the point-
blank query, "Are the societies conventicles?" he re
plied, "I think not; however, you can read the Acts
and laws as well as I. I determine nothing." At
midsummer of the next year, 1739, just after Wesley
had begun his field preaching, and when Whitefield
was addressing vast audiences in and near London,
the timorous bishop issued a pastoral letter, "By way
of caution against Lukewarmness on the one hand and
Enthusiasm on the other," — a paper that makes it
clear he was getting to be a great deal more afraid of
the Enthusiasm than of the Lukewarmness. As the
Methodist movement spread over the island the hostil
ity of the bishop became more pronounced. He re
peated the caution against enthusiasm in his charge of
1 741, and three years later either wrote himself, or at
all events sanctioned, an anonymous pamphlet, "Obser
vations on the Conduct and Behavior of a Certain Sect
usually distinguished by the name of Methodist." The
later parts of this pamphlet are aimed especially at
Whitefield, who is severely censured; but in the first
part the Methodists in general are denounced as sec
taries all the more dangerous because they shield them
selves from legal attack within the Church whose
discipline and formularies they constantly violate. Thus
far Wesley saw no reason for personal reply ; but in his
published charge of 1747 the bishop made an arraign
ment of the Methodists which Wesley felt he ought not
to leave unanswered. The Methodists, the bishop now
declares, are enemies of the Church, "who give shame
ful disturbance to the parochial clergy, and use very
unwarrantable methods to prejudice their people against
them, and to seduce their flocks from them," and who

i5o JOHN WESLEY
profess and teach "doctrines big with pernicious influ
ence upon practice." Wesley's letter to the Bishop of
London, in reply to these accusations, is one of the
best specimens of his controversial writing. He does
not forget the respect due the bishop and his office ; but
he defends the doctrine and the practice of the Method
ists with a cogent earnestness that rises at the close of
the paper to the level of sadly solemn eloquence. A
short passage will show both the nature of the argu
ment with which Wesley met the bishop's main accusa
tion, and the temper in which that argument is urged.
"But do we willingly 'annoy the established minis
try,' or 'give disturbance to the parochial clergy' ? My
lord, we do not. We trust herein to have a conscience
void of offence. Nor do we designedly 'prejudice peo
ple against them.' In this also our heart condemneth
us not. But you 'seduce their flocks from them.' No,
not even from those who feed themselves, not the flock.
All who hear us attend the services of the church, at
least as much as they did before. And for this very
thing, we are reproached as bigots to the church, by
those of most other denominations. ... It is not our
care, endeavor, or desire to proselyte any from one man
to another, or from one church (so called), from one
congregation or society to another (we would not move
a finger to do this — to make ten thousand such prose
lytes), but from darkness to light, from Belial to Christ,
from the power of Satan to God. ... I would fain
set this point in a clear light. Here are, in and near
Moorfields, ten thousand poor souls for whom Christ
died rushing headlong into hell. Is Dr. Bulkeley, the
parochial minister, both willing and able to stop them ?
If so, let it be done, and I have no place in these parts.
I go and call other sinners to repentance. But if, after
all he has done, and all he can do, they are still in the
broad way to destruction, let me see if God will put a

THE EXTENSION OF THE WORK 151
word, even in my mouth. ... Is this any annoyance
to the parochial minister ? Then what manner of spirit
is he of ? Does he look on this part of his flock as lost
because they are found of the great Shepherd? My
lord, great is my boldness toward you. You speak of
the consequences of our doctrines. You seem well
pleased with the success of your endeavors against
them, because (you say) they 'have pernicious conse
quences, are big with pernicious influences upon prac
tice — dangerous to religion and the souls of men.' In
answer to all this, I appeal to plain fact. I say once
more, What have been the consequences (I would not
speak, but dare not refrain) of the doctrines I have
preached for nine years past? By the fruits shall ye
know those of whom I speak; even the cloud of wit
nesses who at this hour experience the gospel which I
preach to be the power of God unto salvation. The
habitual drunkard, that was, is now temperate in all
things. The whoremonger now flees fornication. He
that stole steals no more, but works with his hands.
He that cursed or swore, perhaps at every sentence, has
now learned to serve the Lord with fear, and rejoice
unto him with reverence. Those formerly enslaved to
various habits of sin, are now brought to uniform hab
its of holiness. These are demonstrable facts. I can
name the men, with their places of abode. . . . My
lord, the time is short. I am past the noon of life, and
my remaining days flee away as a shadow. Your lord
ship is old and full of days. It cannot, therefore, be
long before we shall both drop this house of earth and
stand naked before God; no, nor before we shall see
the great white throne coming down from heaven and
he that sitteth thereon. . . . Will you then rejoice in
your success ? The Lord God grant it may not be said
in that hour, 'These have perished in their iniquity:
but their blood I require at thy hands.' "
The next episcopal attack upon the Methodists
was of a very different sort, and was answered by

152 JOHN WESLEY
Wesley in a very different manner. George Laving-
ton, Bishop of Exeter, one must judge, had little
learning and less piety — an essentially vulgar, bois
terous, buffoonish man, whose writing in style and
argument was rather below the level of a Grub
Street pamphleteer. In 1749 he published in two
parts a pamphlet entitled "The Enthusiasm of Meth
odists and Papists Compared," calculated — if not
deliberately intended — to countenance the absurd
calumny that Wesley and Whitefield were papists in
disguise. Selecting numerous passages from Wes
ley's Journal wrested from their context, garbled and
misinterpreted in various ways, Lavington sets beside
them extravagant passages from the lives of the
saints to show that the worst instances of Romish
fanaticism and superstition are surpassed in the con
duct of Wesley and his followers. Seldom has a
more scurrilous piece of abuse disgraced the highest
office of the Church. Although its authorship was
generally known, the pamphlet was anonymous, and
Wesley, therefore, did not feel bound to observe in
his reply all the deference due a bishop. For once
lie allows himself some passages that make very inter
esting reading for the natural man, but are hardly
in his usual tone. The bishop's abuse of facts, his
bad logic, even his bad grammar, all are mercilessly
exposed; while some of his gravest charges Wesley
refuses to discuss till this Christian bishop can show
"a little heathen honesty" and a little more ac
quaintance with "those old enthusiasts," the writers
of the Old and New Testaments. He closes with an
indignant challenge to his critic to drop his mask.
"Any scribbler, with a middling share of low wit, not

THE EXTENSION OF THE WORK

iS3

encumbered with good nature or modesty, may raise
a laugh on those whom he cannot confute, and run
them down whom he dares not look in the face. By
these means, even a comparer of Methodists and
Papists may blaspheme the great work of God, not
only without blame, but with applause; at least from
readers of his own stamp. But it is high time, Sir,
you should leave your skulking place. Come out
and let us look each other in the face. I have little
leisure and less inclination for controversy. Yet I
promise, if you will set your name to your third part,
I will answer all that shall concern me."
The bishop did not choose to accept this challenge;
his "third part," issued as a separate volume, in 1752,
is still anonymous. This part is devoted almost en
tirely to Wesley. Lavington does not attempt any
rejoinder to Wesley's "Letter," which, he says, is
"a medley of chicanery, sophistry, prevarication,
evasion, pertness, conceitedness, scurrility, sauciness,
and effrontery " that time and paper would be wasted
upon; he contents himself, after this courteous intro
duction, with bringing together a number of quota
tions from Wesley's writings — especially from the
Journal — to show that the Methodists in general
and Wesley in particular are boastful, hypocritical,
crafty, and fanatical. The bishop is angry, and his
statements are even more ribald and reckless than
those of his previous pamphlets. Wesley probably
should have passed by the attack in dignified or con
temptuous silence; and perhaps he would have done
so, had it not been for the promise with which his
"Letter" closed. As it was, he felt obliged to the
weary task of taking up the bishop's specifications

154 JOHN WESLEY
one by one and exposing their falsity. At the end,
he draws a long breath and declares that not a single
article of the bishop's charge is true : that not one of
his arguments has any force; that the bishop knows
they have not, and doesn't himself believe his own
conclusions. Southey remarks, truly enough, that
Wesley's Letters to Lavington do not show the urban
ity that characterizes his other controversial writing;
it was hardly possible to be urbane in reply to an oppo
nent who was equally careless of truth and of courtesy,
and who treated the most serious subjects, as Wesley
said, in the "temper of a merry-andrew. " Yet
Wesley cherished for Lavington no bitter nor lasting
resentment; it is pleasant to read in the Journal for
September 29, 1762, after these days of bitter contro
versy were long past, "I was well pleased to-day to
partake of the sacrament with my old opponent,
Bishop Lavington. O may we sit down together in
the Kingdom of our Father." 1
Ten years after the Lavington controversy, Wesley
was again attacked by a bishop. Warburton, Bishop
of Gloucester, the doughty champion of orthodoxy
who for twenty years had been swinging his theo
logical cudgel over the heads of all who differed with
him, now turned his attention to Wesley. In his
treatise on the "Office and Operation of the Holy
Spirit" — a subject which this hard-headed, mun
dane, pugnacious rationalist was not likely to treat
with sympathy — he argued that the supernatural
operations of the Spirit were no longer to be expected.
We now live under the rule of faith. Miracles, once
needed to attest a divine revelation, now no longer
occur. The belief in them is fanaticism — an evi-

THE EXTENSION OF THE WORK 155
dence of feeble intelligence and disordered imagina
tion. He then turns to Wesley as the best example
of this modern fanaticism, and from the sixteen years'
experience recorded in the Journal cites a large num
ber of passages to prove that Wesley claimed for him
self almost all the miraculous gifts of the apostles.
Warburton was always a swash-buckler in contro
versy, and he had seldom been more hardy and reck
less in statement. Before he is through, he accuses
Wesley directly and by implication, not only of cre
dulity and enthusiasm, but also of the vanity, vindic-
tiveness, and hypocrisy which are the natural fruits
of fanaticism. Yet, at all events, Warburton did not
hide behind an anonymous title-page ; he often fought,
it is evident, for the love of fighting and the pride of
championship, but he fought in the open. And his
charges, in this case, though false and reckless, were
urged seriously; to a bellicose temper like his, they
may have seemed fair.
Wesley's "Letter" in reply is temperate and cour
teous. The reader of to-day will doubtless wish that
in this, as in some of his other papers, he had been
less fussily careful to discuss every one of the passages
cited against him and had confined himself to the
larger questions at issue. For his defence was easy. ,
That he was credulous need not he denied — some- if
thing more must be said of that on a later page.
There are certainly many incidents in the Journal
that do not demand the supernatural explanation
Wesley was inclined to give them; some might well
have been omitted. But it is to be remembered that
Wesley never imposed his own explanation upon any
one else ; still less did he ever ascribe any strange phe-

156 JOHN WESLEY
nomena to special gifts of his own, or urge them in
proof of the doctrines he taught. The one proof of
a divine sanction upon his work he found in that abso
lute and often sudden change of temper and desire
which turned thousands of those to whom he preached
from vice to virtue, from a life of sin to a life of
righteousness. This, call it conversion, the new
birth, or what you will, was an indisputable fact.
If it was a miracle, it was such a miracle as had at
tended the preaching of the Gospel in every age, and
a miracle that the Christian Church could never afford
to disavow or depreciate.
These Letters to the three bishops, together with
two pamphlets in reply to some calm and courteous
criticisms from a Rev. Thomas Church of London,
are all of Wesley's papers of personal controversy
that have much importance. More interesting, how
ever, and more valuable than this purely polemic
writing, is the tract issued in 1743, under the title
"An Earnest Appeal to Men of Reason and Reli
gion," with a supplement — "A Further Appeal" —
which followed in 1745. These two papers, as their
title indicates, are a calm, well-reasoned, but vigorous
defence of the people called Methodists. Wesley
welcomes, nay demands, the decision of reason. He
always had to the full the eighteenth-century respect
for logic and common-sense. "The reproach of
Christ," he wrote once, "I am willing to bear; but
not the reproach of enthusiasm — if I can help it. "
He challenges those who accept the central truths of
Christianity to show any point wherein the Method
ist teaching is inconsistent with those truths; and
he shows that, so far from being fanatical or schis-

THE EXTENSION OF THE WORK 157
matic, it is the Methodists, and not their accusers,
who best exemplify the doctrines and obey the rules
of the English Church. As to the absurd calumny
that he himself was making gain from the move
ment, he answers that by stating the simple fact that
not a penny of the contributions of the Methodists
came into his hands, but that, on the contrary, he had
himself assumed a debt of some six hundred and
fifty pounds to provide them with preaching houses
in London and Bristol. "Why," he asks indignantly,
"should any man who has all the conveniences and
many of the superfluities of life deliberately throw up
his ease, most of his friends, his reputation, the way
of life of all others most agreeable both to his natural
temper and education, toil day and night, spend all
his time and strength — to gain a debt of six or seven
hundred pounds!" In the "Further Appeal" he
makes a most searching but just arraignment of morals
and religion in England when he began his work,
and then urges that the Methodist movement, in spite
of the opposition it encounters, is temperate and ra
tional, and can be productive of nothing but good
to individuals or to society. The two tracts, taken
together, form the best contemporary vindication of
early Methodism ; they should be read by all who would
understand Wesley's motives and his methods. They
are also perhaps the best specimens of his controversial
writing ; simple in style ; vigorous but not bitter ; self-
controlled and logical, yet aglow with earnest feeling.
Apart from mere personalities and the many state
ments fabricated in the heat of controversy, the charges
urged by the Church against the early Methodists all
reduce, in the last analysis, to these two : —

158 JOHN WESLEY
First, violations of ecclesiastical discipline or usage,
such as field preaching, lay preaching, the organiza
tion within the Church of a network of societies not
subject to its control. Second, the insistence upon
some "assurance," "inward feeling," "witness," or
similar experience as an essential evidence of faith,
and the disposition to decry the religion of all who
could not profess such experience.
To the first charge Wesley's uniform answer was
that his action, for the most part, was not in violation
of any canon of the Church; but that if, in some
matters, he had disregarded ecclesiastical authority,
it was only because he had been forced to decide
whether he would obey God rather than man. He
had consented to speak in the fields, though with a
repugnance that he could never quite overcome; but
he had consented only because driven to the alterna
tive of preaching there pr not preaching at all. He
had reluctantly sanctioned preaching by laymen; but
only because the parish clergy were indifferent or
hostile and refused their assistance. His societies
were only such groups of religious persons as had been
formed within the English Communion for more
than half a century; and if they tended, against his
wishes, to draw away in many cases from the parish
church and recognized only their relation to Wesley,
it was because of the distrust and often open disavowal
they had to meet from the clergy. In a word, all
these innovations upon established discipline and
usage were the results of the opposition of the
Church, and not its primary cause. Conclusive proof
of this is to be found in the fact that this opposition
had taken pronounced form before Wesley could

THE EXTENSION OF THE WORK 159
have been charged with any irregularities whatever.
As we have seen, practically all the pulpits of London
were shut against him before the close of 1738, when
as yet — to use his own phrase — he would as soon
have thought of cutting a throat as of preaching in
the fields, and had never dreamed of class-meetings
or lay preaching.
Clearly, then, we must find the original ground of
the hostility to Wesley and the early Methodists in the
second of the charges mentioned. The fundamental
objection lay against his teaching. Yet he claimed,
and justly, that he was teaching nothing that could
not be found in the articles of the English Church.
The burden of his preaching throughout that year
1738 was simply the old Protestant doctrine of jus
tification by faith. But into dead formularies he put
life. The statements of Scripture and creed, to which
men gave a drowsy assent, or explained away as
metaphorical, he accepted as literally, vitally true.
He spoke of religion as something to be experienced;
not as a comely profession, but as a life. He dis
claimed all fanaticism, all special personal revela
tions; "as to ecstasies," he said in reply to one of
his critics, "I rest not on them at all, nor did I ever
experience any;" but that the living God should be
able and willing to influence directly the soul of the
individual man He had created, that seemed to Wesley
no fanaticism, but an entirely natural thing; belief of
it, experience of it, the essence of all religion. Per
haps in his early preaching he may occasionally have
urged this truth in too narrow and mandatory fash
ion; indeed he himself in later years admitted that.
But it is difficult to see why his preaching, at the out-

i6o JOHN WESLEY
set, should have aroused such opposition from pious
Churchmen who realized the meaning of the creed
they professed.
After all, however, it was not so much the doctrine
as the temper of Wesley's early preaching that gave
offence. The entry in his Journal, quoted on a for
mer page, is suggestive. "My heart was so enlarged-
to declare the love of God to all that were oppressed of
the devil that I did not wonder in the least when I was
afterward told, 'Sir, you must preach here no more.'"
The sermons that caused the London clergy to close
their pulpits to him were in almost every instance
strictly evangelical. How strange such preaching
sounded in the pulpits of 1738, any one may under
stand by looking over some of the popular sermons-
of that time that have not fallen quite into oblivion,,
say by Sherlock or Seeker. Such ardent love for
sinful and wretched men, such confidence in the
power of the Gospel to reform and uplift them, was
an implied rebuke to the cold, decorous inactivity of
the Church. And perhaps it was not strange that
the whole body of the English clergy from the bishops
down, should decline to take a lesson from the zeal
of an itinerant Fellow of Lincoln College, or admit
that the work they were set to do could be better done
by a group of plebeian preachers, most of them un
learned and ignorant men. Nor need we deny that
the preaching of the early Methodists often produced
in the classes most affected by the Methodist move
ment exhibitions of crude, extravagant, and some
times morbid emotion, distasteful to many thought
ful, conservative persons. There was doubtless
ignorance and extravagance in plenty to vex and

THE EXTENSION OF THE WORK i6r
alarm those cautious Christians who insist first of all
that everything must be done decently and in order.
But it was the misfortune of the English Church to see
in the Methodist movement for twenty years little else
than this ignorance and extravagance; to interpret
the intense devotion of the Methodists as heated
fanaticism; and instead of welcoming their aid in the
work of lifting the nation out of religious apathy and
unbelief, to disown them and disavow their work.
The Rev. Mr. Church did not much overstate the
opinion of many of his fellow-churchmen when he
wrote to Wesley of the Methodists, "We must account
you our most dangerous enemies."

CHAPTER VI
WESLEY'S PRIVATE LIFE
The biographer of Wesley must needs forgo the
interest belonging to the record of that intimate and
domestic life in which a man's real character is often
most clearly shown. For it is hardly too much to
say that John Wesley had no private life. He had no
home. Travelling from one end of England to the
other, directing all those varied activities of which
he was the centre, looked up to as a Father and Leader
by the ever increasing host of Methodists, he never
theless always impresses us as a lonely man. He
had no close family ties. After the death of his
mother in 1742, there was no one of his own family,
save his brother Charles, with whom he could be in
entire sympathy. For Charles, indeed, he cherished
an affection most beautiful to the end. Differing,
as the two brothers did, strikingly in temperament
and often in opinion, no difference ever caused an
estrangement or hindered their cordial cooperation
in the great work to which they had given their lives.
But in 1749 Charles, who up to that time had shared
his brother's manner of life, married a most admirable
Welsh lady, much younger than himself, whose cul
ture and accomplishments were to make his house
for the next forty years an ideal Christian home.
After about 1756 he practically closed his itinerant
life, and, residing for some twenty years in Bristol
162

WESLEY'S PRIVATE LIFE 163
and thereafter in London, gave himself to the care
of the societies in those cities. This change in his
life, of course, withdrew him somewhat from the
companionship of his brother, and left John more
alone than before. Of Wesley's seven sisters, Mary,
the sweet-tempered, deformed child who had married
her father's curate, John Whitelamb, died in 1734;
Kezzy, the youngest, died unmarried in 1741. The
other five had all made such wretchedly unfortunate
marriages as of necessity alienated them in great
measure from the sympathy and companionship of
their brothers. The sisters all showed, each in her
own way, something of the unusual gifts of intellect
or of imagination which were the Wesley birthright.
Three of them in their early womanhood had formed
attachments which their parents — wisely or unwisely
— disapproved ; but it might be difficult to get together
five more worthless creatures than the sisters of John
Wesley finally accepted as husbands. Emilia, the
eldest, married a lazy apothecary of Epworth, whom
she was obliged to support by teaching until he for
tunately died, about 1740, and left her to the care of
her brothers. She occupied for many years a room
adjoining the Methodist Chapel in West Street, Lon
don, a saddened, disappointed woman. Robert
Ellison, the husband of the second sister, Susanna,
was a coarse, loud-mouthed scoundrel. After long
years of abuse and neglect, his wife left him, and
came up to London where her children were living,
and refused ever to see him again. The poor dog
himself followed his wife to London some years later,
begged for help from his brother-in-law John, got it,
reformed — so far as such a paltry, weak-willed charac-

164 JOHN WESLEY
ter could — and finally died in some decency about
1760. Two other sisters, Anne and Hetty, married
incorrigible drunkards. Hetty, the most sprightly
and imaginative of all the Wesleys, after endless hard
ships and humiliations from her boorish husband,
which broke her fine spirit, died in 1750. The last
twenty years of her life were spent in London, where
she could at least have the counsel and occasional
visits of her brothers. Martha, her mother's favorite
and John's best- beloved sister, who exemplified the*
best moral and intellectual traits of the Wesley family,
was of all the sisters most unfortunate in her mar
riage. Her husband, Westley Hall, had been one of
John Wesley's pupils in Oxford, and had taken orders
not long before his marriage. But he was, probably
from the first, an utter scoundrel and hypocrite. Dur
ing his long residence as curate of a parish near Salis
bury, he fell into the grossest immorality, which he
had not even the decency to disguise. He preached
— and practised — polygamy, and had the effrontery
to bring the companions and children of his shame
into his own house. His later years he passed in a
kind of licentious vagabondage, and left his wife to
provide for herself as she could. Like her other
sisters, she was much in London, and won the high
esteem of the few who knew her well — among them
Samuel Johnson — for the soundness of her judg
ment and the brilliancy of her conversation. It is
evident that no one of these sisters, with such connec
tions, had a home where John Wesley could find
welcome. Their presence in London increased his
anxieties, without diminishing the loneliness and
isolation of his life.

WESLEY'S PRIVATE LIFE 165
Nor had Wesley many intimate friends outside the
circle of his own family. To his lay preachers he was
as a bishop and a father; but these humble and
devoted men could hardly share his tastes and his
knowledge. The temporary breach with Whitefield
was quickly healed, and in spite of their pronounced
differences in doctrine, and the bitter antagonism of
Whitefield's Calvinistic followers, Wesley always ac
counted the great preacher his trusted friend. "You
may read," he said, "Whitefield against Wesley; but
you will never read Wesley against Whitefield." In
fact, after the brief alienation in 1741, Whitefield
never did write against Wesley, but responded with
all the warmth of his generous and impulsive nature
to the steadier flame of Wesley's friendship. When
he died in America, in 1770, it was in accord with his
request that Wesley preached his funeral sermon
in Whitefield's Tottenham Court Road Tabernacle,
and paid a just and moving tribute to his old friend.
The story is told that, some days later, a good woman
who could not quite forget the doctrinal differences
that separated Whitefield from the Wesleyan Method
ists, said to Wesley timidly and with great hesitation :
"Mr. Wesley, may I ask you a question? Do you
expect to see dear Mr. Whitefield in heaven?" After
a long pause, Wesley answered solemnly, "No,
Madam." "Ah," exclaimed his questioner, "I was
afraid you would say so." "But," Wesley added with
intense earnestness, "do not misunderstand me,
Madam; George Whitefield will stand so near the
throne that one like me will never get a glimpse of
him!" Yet, though they were genuine friends, the
two men were so diametrically opposed in tempera-

166 JOHN WESLEY
ment that it was impossible they should be thoroughly
congenial, and the relations between them, at least
after 1741, seem not to have been entirely intimate
or confidential. Besides, the sharp division of
their work in England and the repeated and pro
tracted absences of Whitefield in America, made any
close companionship between them impossible during
all the later years of Whitefield's life.
After his brother Charles and Whitefield, the most
congenial friends of Wesley were two or three of his
fellow-clergymen of the Established Church. Of
these the first and oldest was Vincent Perronet, Vicar
of Shoreham. He was ten years older than Wesley,
and a man of singularly good judgment and good
temper — a mellow, wise, kindly man. No one en
joyed Wesley's confidence so fully as he. Both the
Wesley brothers conferred with him on matters per
taining either to their public work or their private
life. When, in 1751, they drew up a mutual agree
ment to guide them in their relations to the lay preach
ers, they first consulted Perronet and then included in
the paper this article: "That if we should ever dis
agree in our judgment, we will refer the matter to Mr.
Perronet." Charles called him "the Archbishop of
the Methodists." It was to Perronet that Charles
opened his heart when he had fallen in love with Miss
Sarah Gwynne, and yet doubted whether he ought to
marry ; and it was Perronet, too, — making for once a
grievous error of judgment, — who advised John
Wesley that he would do well to wed Mrs. Vazeille.
For almost forty years, the Shoreham vicarage was
the home to which Wesley liked best to return for a
day or so of rest or quiet writing.

WESLEY'S PRIVATE LIFE 167
Another and very different clerical friend of Wesley
was William Grimshaw, incumbent of Haworth in
Yorkshire, a burly, impetuous, soft-hearted giant, who
feared neither mobs nor pamphlets, resisted all
attempts to oust him from his parish, and stoutly
declared himself to be a Methodist so long as the
Methodists were Churchmen. "A few such as he,"
said Wesley, "would make a nation tremble."
But the nearest of all Wesley's friends, for some
thirty years, was a man of quite different temper from
either Perronet or Grimshaw. Jean Guillaume de
la Flechere — or John Fletcher as he was known
after he had taken up permanent residence in Eng
land — was born in Nyon, Switzerland, of a family
descended from a noble house of Savoy. His parents
intended him for the ministry, and he was educated
in Geneva; but he conceived an aversion for the
Church, and, like many of his countrymen, determined
upon the career of a soldier of fortune. But his
attempts to get into active service in Portugal and
Flanders were unsuccessful, and he gave up his mili
tary plans, and came to England. He rapidly per
fected his knowledge of the language, and soon
obtained a position as tutor to the sons of a Mr. Hill,
whose country-seat was in Shropshire, but who came
up to London every year, with his family, to attend
the session of Parliament. It was while in the family
of Mr. Hill that he became converted and began to
lead a life which he himself afterwards confessed was
wrongly ascetic. For a time he ate nothing but bread
and milk, and practised austerities which doubtless
planted the seeds of lifelong disease. He sought
out the Methodists, and it was by the advice of Wesley

168 JOHN WESLEY
that, in 1757, he decided to take orders. Two years
later he was presented to the living of Madeley, in
Yorkshire, which he held the rest of his life. He
cherished the warmest affection for Wesley, and
brought to him, at a time when he was much in need
of it, such aid as no one of his friends could afford.
He had attained an excellent mastery of English, —
though he always spoke it with a slightly foreign ac
cent, — and Wesley was glad to leave his theological
controversy mostly to the pen of an assistant so able
and so genial. For Fletcher alone, of all the partici
pants in the bitter Calvinist controversy, knew how
to unite force of argument with a kindly temper and
a style singularly suave and finished. The purity
and simplicity of his nature, his self-sacrificing devo
tion, endeared him even to his opponents; while his
culture, his refined taste, and gentle manners, added
to those religious graces, won from Wesley a sympa
thy such as he felt for no other friend. Fletcher of
Madeley was the saint of Methodism. Always of
delicate constitution, his intense but sensitive spirit
burned out rapidly, and he died at the age of fifty-six.
Wesley closed an account of his life with the words:
"I was intimately acquainted with him for thirty
years. I conversed with him morning, noon, and
night, without the least reserve, during a journey of
many hundred miles; and in all that time I never
heard him speak an improper word, or saw him do
an improper action. To conclude: within fourscore
years, I have known many excellent men, holy in
heart and life, but one equal to him I have not known ;
one so uniformly and deeply devoted to God. So
unblamable a man, in every respect, I have not found

WESLEY'S PRIVATE LIFE 169
either in Europe or America. Nor do I expect to find
such another on this side eternity."
But if Wesley's intimate friends were few and his
life isolated, that was not because he was by nature
ascetic or indifferent to the charm of good society.
His temperament was not, as it has been sometimes
represented, cold or self-sufficient. The record of
his early university days shows him to have been a
genial young fellow, of pleasing manners and brill
iant converse. It was no dull recluse whose visits
delighted pretty Betty Kirkham and the vivacious
young widow, Mrs. Pendarves. Nor was there any
thing morose or repellent in the more intense religious
life of his mature years. "Sour godliness is the devil's
own religion," was one of his sayings. It is true that
the Journal gives frequent proof of his dislike for that
frivolous and vapid society that disported itself at
the masquerade or the ridotto, and found its highest
intellectual pleasures in the scandal exchanged over
a card-table. "I dined at Lady  's. We need
great grace to converse with great people. From
which, therefore (unless in some rare instances), I
am glad to be excused. Horae Jugiunt et imputantur.
Of these two hours, I can give no good account."1
Another entry is more explicit. "How unspeakable
is the advantage in point of common sense which
middling people have over the rich ! There is so
much paint and affectation, so many unnecessary
words and senseless customs among people of rank
as fully justifies the remark made seventeen hundred
years ago, 'Rarus enim firme sensus communis in ilia
Fortuna. ' "2 This is the criticism of the scholar rather
than of the religious devotee; yet Wesley did not
1 April 21, 1758. 2 June 29, 1758.

170 JOHN WESLEY
think much better of society when two or three of its
great ladies, turning devout, adopted Mr. Whitefield
and made Methodism the fad of the hour. It is easy
to see that he sometimes had more than a little diffi
culty in keeping his patience with Whitefield's unctu
ous compliments to the elect ladies.
But if Wesley turned his back upon society, it was
not from any feeling of petulance or envy; still less
from any indifference to the charm of refinement and
intelligence. He had the tastes and culture of a gentle
man. All through his life, thoughtful people who
had the opportunity of knowing him well found him
a most agreeable companion. Samuel Johnson, who
knew a social man from an unsocial one as well
as anybody in that century, once said to Boswell,
"I hate to meet John Wesley; the dog enchants me
with his conversation, and then breaks away to go
and visit some old woman." Johnson's other re
mark of similar tenor is more frequently quoted:
"Wesley's conversation is good, but he is never at
leisure. He is always obliged to go at a certain hour.
This is very disagreeable to a man who loves to fold
his legs and have his talk out, as I do." Johnson's
statements give the cause of the comparative loneli
ness of Wesley's life. It was not from natural incli
nation that he declined so many companionships that
he might have enjoyed. The simple fact is he had no
time for society, hardly for friendship. His whole
life was a noble monotony of labor. He uniformly
rose at four, summer and winter, and usually had an
appointment to preach at five. Not infrequently he
followed this morning sermon by three or four more
in the same day, riding ten miles or more between

WESLEY'S PRIVATE LIFE 171
each one and the next. He kept a voluminous Jour
nal, and was always writing something for publica
tion. This ceaseless, methodical activity not only
obliged him to forgo those attractions of society
which he was fitted both by nature and education to
enjoy, but it allowed him no real companionship.
It was only when riding on his journeys from place
to place that he had any leisure, and then he was
usually alone or accompanied only by a valet, and
was always reading a book.
Perhaps we should not quarrel with that intense,
unremitting activity, without haste, without rest,
which enabled him to accomplish such a prodigious
deal of work; but it may fairly be questioned whether
it did not narrow his habit of thought. He was too
much afraid of leisure. He would not allow himself
any of those hours of quiet reflection, it may be merely
of revery, when the mind lies open to the play of
manifold suggestion. One feels that he might have
been a wiser and a broader man, could he have
learned with Wordsworth that
" We can feed these minds of ours
In a wise passiveness."
However that may have been, certain it is that this
temper of strenuous preoccupation left him little
opportunity to extend the circle of his acquaintance.
Doubtless, also, it made him sometimes overimpa-
tient of those commonplace secular matters in which
society very properly takes interest. When obliged
one afternoon to be in what he calls genteel company,
he exclaims: "Oh, what a dull thing is life without
religion ! I do not wonder that time hangs heavy on
the hands of those who know not God." But cer-

172 JOHN WESLEY
tainly a healthy religion should permit a man of
breeding and culture to stay even in "genteel com
pany" for two hours without being bored. Nor is
it quite clear, in spite of the testimony of Johnson,
that, with this constant feeling of urgency, Wesley
could have been a really first-rate talker. Of argument
and homily, which were the kinds of talk Johnson
himself most affected, he may have been a master;
but the easy give and take of real conversation presup
poses a feeling of leisure, of time to spare, which Wes
ley never had. But it was only a sense of duty, though
possibly a mistaken one, that drove Wesley so much
away from associations that would have been grateful
to his taste and culture. His life was given largely
to service with and for a class of people with whom
he naturally would have had but a limited sympathy.
We do not justly estimate the nobility of his work
until we realize how much sacrifice of all that was
most congenial it must have cost him. Some of the
incidental records in the Journal have a kind of half-
pathetic suggestiveness. Thus when he has a day
of quiet after a fortnight of mobs and riot in Cornwall,
he writes : " Oh, how pleasant a thing is even outward
peace ! What would not a man give for it, but a
good conscience ! " When, in his eighty-first year,
he made a brief trip to Holland, that he enjoyed with
all the eager curiosity of a boy, he notes in the Jour
nal two or three times that all the people he meets
are delightfully refined and courteous; that one of
his hosts speaks Latin very correctly, and "is of a
most easy and affable bearing"; that his hostess
another day received him "with that easy openness
and affability" which, he adds, "is almost peculiar
to Christians and persons of quality."

WESLEY'S PRIVATE LIFE

173

For one reason in particular it might have been
better for Wesley if he had cultivated a wider acquaint
ance with people of a social rank the same as his own.
One of his early critics, Mr. Knox; speaking of Wes
ley's quick sensitiveness to all innocent pleasures and
readiness to love all that was really lovely, adds
quaintly, "To interesting females, especially, this
affection constantly showed itself." Wesley was
certainly very sensitive to the charm of woman's so
ciety; but the "females" upon whom he bestowed his
highest regard would not generally be pronounced
"interesting." Everybody knows that John Wesley
was not fortunate in what the older moralists used to
call "the conduct of the affections. " A man can hardly
make a worse mistake than to choose as a wife a
woman decidedly below himself in intelligence and
social aptitudes. Wesley made that mistake — twice.
Had it seemed good to an all-wise Providence that he
should marry Betty Kirkham when he was about
twenty-seven, his life might have been happier, and
the great Wesleyan movement might perhaps have taken
no harm; for it may be doubted whether the woman
ever lived whose affection could have turned aside
John Wesley either from his inclination or his duty.
But assuredly all his subsequent attachments were
ill placed. After his decision to give up Sophia Hop-
key at the dictation of the Moravian elders in Savannah,
he seems not to have thought of marriage for some
ten years. His brother Charles and himself had
made a mutual agreement that neither would marry
without the consent of the other; it was with some
natural reluctance that John gave this consent when
Charles, in 1748, wished to wed Miss Gwynne.

174 JOHN WESLEY
Moved possibly by unconscious envy of the happy
lot of Charles, and doubtless feeling an added touch
of loneliness at the loss of his brother's more intimate
companionship, Wesley, before the close of that year,
decided that he had found the heaven-sent partner
for himself.
During the summer of 1748, while on one of his
visits to the north of England, he was overtaken by
temporary illness, which obliged him to stay some
days in the orphanage at Newcastle, where Method
ist ministers had hospital privileges. During this
illness he was cared for by one of the nurses of the
orphanage, Mrs. Grace Murray, a young widow of
thirty-two, whose husband, a London sailor, had been
drowned some years previously. Before her mar
riage this Grace Murray had been a domestic ser
vant in London, and seems to have enjoyed few oppor
tunities of education or society. She was attractive
in person and very efficient in practical affairs, but
without much self-possession, and of a fickle, hysteri
cal temperament. Wesley had met her often in Lon
don and Newcastle, and within the last two years had
found her assistance in the Newcastle orphanage and
in religious work in the vicinity of very great value.
A few months later, he declared, with something of
a lover's partiality, that no other woman in England
had done so much good as Grace Murray. Now,
after six days of her care in the orphanage, he was
convinced that she was the woman divinely intended
for his wife — and told her so. She responded, "This
is all I could have wished for under heaven!" What
followed, however, may remind one of Sir Roger de
Coverley's despairing exclamation, "You can't im-

WESLEY'S PRIVATE LIFE 175
agine what it is to have to do with a widow!" One
of Wesley's biographers x summarily declares, "Grace
Murray was a flirt. " Another 2 asserts that she recip
rocated Wesley's affection, but "with shrinking diffi
dence. "
What seems certain is that Mrs. Murray had
another suitor she was unwilling to lose altogether,
and was very much at a loss to know upon which of
the two she ought finally to bestow her hand. A
year before, she had cared for one of Wesley's
preachers, John Bennett, through a long illness, and
ever since had been in correspondence with him.
When Wesley now left Newcastle she accompanied
him through the northern counties till they reached
Bolton, where Bennett resided. Here she stopped,
while Wesley went on, hoping that they might meet
again soon, "and part no more." Three days after
they parted, she promised marriage to John Bennett.
"Here," says Wesley, in his curious account of the
affair,3 "was her first false step" — which is certainly
a mild judgment. During the next twelve months,
Mrs. Murray, who, whatever her virtues, cannot have
had much decision of character, was unable to be sure
for more than six weeks together what were the dic
tates either of duty or of affection. Perhaps one of
her acquaintances was not far wrong in the opinion
that if she consulted her ambition, she would marry
Wesley ; if she followed her affections, she would marry
Bennett. At last, in the autumn of 1749, after having
1 Tyerman. 2 Stevens.
8 "Narrative of a Remarkable Transaction in the Early Life of John
Wesley. From an original manuscript." (Second Edition. London,
1862, p. 62.) The Ms. is in the British Museum.

1 76 JOHN WESLEY
been engaged to, and disengaged from, each of her
suitors twice over, she concluded that Wesley had the
stronger claim upon both her conscience and her
heart. Marriage might soon have followed, had not
Charles Wesley now appeared upon the scene. He
had himself just married a refined and accomplished
young woman of excellent family; he heard with
dismay that his brother was about to take as a wife
a woman without education, who was engaged to
another man. Such a step he feared would be fatal
not only to his brother's happiness but to his influence,
and would bring disaster upon the cause in which
they both were interested. He hurried to the north
of England, and finding reproach and dissuasion alike
vain with his brother, addressed his expostulations
to Grace Murray herself. The poor woman, dis
tracted by his persistent assertion that marriage with
Wesley would be a violation of her pre-contract and
a grievous wrong to both her suitors, persuaded also,
it now seems, by some means, that Wesley was will
ing to give her up, changed her mind again, and con
sented to accompany Charles Wesley to Newcastle
where Bennett was staying. Here Charles made her
peace with Bennett by the plea that the blame for
her vacillation should be mostly laid not upon her,
but upon Wesley — as Charles himself then thought.
Five days later, she and Bennett were married in St.
Andrew's Church. Charles Wesley prudently re
mained in Newcastle till the ceremony was safely over,
and then accompanied the newly married couple to
Leeds, where all three met John. At the meeting,
Charles, whose naturally hasty temper had been tried
beyond patience by what he considered the inexcus-

WESLEY'S PRIVATE LIFE

177

able folly of his brother, at first declared that he re
nounced all intercourse with him save "What I would
have with an heathen man and a publican." But
after hearing the whole story from John, he pro
nounced himself "utterly amazed," and was inclined
to shift any blame upon Grace Murray. John, for
his part, would not quarrel with his brother for what
he must have deemed a most unwarrantable interfer
ence; and he would not blame the woman. But the
week after her marriage, he recorded his own poig
nant grief in a series of stanzas that have at least the
merit of utter sincerity. Forty years afterward, when
both were near the close of life, they met again for a
few moments; and it was evident to the friend who
accompanied Wesley that the wound, though it had
long since ceased to smart, had never been forgotten.1
The affections of the man were deep and tender; but
it was certainly some proof of ill-regulated sentiment
that he should have bestowed them upon one who,
whatever her activity and success in religious work,
was so ill fitted in other respects to become his com
panion. Yet marriage with Grace Murray, unfortunate as
it might have proved, would have saved Wesley from
a worse fate. On that later story the biographer
does not care to linger. Under date of February 2,
1 75 1, Wesley writes in his Journal, "Having received
a full answer from Mr. P. [erronet], I was clearly con
vinced that I ought to marry." This time he evi
dently determined to be beforehand with his brother,
for on the same day he announced to him his fixed
resolution. "I was thunderstruck," says Charles,
1 Moore's "Life of Wesley," II, 171.

178 JOHN WESLEY
"and could only answer he had given me the first blow,
and his marriage would come like the coup de grace.
Trusty Ned Perronet told me the person was Mrs.
Vazeille, one of whom I never had the least suspi
cion. I refused his company to chapel, and retired
to mourn with my faithful Sally." Charles Wesley
knew there was cause for mourning. Mrs. Vazeille
was the widow of a London merchant, an essentially
vulgar woman with a tendency to hysteria. What
attractions of person, mind, or temper she can have
had for such a man as Wesley must always remain
a mystery. She had been known to both the brothers
for about two years, but not intimately, and John's
decision to marry seems to have been taken suddenly.
He doubtless intended that the ceremony should not
be long delayed ; but it was by an accident precipitated
more speedily than he had purposed. A week after
the entry in his Journal just cited, he slipped on the
ice while crossing London Bridge, injuring his ankle
so that he could not walk or stand upon his feet. He
was immediately taken to the residence of Mrs. Va
zeille on Threadneedle Street and occupied the re
mainder of the week — so the Journal records —
"partly in prayer, reading, and conversation, partly
in writing on Hebrew Grammar and ' Lessons for
Children.'" As one of his biographers remarks, the
"conversation" was probably of most importance —
for at the beginning of the next week he was married
to Mrs. Vazeille. There was long leisure for repentance.
Within a fortnight he had so far recovered from his
lameness as to resume his travels, and set out for
Bristol, leaving his wife in London, and after a short
visit there went north again. Mrs. Wesley naturally

WESLEY'S PRIVATE LIFE 179
disliked being left alone either in London or Bristol,
and Wesley for some four years took her with him
wherever she could be induced to go. But within a
year after the marriage, her jealousy, suspicion, and
constant complaint or accusation made life almost
intolerable. Probably the best of wives might have
found that life with John Wesley laid a heavy tribute
upon her patience. Not that he lacked affection.
But he was forty-eight years old ; he was confirmed
in all his habits of life ; and he was engaged in a work
that left him little time or thought for domestic cares.
He would never have consented, as Charles Wesley
did, not many years after his marriage, to give up
most of his itinerant work and fix himself in a home.
In fact, he agreed with Mrs. Vazeille that he should
not be expected to travel a mile the less after his mar
riage than before; in the event, he was probably
glad to travel more. Doubtless, with his varied and
exacting personal responsibilities, it would have been
better had he not married at all. He was mistaken
in the conviction recorded in the Journal that "in my
present circumstances I might be more useful in the
married state." Moreover, we may admit that his
notions as to the headship of the family were such as
any high-spirited woman might not have accepted
without some protest. In a tract on Marriage he
says that the duties of a wife may all be reduced to
two: 1. She must recognize herself as the inferior
of her husband. 2. She must behave as such. This
paper, to be sure, was written later in Wesley's life,
and its rather mediaeval theory of the marriage rela
tion may have been largely an inference from his own
unfortunate experience.

180 JOHN WESLEY
Mrs. Wesley, at all events, did not accept any such
theory. She was obstinate, peevish, and subject to fits
of violent passion. Wesley was just, and — in the
opinion of his brother at least — marvellously patient ;
but he could hardly have felt much affection for such a
wife, and some of his letters to her evince a certain long-
suffering assertion of superiority not exactly concilia
tory. One of them closes with the advice : "Be content
to be a private, insignificant person, known and loved
by God and me. Leave me to be governed by God
and my own conscience. Then shall I govern you with
gentle sway, and show that I do indeed love you, even
as Christ the Church." One minded to extenuate the
guilt of Mrs. Wesley might not unplausibly urge that,
after having made the sad mistake of marrying such a
wife, Wesley might have conceded somewhat more than
there is proof he ever did to the irritating weaknesses of
her character. Still more unfortunate was it that, in his
innocent unwisdom, he allowed himself to write letters
of religious advice and sympathy to other women, espe
cially to a Mrs. Sarah Ryan, housekeeper of his Kings-
wood School. This Sarah Ryan was an ignorant,
rather flippant, domestic servant, who had — before
her conversion, of course — married three husbands,
one after the other, without waiting for either to die;
and now finding herself somewhat puzzled to know
whose wife of the three she should be, and having been
treated very badly by all three, concluded, as they all
were providentially out of the country, she would keep
the name of the second, but be the wife of neither. I
must agree with Mr. Tyerman that it was imprudent
of Wesley to make this woman, however blessed her
experiences or exemplary her present life, the house-

WESLEY'S PRIVATE LIFE 181
keeper of his Kingswood School. It was much more im
prudent in him to write her letters of religious confidence
when he had a wife insanely irritable and suspicious,
and to insert in these letters passages referring to that
wife. The knowledge of such correspondence threw
Mrs. Wesley into paroxysms of jealousy. She habitu
ally intercepted and opened his letters; she sometimes
interpolated compromising passages of her own inven
tion in them, and then read them to prejudiced persons ;
in one or two instances she gave such doctored letters
to the public prints. She spread the most calumnious
reports as to her husband's character. Her conduct,
indeed, was so scandalous and at times so violent, as to
prove that she cannot have been perfectly sane. She left
Wesley repeatedly for long periods, and finally, in 1771,
departed, taking with her a bundle of Wesley's letters
and papers, vowing never to return. Wesley simply
noted the fact in his Journal and added, "Non earn reli-
qui; non dimisi; non revocabo." She seems, however,
to have returned of her own accord, but 'only for a short
time. When she died, ten years later, she was in sepa
ration from Wesley, and he was not even informed of
her death until three days after her funeral.
Perhaps it is not strange that, after such an experi
ence, Wesley should have repeatedly given to his young
preachers who thought to marry the laconic advice of
Punch, "Don't." Not that he was coldly insensible to
the power and charm of youthful sentiment; on the
contrary, as his favorite niece prettily said, "My uncle
John always showed peculiar sympathy to young peo
ple in love." His advice was prompted not by a dislike
for sentiment, but by a distrust of it. Knowing from
his own case how fatally easy it is to become unequally

182 JOHN WESLEY
yoked together with believers as well as with unbe
lievers, he feared lest his preachers, like himself, might
have their judgment blinded by an excess of that ami
able quality. But it certainly was unfortunate that a
great religious leader should have found no happiness
in the most normal of human relations, and should have
been inclined to dissuade other religious teachers from
entering it.
The opening year of the second half of the century
was a trying period for Wesley in many ways. The
more violent opposition of mobs was beginning to les
sen, but his preaching was regarded with no less hos
tility by the clergy and the magistrates. The worst
attack of Lavington and the Bishop of London's severe
Pastoral Letter were both published in 1757. The
mutual attitude of the Methodists and the Church was
a matter of constant anxiety. The visitation and over
sight of his societies was an increasing burden, more
heavy now that Charles, since his marriage, afforded
him less assistance. A journey through Ireland in the
spring and summer of 1 750 was especially toilsome. He
wrote one evening in June, after preaching to a little
company in an Irish village : "Oh, who should drag me
into a great city if I did not know there is another world.
How gladly could I spend the remainder of my busy
life in solitude and retirement." He was encouraged
by the marvellous spreading of genuine religion over
the island ; but, as was only natural, after the first glow
of resolve, many members of his societies fell back into
their old habits. Nor was it always easy to enforce the
requirements of religion upon the practice of his con
verts. Some honest members of the societies could not

WESLEY'S PRIVATE LIFE 183
see why Methodists might not cheat the customs or
sell their votes, as all the rest of the world did. But
Wesley's discipline was strict, and offenders who would
not promptly mend their ways were dropped. Under
this winnowing process the society at Bristol, at one
time, lost half its members. Doctrinal disputes, too,
more bitter than intelligent, broke out in many of the
societies, and vexed Wesley's practical and tolerant
temper. The Calvinist controversy, in particular,
which later was to prove so virulent, as early as 1750
began to provoke a good deal of hard feeling. Then,
too, the fringe of fanatics, cranks, and hypocrites that
always hangs upon the skirts of any aggressive religious
movement, sometimes sorely tried his patience and his
common sense. His own religious teaching was emi
nently sane and practical; but it was to be expected
that ignorant zeal should sometimes drive it into absurd
ities of misinterpretation. At one place he finds a
"half dozen poor wretches" who assured him that they
"lived in the Spirit," and were therefore beyond the
need of the sacraments and prayer, and beyond the pos
sibility of sin. Two men called on him one day stating
that they were sent from God with a message to him
that he was shortly to be "borned again," adding that
they proposed to stay in the house till that was done,
unless they were turned out. Wesley assured them that
they could remain, and courteously showed them into
another room while he kept on with his writing. It was
tolerably cold, he says, and they had neither meat nor
drink; but they sat there patiently till nightfall, and
then, despairing of Wesley's new birth, quietly got up
and went away. Occasional instances of such fanati
cism or credulity are scattered through the Journal.

184 JOHN WESLEY
He now and then had to warn some of his own preachers
against extravagances or crudities of utterance that
tended to discredit their teaching. Besides all these
anxieties, we may be certain that the disappointment of
his affection for Grace Murray and the growing cer
tainty that his marriage was ill judged must have
weighed upon his spirits. Wesley never fretted or wor
ried ; but a burden is no less sorely heavy, though it
is borne silently.
As a result of these labors and anxieties, in 1753, Wes
ley's health broke down. Hitherto his constitution, if
not exactly robust, had been elastic. His ceaseless ac
tivity had not seemed to depress either his health or
his spirits. But in the summer of that year, we find in
the Journal mention of fatigue, headaches, and fever.
In October his illness increased, with chills, weakness,
and a violent cough. By the end of November he sup
posed himself in the grasp of fatal pulmonary disease.
At the command of his physician, the eminent Dr.
Fothergill, he stopped preaching and retired into the
country at Lewisham. The evening of his arrival
there, thinking his life near its close, "to prevent vile
panegyric," he wrote his epitaph : —
Here lieth the body
of
John Wesley
A Brand plucked out of the Burning :
Who died of a consumption in the fifty-first year of his age,
Nor leaving, after his debts are paid,
Ten Pounds behind Him :
Praying
God be merciful to me, an unprofitable servant !
(He ordered that this, if any, inscription be placed upon his
tombstone.)

WESLEY'S PRIVATE LIFE 185
The mourning all over England, the days of special
prayer for him, the multitude of letters of sympathy,
attested the place he had won in the hearts of a host of
Methodists. Whitefield, just then in England, poured
out his heart in a farewell letter that showed how deep
and tender, in spite of all their doctrinal differences,
was his love for his old friend.
But the disease proved less obstinate than had been
feared. After a few weeks of rest, the worst symptoms
began to abate, and at the beginning of the next year,
1754, he was able to remove to the Hot Wells, near
Bristol, where he remained some three months. In
the spring, though feeble, he attended his Conference;
but his recovery was slow and it was nearly a year be
fore he regained his old strength and vigor. But while
unable to preach, his pen was kept busy. He spent the
first half of the year in writing his "Notes on the New
Testament," a work which he says, "I should not
have attempted had I not been so ill as not to be able
to travel or to preach, and yet so well as to be able to
write." Early in the next year, 1755, his strength seemed
fully restored and he was riding and preaching as usual.
Never again, with the exception of a short but sharp
illness in 1775, caused by sleeping on the ground, did
Wesley suffer from serious illness. On his eighty-fifth
birthday, remembering thankfully his uniform good
health throughout a long and busy life, he imputes it :
"1. To my constant exercise and change of air.
2. To my,never having lost a night's sleep, sick or
well, at land or at sea, since I was born.1 3. To my
having sleep at command, so that, whenever I feel my-
1 In this his memory was slightly at fault. See supra, p. 120.

1 86 JOHN WESLEY
self almost worn out, I call it and it comes, day or night.
4. To my having constantly, for over sixty years, risen
at four in the morning. 5. To my constant preaching
at five in the morning for above fifty years. 6. To
my having had so little pain in my life, and so little sor
row or anxious care." No doubt his life in the open air,
especially his habit of preaching out of doors, checked
a native tendency to pulmonary disease. He always
believed that his friend Fletcher, if he had consented to
travel a few months on horseback, would have thrown
off the disease to which he finally succumbed. But
the last of the six causes in Wesley's list is the one to
which we are inclined to give most credit. It is not
work that kills, but worry; and John Wesley never
worried. Like most people of superior efficiency, he
had an equable temperament and great power of self-
command. The slight little man who for fifty years
had carried such a tremendous load of responsibility
could affirm that he had known little "anxious care."
Taking good care of his own health, he always in
sisted that other people should do the same. He had
no patience with interesting valetudinarianism. He
was always concerned for the health of the people in
his societies, and sometimes spoke almost with envy of
the service rendered to humanity by a good physician.
Of his own books, the one he himself was inclined to
value most was his "Primitive Physic," a collection of
simple prescriptions for the treatment of almost all dis
eases and accidents, with suggestions as to care and
hygiene. Published first in 1748, it ran through
twenty-three editions during Wesley's lifetime. Some
of the remedies prescribed are very odd, and a few of
them purely superstitious; yet the book has been pro-

WESLEY'S PRIVATE LIFE 187
nounced by good medical authority the most useful
manual of the kind then to be found in the language.
As early as 1746, Wesley began the custom, in Bristol,
of distributing medicines gratuitously to the poorer
members of his societies, with the advice of an apothe
cary and a surgeon. In six months, six hundred cases
had been treated and fifty-one thoroughly cured. The
success of the experiment induced him, next year, to
set up a dispensary which rendered great service to the
poor of Bristol for half a century. Similar dispensaries
were set up in London and in Newcastle ; and in some
cases arrangements were made to secure free treatment
for the poor in their homes. Wesley himself was much
interested in anything new in medical theory or prac
tice ; in especial, he was assured of the great therapeu
tic value of electricity, when, about 1780, that began
to excite attention. He purchased an electrical appa
ratus himself, and specified certain hours when any
persons might come to "try the virtue of this surprising
medicine." Hundreds, perhaps thousands, he thinks
were greatly benefited by this treatment.
The record of Wesley's private life after his recovery
from the illness of 1754, to the end, presents no striking
deviations from the daily routine of labor. As the roads
throughout England improved, he journeyed more fre
quently by coach or post-chaise rather than on horse
back, though he always preferred the simpler mode of
travel. Rising early and sleeping early; moving over
England constantly in his never ending round of visita
tions to the societies ; preaching now in chapels, oftener
in a market-place, on a hillside, or in some vast natural
amphitheatre like that at Gwennap, in Cornwall; not
only meeting his societies but giving exhortation and

188 JOHN WESLEY
instruction to thousands of individual seekers after a
better life; reading, writing, compiling, publishing book
after book ; his life ran on without interruption or any
change in the method of his ceaseless activity. With
the exception of the hour at morning and at evening
which he always gave to prayer and reflection, there
was hardly a waking moment in his day in which he
was not engaged in some labor for the good of others.
When, in 1778, the new City Road Chapel was built,
rooms were provided for his use in the house adjoining,
and that was nominally his home for the rest of his life ;
but he stayed there no more than he had been used to
stay in the Foundery.
In 1772 his brother Charles fixed his residence in
the parish of Marylebone, London, three miles from
the Foundery, occupying a large house which had been
put at his disposal by a wealthy friend. Mrs. Wesley
was an accomplished musician, and her children in
herited from her — as, indeed, from their father also —
special musical aptitude. Her two sons, Charles and
Samuel, became eminent organists and composers, and
the Wesley house was for years a centre of musical
society. John Wesley was always welcome there, of
course, and occasionally allowed himself a brief rest in
these congenial surroundings. He was especially fond
of the daughter of Charles, "Little Sally," — as she
was called to distinguish her from her mother, — and she
returned his love with a most enthusiastic devotion.
One day in 1775 he had promised to take her with him
on a trip to Canterbury ; but just at that time Wesley's
wife, then at her worst, had obtained some private letters
of his, and after mutilating them to suit her purpose,
threatened to publish them next day in the Morning

WESLEY'S PRIVATE LIFE 189
Post. Charles Wesley, learning her intention, hurried
over to the Foundery to warn his brother and advise
him to postpone his journey. "No," said John,
"when I devoted to God my ease, my time, my life, did
I except my reputation ? Tell Sally we will go to Can
terbury to-morrow." They went, the old man of seventy-
two pointing out to the girl of eighteen every noteworthy
object on "the road he knew so well, and beguiling the
long miles by having her read to him from Beattie's
new poem, "The Minstrel."
It was seldom, however, that Wesley found time for
any period, however short, of rest or recreation. Still
less would he allow himself any of the luxuries of life,
hardly even its comforts. Never was a man with tastes
more simple. He made no virtue of his austerities, at
least not after his early High Church days ; but in a
world full of want he could not permit himself wealth.
The sale of his books during the later years of his life
brought him annually an income of about a thousand
pounds ; but he gave it all away. When the officers of
the excise once sent him the formal notice to "make due
entry" of his plate, he replied : "Sirs, I have two silver
spoons here in London, and two in Bristol. This is all I
have at present, and I shall not buy any more while so
many around me want bread." His personal gifts to
charity amounted to over thirty thousand pounds ; but
it is doubtful whether there was ever a time when he
had on hand more than twenty pounds not needed for
immediate use.

CHAPTER VII
THE YEARS OF SUCCESS
The last thirty years of Wesley's life were years of
recognition and success. After about 1 760 active oppo
sition to his work mostly ceased. It was only seldom,
and in the most remote quarters, that his preachers
encountered any violence from mobs. The Eng
lish clergy, though not generally cordial, were at least
no longer actively hostile. A strong evangelical senti
ment had grown up within the Church Establishment,
which recognized the beneficent character of Wesley's
work, and sympathized heartily with his motives,
though not approving all his methods. No one, in
deed, not wilfully blind, could fail to see the good
that had been wrought. Hardly a large town in Eng
land but had its Wesleyan Society, and often among
the members of these societies could be found the men
who before their conversion belonged to the most dan
gerous, and it might have seemed, the most irreclaima
ble classes of society. Whole communities, before shift
less and impoverished, under the influence of the new
enthusiasm, had become temperate, law-abiding, and
thrifty. Wesley used to say that he now feared for his
people the temptations of wealth, since there was noth
ing to hinder Methodists from growing rich; and he
would urge upon them his own maxim, "Earn all you
can, save all you can, give all you can." And, best of
190

THE YEARS OF SUCCESS 191
all, to Wesley's thought, a more vital religion was spread
ing steadily among the English people, a religion that
could be experienced as well as believed, that trans
formed the outer life by renewing the inner life, that
gave strength for all duty or hardship, hope in all trial
or sorrow. In the Established Church and in the
dissenting bodies there was a deeper, more intimate
sense of the meaning of Christianity to the individual.
The phrases of the New Testament which had been
taken as the figurative expression of an unattainable
ideal became realized in the daily life of thousands of
devout people all over the island.
Some of the sorest trials of Wesley's during this period
of his life came from Methodists themselves. He him
self never countenanced extravagance or fanaticism.
But it is not strange that some few of his preachers,
without the habit or even the power of clear mental
analysis, should interpret the statements of Scripture by
their own narrow and sometimes morbid experiences,
and so announce very extravagant notions of the Chris
tian life. This tendency was seen especially in connec
tion with the doctrine of sanctification or Christian per
fection. As enjoined by Wesley, this doctrine meant
little more than that complete and loving devotion of
the will to the service of God which issues in habitual
righteousness of life. There would seem to be no ex
travagance in asserting this to be the ideal condition of
religious living, after which every Christian should
strive; it certainly cannot be our duty to give an in
complete or divided allegiance to the Master. Wesley
was careful to avoid the term "sinless perfection" as
liable to misapprehension and likely to sanction anti-
nomian and fanatical claims. Moreover, although he

192 JOHN WESLEY
urged this high state of religious attainment upon all
Christians as an ideal to be striven for, and certainly
believed that it had been reached by many members of
his societies, it seems clear that he never explicitly
claimed it for himself. He deemed there was no in
consistency in urging all Christians to seek a spiritual
state which he himself desired, but which his clear and
scrupulously honest self-insight would not allow him
confidently to profess. He found difficulty in bring
ing his teaching on this matter into agreement with
that of his brother Charles. To Charles it seemed
clear that anything to be justly called Christian perfec
tion could only be attained gradually, as the result of
the long discipline of faithful living. He was inclined
to distrust either the intelligence or the sincerity of
those who thought themselves to have gained in a day
or an hour that sainthood which crowns the education
of a righteous life. John Wesley, on the other hand,
insisted that many whose sincerity he could not doubt
professed to have been brought to this state of entire
devotion, with its consequent righteousness and peace,
by a sudden, supernatural blessing. It is not neces
sary to think there was any essential contradiction in
the views of the two brothers. It is possible to hold
that the most normal way of reaching any high moral
or spiritual condition is by the gradual education of
effort and obedience, while at the same time we may
admit that, in many instances, some sudden access of
truth or feeling may lift a man from a lower to a higher
plane of spiritual life, which he maintains thereafter.
Yet it must be admitted that such a doctrine is pecul
iarly open to misinterpretation by a hasty enthusiasm.
It is probably wiser to insist only on the duty of a healthy

THE YEARS OF SUCCESS 193
Christian life to strive constantly after higher attain
ments, rather than to encourage efforts, that are likely
to be spasmodic, after some special and sudden perfec
tion. It was not until after 1760 that any serious trouble
arose from the teaching of Wesley and his preachers on
this matter, or from ill-considered professions by mem
bers of his societies. But in the winter of 1 760-1 761
there was a deepening of religious interest among all
denominations of Christians throughout the island. In
Wesley's London societies this intensification of reli
gious feeling and desire was especially marked. In
most cases productive of nothing but good, it occasion
ally ran into most unfortunate extravagance and fanati
cism. Pious and thoughtful John Fletcher, hearing of
the agitation in London, wrote in alarm from his
Madeley vicarage to Charles Wesley: "Many of our
brethren are overshooting sober Christianity in London.
Oh, that I could stand in the gap ! Oh, that I
could, by sacrificing myself, shut this immense abysm
of enthusiasm which opens its mouth among us !
The corruption of the best things is always the worst
corruption." One George Bell, who had been a corporal in the
Life Guards, professed entire sanctification sometime
in 1762, and was allowed by Wesley to hold a few
meetings for prayer, with a number of his friends, in
the society room at the Foundery. But the man soon
developed symptoms of the wildest fanaticism. In the
early weeks of 1763, he began preaching publicly in
Hanover Square, declaring that the ordinary forms of
worship and the Sacraments of the Church were need
less for those who, like himself, had been freed from

i94 JOHN WESLEY
sin, and announcing that the coming of Christ and the
end of earthly things was at hand. He even went so far
as to name as the date of this consummation, the 28th
of February. Wesley hastened to issue a card stating
that Bell was not a member of any one of his societies,
and denouncing in the name of all Methodists his con
duct and his teaching. But crowds of foolish people
still flocked to hear him, partly from curiosity, partly
from fear, until the city authorities felt it necessary to
interfere. On the day before the expected end, Bell
with some of his followers ascended a little eminence in
the outskirts of London to take their last look at the
doomed city ; but two constables, learning of their pur
pose, were there before them, and quietly put Bell under
arrest. He was taken before a Southwark magistrate,
and on the day he had fixed for his translation, was
safely lodged in jail. After his release he gave up all
religion, and ended his career in some sort of half-crazy
radicalism. ^
This ignorant and loud-mouthed fanatic might have
done little harm to Methodism, had he not received the
support of one of Wesley's earliest and hitherto most
trusted preachers, Thomas Maxfield. Maxfield, it will
be remembered, was the Bristol convert who had first
alarmed Wesley by venturing to preach in London, and
then had received his approval as his first formally
recognized lay preacher. Later he had received ordi
nation at the hands of the bishop of Londonderry, and
for twenty years had been one of Wesley's most effi
cient helpers. Of humble birth, and without educa
tion, he had married a woman of considerable wealth,
and by his energy and ability had come to be perhaps
the most prominent of the London preachers. Natu-

THE YEARS OF SUCCESS 195
rally somewhat domineering in temper, and perhaps a
little vain, he had been flattered by his influence and
the confidence reposed in him, till he had come to re
gard himself as the coadjutor and almost the equal of
Wesley. Maxfield professed a high form of religious experi
ence; but Wesley, having confidence in his sincerity
and his good sense, assigned to his charge, in 1760, the
direction of a little group of London Methodists who
seemed in danger of running into very wild notions on
the matter of sanctification. Maxfield, however, instead
of tempering the extravagance of these enthusiasts, en
couraged it, and in the course of the next two years —
perhaps without altogether intending to do so — made
himself the centre of all the fanaticism in the London
societies. His followers, with his approval, declared
themselves to have reached a religious condition in
which they were without sin or the danger of it, to be
above the need of the ordinary ministrations of the
Church, and quite beyond the possibility of profitable
instruction by any who had not reached the same ex
alted experience with themselves. Maxfield himself
later denied that he had ever openly sanctioned the
vagaries of Bell; but he certainly did not openly dis
courage them, and the two men were considered leaders
of all the more erratic members of the society in Lon
don. Wesley repeatedly expostulated with Maxfield;
he published, in 1762, a sober tract of "Cautions and
Directions to the Greatest Professors in the Methodist
Societies" ; but his efforts to check the tide of extrava
gance were only partially successful. Maxfield grew
more jealous and bitter, and in April of 1763, he with
drew from Wesley altogether, taking with him over two

196 JOHN WESLEY
hundred of the Foundery society, and formed a con
gregation of his own in Moorfields. In later years his
temper grew less acrid, but he was never again one of
Wesley's preachers.
These dissensions and extravagances were the source
of deep regret to Wesley, and they doubtless did some
thing to discredit Methodism in the eyes of a hostile or
indifferent public. Yet their final result was, perhaps,
not altogether injurious. The schism in the London
society purged it of ignorance and delusion, and made
its members, for the future, more thoughtful and pru
dent. Wesley, for his part, found it necessary to define
more carefully his views on the vexed subject that had
caused so much trouble ; while his attitude during the
whole period of excitement was an assurance that
Methodism had no place for credulity or fanaticism.
More bitter and more discreditable to religion was
the Calvinistic controversy which reached its climax
about ten years later. Between Whitefield and Wesley,
after the reconciliation which followed their brief alien
ation in 1 741, there was always a cordial sympathy.
Neither would modify or conceal his opinions upon
the points of difference between them ; yet both agreed
not to make these matters of controversy needlessly
prominent in their preaching. Whitefield, when in
England, occasionally spoke in the Foundery and in
other preaching places of Wesley's societies throughout
the island ; but, for the most part, their work was done
in separation. And after about 1750 a change in White-
field's methods and associations, while it had little
effect on their friendship, tended to dissociate them yet
further in their labors and their companionships.
As early as 1739, Whitefield's preaching had at-

THE YEARS OF SUCCESS 197
tracted the attention of that great lady, Selina, Countess
of Huntingdon, and during the winter of 1 741-1742,
when Whitefield was in London, many titled ladies
flocked in her train to hear him. Lady Townshend,
Lady Frankland, Lady Hinchinbrooke, the Duchess of
Ancaster, the Duchess of Queensberry, — "Kitty, ever
fair and ever young," — all were found in Whitefield's
audiences. The proud old Duchess of Buckingham,
though she declared it "highly offensive and insulting"
to be told that her heart was "as sinful as that of the
commonest wretches," nevertheless consented to hear
the favorite preacher of the Countess; and the great
Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, professed herself eager
to hear any one who could do her good. When, seven
years later, in 1748, Whitefield came back to London
after a long absence in America, his reception was still
more flattering. The Countess had now taken him
definitely under her patronage, made him her domestic
Chaplain, and opened her salon to his sermons. Meth
odism became for a little time the fad of the hour.
Most of the great ladies of the Court bowed in the
Countess of Huntingdon's drawing-room. My Lord
Bolingbroke, with "that saint, our friend Lord Chester
field," listened with admiration to the "apostolical per
son," — as Bolingbroke termed him, — while Bubb
Dodington, George Selwyn, Lord Lyttleton, Lord
Townshend, Lord Sandwich, Lord North, William
Pitt, the Duke of Cumberland, Frederick, Prince of
Wales, and a long array of other titled folk swelled the
company of his hearers. "If you think of coming to
England," wrote Walpole to Horace Mann, "you must
prepare yourself with Methodism. I really think by
that time it will be necessary."

198 JOHN WESLEY
There is no reason to charge Whitefield with any
foolish vanity over this popularity in the world of rank
and fashion ; but it was in part the hope of permanent
influence there, encouraged by the advice of the Count
ess, that led him to change somewhat his plan of work
and his relation to the Methodist movement. Up to
this time, he had been recognized as having a certain
authority over the numerous societies formed in Eng
land and Wales among those Methodists holding Cal
vinistic opinions; though that authority was not se
cured by any such strict organization as that which
obtained in the societies under the control of Wesley.
But now, at the close of 1748, Whitefield seems to have
determined to sever his official connection with the Cal
vinistic societies, and to make no further attempt to
form such societies, but rather to give himself, while in
England, to the work of a preacher and evangelist. The
Countess did not look with much favor upon the mul
tiplication of societies like Wesley's, ministered to by
lay preachers, and tending constantly toward separa
tion from the Church. It was, rather, her desire to
stimulate the growth of vital religion within the Church,
and, with that purpose, to secure patronage and influ
ence for preachers of a pronounced evangelical type.
She was on the watch for young men of promise who
were of devout and aggressive religious character; she
provided means for their education, and then used her
influence to procure for them ordination. She usually
had several proteg6s in the universities; and in 1768
she founded a college of her own in Trevecca, Wales,
for the training of young men who were to enter the
ministry, either in the Established Church or in any
other Protestant denomination.

THE YEARS OF SUCCESS 199
All these measures had Wesley's cordial approval.
He now and then betrayed a little impatience at White-
field's pious complacency over his "elect ladies," and
probably was more than a little doubtful whether any
lasting work of grace was being wrought in the hearts
of those great but giddy folk who listened to the fash
ionable Methodist one night, and the next night crowded
to the theatre or the ridotto. Whitefield, for his part,
with his impulsive nature, was always liable to moods
in which he thought Wesley unjust or jealous; but
their friendship was too deep and their zeal too intense
for the cause in which they both were laboring to allow
any lasting disturbance of the sympathy between them.
Some of Whitefield's preachers, indeed, were not so
cautious or so charitable; and, as early as 1739, spoke
bitterly against the doctrine and the discipline of Wes
ley. So long, however, as Whitefield was in England,
there was little danger of an outbreak of virulent con
troversy. But in September, 1769, Whitefield sailed on his
seventh and last voyage to America; one year from
that time he died at Newburyport. When he was
gone, there was no curb upon the violence of some of
the Countess of Huntingdon's younger ministers. Two
of them in particular, though we must suppose them
pious and earnest men, gained an unenviable reputa
tion for rancor in controversy, Toplady and Rowland
Hill. Augustus Montague Toplady was the son of an army
officer, and was born in 1740. He had some training
in Westminster School, but at the death of his father
the widowed mother removed with her son to a small
estate in Ireland, and entered him at Trinity College,

200 JOHN WESLEY
Dublin. Shortly before his admission to college, he
heard one of Wesley's lay preachers, professed con
version, and decided to take orders. In those early
days he looked up to Wesley as his spiritual father,
and wrote him — as so many did — for counsel as to
his religious life ; but his theological opinions seem to
have been early inclined toward Calvinism. On leav
ing college, he came over to England and obtained the
small living of Blagdon in Somerset, which he exchanged
a few years later for the vicarage of Broadhembury in
Devon. While here, he came under the more imme
diate influence of Lady Huntingdon. He frequently
preached in her chapel at Bath, and soon came to be
accounted one of her most useful helpers. Ardent
and impetuous in temper, with a vein of genuine poetry
in his nature, he threw himself into his every undertak
ing with a zeal that soon burned out a feeble and sickly
body. A brilliant and rapid extempore preacher, he
had little breadth or power of thought. He never
could see more than one side of any question, and thus
could hardly help impugning the honesty of those who
differed with him. He carried into controversy all the
intense sincerity of a narrow man, and often allowed
his zeal for what he thought truth to hurry him into
unchristian bitterness of feeling and indecent violence
of speech. Some of his pamphlets unite the ardor of
the devotee with the manners of Billingsgate.
But the worst abuse of Toplady was surpassed by
the deliberate and studied scurrility of Hill. Rowland
Hill, a younger son of an old Shropshire family, had
been adopted as a spiritual protege" of Lady Hunting
don, while yet an undergraduate of St. John's College,
Cambridge, and for some years thereafter was her

THE YEARS OF SUCCESS 201
doughty champion. On leaving the university in 1769,
he had been disappointed in his plan to take orders;
no less than six bishops refused his application for ordi
nation, on the ground of his irregular preaching while
in Cambridge. But the pious activities of the young
Cambridge undergraduate which the bishops stigma
tized as irregular were precisely what recommended
him to the favor of the Countess of Huntingdon. De
termined that the entrance to a useful career should
not be denied to such an earnest young man by episco
pal obstinacy, she encouraged him to preach without
ordination, opened to him freely her chapel at Bath,
and secured for him large audiences in other places in
that neighborhood. His eldest brother Richard —
who after the death of the father succeeded to the fam
ily title of baronet — was also a warm supporter of
the Countess, and during the years of controversy from
1769 to 1775, the Calvinistic party had no more vigor
ous defenders than the brothers Hill. The long and
useful career of Rowland Hill must command our re
spect; but it is impossible to have anything but indig
nation for the truculence and vulgarity that defaced his
early controversial writing.
In the spring of 1768, six students were expelled from
St. Edmund's Hall, Oxford, for Methodist doctrines
and practice. It was charged that they held illegal
conventicles, and preached, though not in orders; that
they taught the false doctrine that faith without works
is sufficient for salvation, and that there is, therefore,
no necessity for good works ; and, moreover, that they
were illiterate and "incapable of performing the stated
duties of the university." The young men were none
of them connected with Wesley's societies, but it was

202 JOHN WESLEY
reported, probably with truth, that some or all of them
were supported by the Countess of Huntingdon. At
all events, that lady was indignant at the action of the
university authorities, and five months later opened a
college of her own at Trevecca in Wales, where the
conscientious exercise of the duties of religion would
not expose young men to discipline and penalty. Mean
time, her friends took up the cause of the expelled Ox
ford men. Rowland Hill was still in Cambridge ; but
his brother Richard issued a pamphlet in which he
defended vigorously not only the conduct but the creed
which had been disapproved by the Oxford authorities.
This called out a reply from Dr. Nowell, Principal of
St. Mary's Hall, proving the Calvinist doctrines the
young men had taught to be contrary to the standards
of the Church of England. The battle was now fairly
on, and Toplady rushed bristling into the field with
two pamphlets, one a vindication of the Church from
Nowell's charge of Arminianism, and the other a stout
assertion of the doctrine of absolute predestination,
translated from the Latin of Zanchius.1
Wesley had always maintained most cordial relations
with the Countess of Huntingdon, though perhaps
sometimes chafing a little under her superior tone of
patronage ; but he had for some time past viewed with
increasing uneasiness her efforts in bringing together a
group of preachers who were known to the world as
Methodists, but who had no connection with his socie
ties, and who were being schooled to teach doctrines he
1 Girolamo Zanchi, 1516-1590, an Italian theologian who was forced
to leave Italy because he adopted Protestant doctrines, was for a term a
leader in the reformed church in Geneva, and passed the later years of
his life as Professor in Heidelberg.

THE YEARS OF SUCCESS 203
himself most heartily repudiated. He had little incli
nation for controversy; but he found it impossible to
remain altogether quiet under the cool positiveness with
which these young preachers — Toplady was not yet
thirty — announced doctrines that seemed to him mon
strous. He left formal reply mostly to others; but he
could not resist the temptation of applying to Toplady
the reductio ad absurdum. He abridged the translation
of Zanchius into a pamphlet of twelve pages, without
note or comment, simply adding at the close this para
graph:— "The sum of all is this: one in twenty (suppose) of
mankind are elected; nineteen in twenty are repro
bated. The elect shall be saved, do what they will;
the reprobate shall be damned, do what they can.
Reader, believe this or be damned. Witness my hand.
A— T— ."
Toplady was not likely to keep silent under such an
arraignment as this. In angry rejoinder he branded
Wesley's abridgment as a wilful travesty of his trea
tise, and the summary paragraph as an attempt to foist
upon him a monstrous perversion of the truth. "In
almost any other case, a similar forgery would transmit
the criminal to Virginia or Maryland, if not to Ty
burn." Wesley, he says, is guilty of "Satanic shame-
lessness," of "acting the ignoble part of a lurking, sly
assassin," " uniting the sophistry of a Jesuit with the
authority of a pope," of sinking the discussion "to the
level of an oyster woman." One might have supposed
that some respect for the years of a great religious
teacher, his senior by almost half a century, might have
restrained somewhat the violence of this young de-

204 JOHN WESLEY
claimer; but it never did. The bitter animosity shown
in this pamphlet characterized all his later relations
with Wesley, and for the next seven years the Gospel
Magazine, which he edited, emitted from time to time
articles filled with noisome invective to which the only
fit reply was pitying or contemptuous silence.
Meantime, there was good reason to think this un-
brotherly temper was not the only ill result of the con
troversy. In particular, the spread of the Antinomian
doctrine that good works were not necessary to salva
tion had a very injurious effect upon the morality of
some Methodists. Fletcher declared that "Antino
mian principles and practice" were spreading like wild
fire in some of the societies. In these circumstances,
Wesley felt it necessary at the session of the Conference
in 1770 to make a full and explicit statement of his
teaching upon the subject of faith and works. The
leading theses of this famous declaration, in the quaint
form of question and answer in which the Minutes of
the Conference were always phrased, were the fol
lowing : —
"We have leaned too much toward Calvinism.
Wherein ?
" 1. With regard to man's faithfulness. Our Lord
himself taught us to use this expression ; and we ought
never to be ashamed of it.
" 2. With regard to working for life. This also our
Lord has expressly commanded, as 'Labor,' ipydt,ea-0e,
literally, 'work' for the meat that endureth to everlast
ing life. And, in fact, every believer till he comes to
glory, works for as well as from life.
"3. We have received it as a maxim that 'a man is
to do nothing in order to justification.' Nothing can
be more false. Whoever desires to find favor with

THE YEARS OF SUCCESS 205
God should 'cease to do evil and learn to do well.'
Whoever repents should do 'works meet for repentance.'
And if this is not in order to find favor, what does he
do them for ?
"Review the whole affair: Who of us is now ac
cepted of God ? He that now believes in Christ with a
loving and obedient heart. Who among those that
never heard of Christ? He that feareth God and
worketh righteousness according to the light he had.
Is this the same with 'he that is sincere'? Nearly, if
not quite. Is not this 'Salvation by works'? Not by j
the merit of works, but by works as a condition. What /
have we been disputing about for these thirty years?
I am afraid about words.
"As to merit itself, of which we have been so dread
fully afraid ; we are rewarded 'according to our works.'
How does this differ from for the sake of our works?
And how differs this from secundum merita operum?
Can you split this hair ? I doubt I cannot.
"Does not talking of a justified or a sanctified state
tend to mislead men? Almost naturally leading them
to trust in what was done in one moment? Whereas, ;
we are every moment and hour pleasing or displeasing ,
to God 'according to our works,' — according to the
whole of our inward tempers and our outward be
havior." This statement threw the Calvinist preachers into
consternation. The Countess of Huntingdon, resolved
to countenance no such heresy, promptly announced
that any one in her college at Trevecca who did not dis
avow Mr. Wesley's theses must be expelled. As a re
sult she lost her headmaster, Mr. Benson ; and Fletcher
of Madeley, who had served as president of the college,
though not constantly in residence there, also felt it
necessary to resign his office. The Countess seems to
have thought it possible to bring such a pressure upon

206 JOHN WESLEY
Wesley as would force him to retract his Minutes at
the next session of the Conference, which was to be
held in Bristol. With this purpose her cousin and
agent, the Rev. Walter Shirley, drew up a circular let
ter and sent it to a large number of his Calvinist friends,
urging that as many as possible, both clergy and laity,
of those who disapproved Mr. Wesley's "dreadful her
esy" should assemble in Bristol during the session of
the Conference, and "go in a body to the said Con
ference to insist on a formal recantation of the said
Minutes." In case of a refusal, they were to sign and
publish their emphatic protest — a copy of which was
enclosed with the letter. This manifesto of the Countess,
however, met with no very general response. It was
probably evident even to her friends that she had no
business with Wesley's Conference, and that, in any
case, the attempt to force such a man as John Wesley
to retract opinions he had officially announced was
hardly likely to succeed. When the time came, it was
found that the assembly which was to overawe Wesley
and his Conference mustered only eight men, of whom
two were young students from Trevecca, and only Shir
ley had the slightest pretensions to ability or influence.
A little disheartened, perhaps, by this feeble promise
of support, both the Countess and Shirley addressed
conciliatory letters to Wesley on the evening before the
Conference met. The Countess protested that she had
intended no personal disrespect to him in her action,
but "only a degree of zeal against the principles of the
Minutes"; while Shirley professed himself ready to
apologize for any hasty or offensive expressions in his
letter. Wesley, who had written to Lady Huntingdon
some six weeks before in a tone of kindly remonstrance,

THE YEARS OF SUCCESS 207
did not feel it necessary to answer either of these letters ;
but consented to receive Shirley and his companions at
a session of the Conference. The interview proved to
be conciliatory. Shirley did not press for any formal
recantation, but, after considerable discussion, pre
sented to the Conference for signature a paper contain
ing an admission that the language of the Minutes had
not been sufficiently guarded, and defining the obnox
ious doctrine in a way that, it was hoped, might be sat
isfactory to both parties. "No one is a real Christian,"
so the statement ran, "and consequently cannot be
saved, who doeth not good works, yet our works have
no part in meriting or purchasing our salvation." This
paper, after some slight changes in its phrasing, Wesley
accepted and signed, with fifty-three of his ministers.
Shirley professed himself satisfied, and retired from the
interview declaring it one of the happiest days of his
life. This attempt at compromise, however, proved rather
a new beginning than the end of controversy. Wesley
always insisted, and justly, that there was nothing in
the declaration he had signed inconsistent with his pre
vious teaching. The Minutes of 1770, he claimed, had
only emphasized that side of a doctrine which at the
moment needed emphasis. Nor was that need, in his
opinion, by any means past. Just before the begin
ning of the Bristol Conference he had received and sent
to the printer a pamphlet by Fletcher explaining and
vindicating the obnoxious Minutes. This pamphlet
Shirley now requested him to withdraw or suppress;
but Wesley declined. He felt he had no right to be
silent when his silence would be accounted a tacit as
sent to the widespread misrepresentation and denun-

208 JOHN WESLEY
ciation of his doctrine. Fletcher's pamphlet was hur
ried through the press, and published soon after the
adjournment of the Conference. It is the first of his
well-known "Checks." Shirley, on the other hand,
thought, or professed to think, this action a violation
of the Compromise implied in the Declaration Wesley
and his preachers had signed, and he replied with great
bitterness, charging Wesley with sophistry and bad
faith. Richard Hill and his brother Rowland, — now
out of the University, — Toplady, and a number of
smaller men, soon joined full cry in the attack. The
controversy that followed we need not trace in detail.
It lasted several years, and it was not edifying. Wesley
himself took little or no part in it. And it should be
said that his principal defenders, Sellon and Fletcher,
never descended to the vulgar abuse that too often
defiled the pages of their opponents. But no contri
bution of any permanent value to the age-long argu
ment was made by either side, unless we are to except
the series of papers by Fletcher, commonly known as
"Checks to Antinomianism." These in their collected
form have been ever since regarded as one of the stand
ards of Methodist doctrine. Fletcher was a clear and
facile writer, with a talent for debate and a knack of
telling illustration and example. His gentle temper
could not be betrayed into harshness or scurrility; but
he was master of a quiet irony, all the more effective
that it was never angry or acrimonious. It may be
admitted that he by no means said the last word on the
insoluble problem he was discussing; indeed, perhaps
he hardly perceived its profoundest difficulties. But
he gave a satisfactory reply to the crude and morally
repulsive form of Calvinism urged by his opponents.

THE YEARS OF SUCCESS 209
It was the best result — perhaps it was the only good
result — of the whole controversy that it committed
Wesleyan Methodism definitely and unalterably to an
Arminian theology. And it will not be denied that to
the influence of Wesleyan Methodism, on both sides
the Atlantic, is due in no small degree the almost uni
versal abandonment of that merciless logic which reads
in the will of God the denial of the human will, and
the absolute, irrevocable doom before their birth of a
great majority of the human race. It is the demand
of ultimate reason that we should insist, at cost of what
ever logical inconsistency, upon a God of justice and of
love. Only such a God can men love and worship.
But it cannot be too often repeated that Wesley's
temper was not controversial. He claimed the privi
lege of teaching what he deemed the truth, and some
times, therefore, felt it necessary to answer perversions
or misrepresentations of his teaching. He also ex
pected, very justly, that his preachers, for whose teach
ing he was responsible, should not inculcate doctrines
at open variance with his own. But he never made the
acceptance of his own opinions the test of a Christian
life. He did not even attempt to impose his doctrines
upon his own societies. Calvinists and Arminians
were welcomed there, if they could unite in Chris
tian sympathy and labor. Given the central force of a
religious life manifesting itself in devout and beneficent
activity, and he asked no more. From first to last, no
other condition of membership was required. As early
as 1742, Wesley wrote: "The distinguishing marks of
a Methodist are not his opinions of any sort. His
assenting to this or that scheme of religion, his embrac
ing any particular set of notions, his espousing the

210 JOHN WESLEY
judgment of one man or another, are all quite wide of
the point. Whoever, therefore, imagines that a Method
ist is a man of such or such an opinion is grossly igno
rant of the whole affair. ... Is thy heart right, as
my heart is with thine ? I ask no further question. If
it be, give me thy hand. Dost thou love and serve God ?
It is enough. I give thee the right hand of fellow
ship." x
And more than forty years later, at the very end of
his life, he reaffirms the same position even more ex
plicitly : —
" One circumstance more is quite peculiar to the peo
ple called Methodists; that is, the terms upon which
any person may be admitted to their society. They do
not impose, in order to their admission, any opinions
whatsoever. Let them hold particular or general re
demption, absolute or conditional decrees ; let them be
Churchmen or Dissenters, Presbyterians or Indepen
dents, it is no obstacle. Let them choose one mode of
baptism or another; it is no bar to their admission.
The Presbyterian may be a Presbyterian still; the In
dependent or Anabaptist use his own mode of worship.
So may the Quaker; and none will contend with him
about it. They think, and let think. One condition
and one only, is required — a real desire to save their
soul. Where this is, it is enough ; they desire no more ;
they lay stress upon nothing else; they ask only, 'Is
thy heart herein as my heart? If it be, give me thy
hand.' Is there any other society in Great Britain or
Ireland that is so remote from bigotry? That is so
truly of a catholic spirit ? So ready to admit all serious
persons without distinction ? Where then is there such
1 "The Character of a Methodist," 1742.

THE YEARS OF SUCCESS 211
another society in Europe? In the habitable world?
I know none. Let any man show it me that can." 1
Over and over again, throughout his whole career,
he expresses this hearty tolerance of opinions at vari
ance with his own, whenever they do not prove in
consistent with a genuinely religious life. "I am
sick of opinions," he says in his " Further Appeal to
Men of Reason," 1745 ; "let my soul be with Christians
wherever they be, and of whatsoever opinion they be
of." In a letter to a friend he declares: "'Is a man a
believer in Jesus Christ, and is his life suitable to his
profession?' are not only the main, but the sole in
quiries I make in order to his admission into our
society." 2 Discussing this matter of beliefs before
his Conference once he said: "I have no more right to
object to a man for holding a different opinion from
mine than I have to differ with a man because he wears
a wig and I wear my own hair ; but if he takes his wig
off and shakes the powder in my eyes, I shall consider
it my duty to get quit of him as soon as possible."
His charity, indeed, extended far outside the limits of
strict orthodoxy. In his noble "Letter to a Roman
Catholic," 1749, after enumerating the beliefs and pur
poses they held in common, he continues : —
"Are we not thus far agreed? Let us thank God
for this, and receive it as a fresh token of his love.
But if God still loveth us, we ought also to love one
another. We ought, without this endless jangling about
opinions, to provoke one another to love and good
works. Let the points wherein we differ stand aside :
here are enough wherein we agree, enough to be the
1 "Thoughts upon a Late Phenomenon," 1788.
2 Journal, May 14, 1765.

212 JOHN WESLEY
ground of every Christian temper, and of every Chris
tian action."
He printed for Methodists a life of that good Uni
tarian, Thomas Firmin — a very pious man, he said.
The arch-heretics of history, Montanus of the second
century, Pelagius of the fifth century, Servetus of the
sixteenth century, — he declared that, in his opinion,
they were all holy men, who, at the last, with all the
good men of the heathen world, Socrates, and Plato,
and Trajan, and Marcus Aurelius, would come from
the east and the west to sit down in the Kingdom of
Heaven. Religious history from the dawn of Chris
tianity to the present day may be searched in vain to
find another leader of equal prominence and equal
positiveness of personal opinion who showed such
genuine liberality as the great founder of Methodism.
Nor was the religious life which Wesley enjoined
upon the members of his societies enthusiastic or
mystical. The whole Wesleyan movement, despite a
contrary opinion widely current then and sometimes
heard even now, owed its success very largely to the
fact that the type of religion it fostered was thoroughly
healthy and practical. The movement, it is true, was
not merely or primarily ethical, but rather evangel
ical; it was distinctively a religious revival. It was
inevitable, moreover, that such a movement as the
Wesleyan revival should be accompanied by much emo
tional excitement. It is only by some strong compul
sion of soul that men by thousands can be led to turn
from long-confirmed habits of vice to a life clean,
righteous, devout. And such a passage from moral
disease to moral health must often be marked by
something of morbid or irregular excitement. But

THE YEARS OF SUCCESS 213
grant all this, and it may be confidently affirmed that
seldom or never has a great popular religious reform,
so widespread and so searching, been more free from
unwholesome teaching and unwholesome stimulus.
The truth is, Wesley impressed upon his societies
his own type of religion, and that type was preemi
nently sane and practical. As we have noted in a
previous chapter, there is in his Journal, after about
1740, hardly a reference to his own emotions, to what
is commonly called personal religious experience. After
he had got out from under the influence of the Mora
vians, he had no patience with anything like mysti
cism, or quietism, or enthusiasm. The result was that
the Wesleyan movement, throughout its whole course,
tended to foster the virtues of good citizenship. The
condition of membership in the societies was always
conduct. Wherever they were formed, it was noticeable
not only that they diminished the more flagrant forms
of vice, but that they raised the standard of morals
throughout the community. Some prevalent forms
of crime were almost eradicated. In his earlier visits
to Cornwall, for example, Wesley found that nearly
all the members of his societies were in the habit of
buying and selling goods that had not paid the duty.
It was not thought immoral; everybody did it. But
Wesley's rule was explicit and peremptory. Meeting
his large society at St. Ives, he "found an accursed
thing among them; well-nigh one and all bought or
sold uncustomed goods. I therefore delayed speaking
to any more till I had met them all together. This I
did in the evening, and told them plain, either they
must put this abomination away, or they would see
my face no more." Next day they individually prom-

214 JOHN WESLEY
ised to do so. Making the round of his Cornish
societies, some years later, in 1762, he can note in his
Journal, "that detestable practice of cheating the King
is no more found in our societies." The records of
the excise show that, in fact, smuggling had greatly
diminished along the Cornish coast. In some of the
northern counties the practice died harder. In 1776,
Joseph Benson had expelled a smuggler from the New
castle Society. Wesley wrote him: "You did right.
Fear nothing. Begin in the name of God and go
through with it. If only six will promise you to sin
no more, leave only six. . . . You must, at all events,
tear up this evil by the roots."
So, too, the current practice of bribery at elections
Wesley denounced as impossible for a Christian man.
He published pamphlets against it and distributed
them broadcast. "For God's sake," he wrote to his
Bristol societies, "for the honor of the Gospel, for your
country's sake, for the sake of your own souls, beware
of bribery. Before you see me again, the trial will
come at the general election for members of parlia
ment. On no account take money or money's worth.
Keep yourselves pure. Give, not sell, your vote.
Touch not the accursed thing." As early as 1747, he
had the satisfaction of knowing that among his Cornish
people there were many men who had not only refused
to accept money for their votes, but would not even eat
or drink at the expense of the candidate for whom they
voted. Long before the close of the century, Method
ists came to be recognized as the most incorruptible
class of voters in the realm.
It has been said by some critics of Methodism that,
while Wesley was, indeed, very liberal in the matter of

THE YEARS OF SUCCESS 215
belief, the rules of conduct he imposed upon his societies
were unwisely rigid. He is charged with forbidding
innocent recreations and amusements, discouraging as
worldly the accomplishments that heighten the charm
of society, condemning as culpable luxury indulgence
of taste in dress and in the arts of the household, and,
in general, fostering an ungenial temper that divorces
religion from beauty and shuts out the pious man from
much that refines and liberalizes life.
Nor need we deny that there is at least some plausi
bility in such an arraignment. It may certainly be
pardoned to a great religious reformer, if, in his earnest
ness for the religious welfare of his followers, he is
sometimes too careless of their tastes and their pleasures.
Wesley doubtless was somewhat deficient in a sense of
the range and variety of life. Then, too, his own
immense, unremitting industry made him sometimes
overexacting in his demands upon others. His ideas
of education, for example, were vitiated by an undue
dread of idleness. When he founded his boys' school
at Kingswood, his first rule was the very bad one that
no boy should be allowed any time at all for play.
This Kingswood school, in fact, was an example of
many things that a boy's school ought not to be. Wes
ley's idea of discipline led now to intolerable severity
and now to insufferable laxity. The absence of all
spontaneity, the system of religious forcing that en
couraged pronounced emotional "experiences" of re
pentance and conversion, gave a morbid tone to the
life of the school, and resulted in seasons of hysterical
excitement followed naturally by periods of reaction
against all serious things. Wesley's own kindly manner
was always attractive to children, and he was personally

216 JOHN WESLEY
very fond of them, especially in his later years ; but it
cannot be said his religious treatment of them was
always wise. Without children of his own or any
real knowledge of childhood, his notions as to the
proper discipline for young people was largely derived
from his recollection of his mother's parental system;
and we have seen that Susannah Wesley's training
of her children was not in every instance beyond
criticism. But, granting all this, it must still be urged that
those who arraign Wesley's government of his societies
as narrow and rigid overlook some of the essential
facts in the case. They forget that a large proportion
of Wesley's converts, drawn from the lower-middle
class of society, had been accustomed to few recreations
more refined than the cock-pit and the bull-ring. To
people of this class hardly any amusements were ac
cessible that would have been approved by any person
careful of the morals of society. And as for matters of
dress and other forms of personal expenditure, Wesley
well knew that the very first step toward the formation
of good taste in such people is to teach them the charm
of simplicity. Ostentation is vulgar anywhere; but
nowhere is it quite so vulgar as in the garish display of
folk just rising out of poverty. He saw that, in thou
sands of instances, the energy and industry of Meth
odists were making them rich, and he frequently used
to express his apprehensions that the societies might
not be proof against the temptations of newly acquired
wealth. It was surely the part of wisdom to enjoin
upon them both by precept and example the virtue of
plain living. Wesley himself was a pattern of careful
neatness in all matters of dress. And there was always

THE YEARS OF SUCCESS 217
a quiet dignity in his manner that commanded respect
and imitation. The teaching and example of such a
man upon the social conditions of his people could not
have been other than liberalizing. In fact the man who
exerted the most beneficial influence upon English
manners and minor morals at the middle of the eigh
teenth century was not my Lord Chesterfield or any
of his ilk; it was John Wesley.
Nor was Wesley's regard for the interest of the
members of his societies confined by any unintelligent
pietism. He deserves to be considered one of the
earliest advocates of popular education. It was one of
his correspondents, a Miss Ball, who started the first
Sunday School, fourteen years before Robert Raikes
opened his; and it was another Methodist young
woman, Miss Cooke, who first suggested to Robert
Raikes the idea of his Gloucester School.1 Wesley
from the first warmly seconded the plan. "So many
children," he says in his first notice of the schools,2 "in
one parish are restrained from open sin, and taught
a little good manners, at least, as well as to read
the Bible." This was in 1784; and so rapidly did
the idea spread that within three years thereafter the
number of children taught in Sunday Schools exceeded
two hundred thousand.3 The largest of the schools
were under Methodist direction. In Newcastle, for in
stance, a school was established in the Orphan House,
attended by more than one thousand children. In
Bolton, the Methodist Sunday School, opened in 1785,
had for about twenty years an average attendance of
eighteen hundred. In many schools, as at Bolton, the
1 Tyerman, III, 415. 2 Journal, July 18, 1784.
8 Tyerman, III, 500.

218 JOHN WESLEY
boys and girls were carefully trained in music as well
as in the elementary branches of learning. Wesley,
who was not only an enthusiastic lover of music, but
no mean critic, declared that there were in this Bolton
School "a hundred such trebles as are not to be found
together in any chapel, cathedral, or music room within
the four seas," and when the whole chorus of a thousand
sang together, "the melody was beyond that of any
theatre." Wesley's services to the cause of popular literature
are also worthy of recognition. He positively de
manded that his preachers should devote a certain part
of their time to methodical reading and study, and
warmly encouraged the reading habit in all his societies.
And he was at pains to put good reading within their
reach. The Arminian Magazine, which he established
in 1778, was one of the first, as it is the oldest, popular
magazine in England. Although intended primarily
to inculcate a sound theology, and like all other "maga
zines" up to the beginning of the nineteenth century —
as the name implies — a kind of repository for ex
cerpts, letters, anecdotes, biographical sketches, and
other miscellany, it also contained from the start some
poetry, notices critical and literary, and other matter
calculated to cultivate the taste as well as the piety of
its readers. Wesley's own writings, which touched
almost all sorts of subjects, and the hymns by himself
and his brother Charles, were published in the cheapest
possible form that they might be universally circulated
among his people. He prepared or abridged treatises
on physics, chemistry, medicine, history, rhetoric, poli
tics, selections from standard poetry, to be used as
popular handbooks. In 1 781, he issued a revised and

THE YEARS OF SUCCESS

219

somewhat abridged edition of a popular novel he much
admired, Brooke's " Fool of Quality." In every way he
was anxious that the Methodist movement should foster
popular intelligence as well as popular morals.
Nor was Wesley insensible to the higher forms of
art. An impassioned lover of music in its nobler
forms, he lost no opportunity of listening to it when
his busy life would allow. He repeatedly records in
the Journal his delight in oratorio.1 He encouraged the
study and practice of music wherever practicable. It
was with his sanction that Martin Madan opened his
chapel once a year for the performance of oratorio, —
an act which Wesley's biographer cannot bring him
self to approve,2 — and Wesley speaks with enthusiasm
of hearing " Judith " and " Ruth " given there. Some
of the best of Charles Wesley's hymns were set to
music by Handel ; especially admirable is his setting
for that noble lyric —
" Rejoice, the Lord is King."
Wesley himself, with the aid of his brother Charles,
selected the music to be sung in his societies; and it
was in no small degree owing to the ardent and well-
instructed love of these two men for music, that the
Methodist movement carried a wave of sacred song all
over England. The London home of Charles Wesley
was for twenty years a centre of musical culture. His
wife was an accomplished musician with a trained and
sympathetic voice ; his two sons, Charles and Samuel,
1 1758, Thursday, Aug. 17. "I went to the Cathedral to hear Mr.
Handel's ' Messiah.' I doubt if that congregation was ever so serious
at a sermon as they were during this performance. In many parts,
especially several of the chorusses, it exceeded my expectation."
2 Tyerman, II, 499.

220 JOHN WESLEY
were among the most distinguished organists of their
time. The elder, Charles, was an especial favorite of
George III ; the younger, Samuel, won some eminence
as a composer, and had almost equal mastery of the
organ, harpsichord, and violin; while his son Samuel
Sebastian, the well-known organist of Gloucester
Cathedral, carried the musical traditions of the Wesley
family quite down to the end of the nineteenth century.
From all more questionable forms of popular amuse
ment, doubtless most Methodists scrupulously ab
stained; but because such amusements were disap
proved by Wesley rather than absolutely forbidden.
On doubtful matters, his method was not to prescribe
or to prohibit, but to leave the decision of such cases
where it belongs, with the individual conscience. In
an admirable sermon on amusements, characteris
tically entitled, "The Better Way," after admitting
that something might be said for the drama, — he was
a lover of dramatic literature in its better forms and
advised his preachers to read plays that they might
cultivate a natural manner of speech, — he declares
that, for himself, he could not go to the theatre nor
play at cards; but he adds: "Possibly others can; I
am not obliged to pass any sentence on them that are
otherwise minded. I leave them to their own Master;
to Him let them stand or fall." His successors have
not always been so wise.
Supreme devotion to one great purpose almost of
necessity implies some withdrawal of attention from
less important matters. The successful reformer is
often chargeable with some lack of sympathy or propor
tion in his views of life. But no impartial student of
Wesley's career will assert that the type of religious

THE YEARS OF SUCCESS 221
life he exemplified himself and enjoined upon others
was ignorant or illiberal; no one can deny that the
Methodist movement, on the whole, tended powerfully
to stimulate the intellect and elevate the taste, as well
as to promote the piety, of the great mass of the Eng
lish people.
A man with Wesley's wide and accurate knowledge
of social conditions all over the United Kingdom
could not fail to be interested in political matters.
Throughout his career he kept a watchful eye upon the
measures of government, and estimated carefully their
influence, both at home and in the colonies. Journey
ing constantly from one end of England to the other,
with frequent visits to Scotland and Wales, crossing
the channel to Ireland, as he did, about fifty times,
meeting in intimate relations thousands of devoted
followers, and receiving the confidence accorded only
to a trusted religious leader, he enjoyed better oppor
tunity than any other man in the realm to observe the
state of public opinion among the great body of the
English people. And few men could have used that
opportunity better. For the first thirty years of his
public life, it is true, he did not think it needful or
wise to declare allegiance to either party, or to take
any share in political controversy. By nature and by
education he was a Tory. The first principle of his
political creed was loyalty to his king and his Church ;
though, like his father, he found his Toryism no bar
to a hearty support of the House of Hanover. At
the time of the rising of '45, he stoutly avowed that he
loved and honored his Majesty, George Second, "no
less than his own father " ; and when that insignificant

222 JOHN WESLEY
monarch died, the loyal Wesley wrote in his Journal,
' ' When will England have a better prince ! " He always
deprecated the rancor of parties, and enjoined upon
Methodists the virtues of obedience and quiet. It was
natural, therefore, that he should view with alarm the
restlessness and the growing distrust of the influence of
the Crown which spread through England during the
early years of the reign of George III. He did not, or
would not, see that the young monarch by his system
of what Burke called "the double cabinet" and his
efforts to form a subsidized court party, was striving
to get all the reins of power into his own hands and
practically to nullify constitutional government. The
great middle class, to which most Methodists belonged,
Wesley saw, with special concern, were being tainted
with what he thought false notions of liberty. He
recognized the unwisdom of excluding this growing
class so entirely from any participation in the govern
ment, and he was one of the early advocates of some
scheme for the reform of parliamentary representation.
But he feared the result of crude and revolutionary
ideas as to personal liberty and the warrant of civil
government. Such notions were already filtering down
through the mass of the English people, fomenting, so
Wesley thought, a dangerous discontent with all consti
tuted authority. The Wesleyan movement had been
more successful in the towns than in the rural districts ;
and it was in the towns that this restlessness was
most pronounced, — nowhere more turbulent and ag
gressive than in the three great Methodist centres,
London, Bristol, and Newcastle.
Wesley, however, wrote nothing upon political sub
jects until 1768. Then, in the heats of the Wilkes

THE YEARS OF SUCCESS

223

agitation, he could keep silence no longer. John
Wilkes, it will be remembered, had been condemned
for seditious libel four years before, expelled from the
Commons, and outlawed. In February of 1768, he
returned from France, and in the following April
stood for election to Parliament from Middlesex, and
was elected by a large majority. A few weeks later,
his sentence of outlawry was pronounced illegal on a
technicality; but the verdict of blasphemy and sedi
tious libel still rested on him, and in June he was
sentenced to imprisonment for twenty-two months.
Meantime, popular excitement in London was at fever
pitch. It was assumed that Wilkes would be released
from his imprisonment to take his seat in the Commons ;
and when Parliament met, in May, an immense throng
surrounded his prison in St. George's Fields, waiting to
escort their hero in triumph to Westminster. But a
detachment of the Guards had been sent to preserve
order ; and without any real provocation, they fired on
the crowd, killing five or six, and rousing the passions
of the mob to fury. The king had determined that
Wilkes should not be seated; but in the face of this
storm of popular indignation, the Commons hesitated
at taking the dangerous step of expelling a member
legally elected. They temporized for some time, and
finally postponed their decision till the winter session.
In the following February, after long and violent
discussion, Wilkes was expelled. Twelve days later
he was reelected, and the following day, February
17, was declared incapable of sitting. Protesting
against this violation of their rights and the right of
Wilkes, the Middlesex electors again put him forward
as a candidate, and again elected him, this time by an

224 JOHN WESLEY
enormous majority. The Commons at once declared
the election void, and seated the rival candidate who
had received but a handful of votes.
Wilkes lost his seat, but he became the idol of the
hour, the representative and champion of popular
rights. Franklin, who was in England at the time, de
clared that if George III had had a bad private char
acter and John Wilkes a good one, the latter might
have turned the former out of his kingdom. But
Wilkes had a notoriously bad character. A gamester,
a profligate, and a rake, his private life was an example
of all those vices that most shock common decency. In
conversation, indeed, he sometimes showed a brilliancy
that, on one famous occasion, disarmed the prejudice
even of so stout an opponent as Samuel Johnson ; but his
public utterances were usually in the rancorous tone of
the demagogue, and he had little real statesmanlike
ability. Had he been given his seat in the Commons,
he would probably soon have sunk into deserved
obscurity; the action of the government pushed him
at once into prominence as the champion and martyr
of popular right. For it was justly urged that his char
acter as a man could not annul his claim to the seat to
which his constituents had duly elected him. Moreover,
it was evidently not for his morals that the king and the
court party were determined to punish him, but for
his politics. Everybody knew that writings quite as
scandalous as his, libels quite as violent, had for years
been allowed to pass unnoticed ; and if Wilkes had been
one of the "king's friends," he might have published
what he pleased without calling down upon himself
anything worse than pious regrets or expostulations.
Thus a curious irony of circumstance forced some of

THE YEARS OF SUCCESS 225
the purest and wisest English statesmen to support a
notorious rake and debauchee, and made his name,
for some years, the symbol of civil liberty on both
sides the Atlantic.
It was in the summer of 1768, while the decision of
Wilkes's case was pending in the Commons, that Wesley
published the first edition of his pamphlet, "Free
Thoughts on Public Affairs"; the enlarged and re
vised form found in his collected works was issued in
1770. Wesley might have had special reason for
antipathy to Wilkes; the wife of Wilkes, who seems to
have borne the brutal treatment of her husband with
exemplary patience, was a wealthy Methodist, and a
member of one of Wesley's London Societies. But, in
fact, Wesley has comparatively little to say on the Wilkes
case. Admitting that he cannot approve the violent
measures taken on either side relative to the Middlesex
election, he defends the exclusion of Wilkes in a clear
and succinct argument, and quotes at considerable
length from the famous speech of Mansfield in the
lords to support his position. But it is evident that
he is chiefly concerned over the alarming spread of dis
loyalty to the person and authority of the Crown. The
paper is really an apology for the character and conduct
of George III. As was to be expected, it was not very
satisfactory. At almost the same moment, another
pamphlet, dealing with the same questions, and under
a similar title, appeared from the pen of one of the
greatest of English statesmen. Edmund Burke pub
lished his "Thoughts on the Causes of the Present
Discontents" within a few weeks of the issue of the
second edition of Wesley's "Free Thoughts." Burke,
too, saw with genuine alarm, the universal temper of

226 JOHN WESLEY
disaffection, the decay of obedience, the loss of respect
for rank and office, for what, in one of his own fine
phrases, he calls "all the solemn plausibilities of the
world." But with the insight of the statesman Burke
traces these evils to their source in the corrupt and
arbitrary system of personal government to which
George III had committed himself. Wesley, on the
other hand, cannot or will not see anything to condemn in
the character or the policy of the king. He contents
himself with insisting that George is an intelligent,
honest, and pious man. As to the popular agitation
against him, it is so unaccountable that he is forced to
conclude, "the first and principal spring of the whole
commotion is French gold ! " Such a charge as this
was not likely to soothe the passions of any overardent
friends of civil liberty. Nor could they be expected
to think Wesley's defence of the king of any value.
They were protesting against the arbitrary and un
constitutional measures of the Crown ; they were told
that their monarch was a good man, who, unlike Mr.
Wilkes, read his Bible, feared his God, and loved his
wife. Two years later, the continued and increasing op
position to the Crown, heightened by the scathing in
vectives of the Junius Letters, called out from Wesley
another pamphlet, entitled "Thoughts upon Liberty."
In this he inveighs, with greater warmth than in his
former paper, against the universal cry for larger
liberty. Religious liberty, he claims, Englishmen al
ready enjoy in greater measure than any other people
in the world. Civil liberty he defines as "the liberty
to enjoy our lives and fortunes in our own way — to
use our property, whatever is legally our own, according

THE YEARS OF SUCCESS 227
to our own choice," and who, he cries, is robbed of
this liberty? "Certainly I am not. I pray do not
face me down that I am. Do not argue me out of my
senses." Of course, the Whig could reply that the
liberty which leaves my property and my person in the
control of a government that will not seat the repre
sentative I have elected, or, having seated him, manages
by corrupt influence to silence his voice and stifle his
vote, is not civil liberty at all. The truth is, Wesley's
ingrained conservatism would not let him see the real
question at issue. Justly shocked by the lawlessness
and violence on the surface of the popular movement,
he failed to recognize the underlying principles which
gave that movement significance. The crowd who
broke the windows of the ministers, and bawled for
liberty, as he saw, really meant license. The insolent
Letters of Junius tended to destroy all reverence for
authority, while Wilkes was certainly a stained and
sorry champion of any good cause. Yet, though little
honored by many of its loudest advocates, the founda
tion principles of representative government were really
at stake, and the ultimate outcome of all the agitation
was the greater security of life and liberty the world
round. On the other hand, we should never overlook
the inestimable services rendered to society in times of
change by the conservative, who, like Wesley, protests
against the hasty generalizations, the violent measures,
the irrational hatred of convention, into which the
popular movement is always liable to run. If no such
cataclysm as the French Revolution was possible in
England after 1760, it was largely because of the senti
ment of respect for established order which such teach
ing as Wesley's inculcated.

228 JOHN WESLEY
But Wesley's most famous political pamphlet was
called out, two years later, by the troubles in America.
He had followed with close attention the course of
affairs in the colonies, political as well as religious,
ever since his early sojourn in Georgia. Deeply in
terested in the work of Whitefield in America, he felt
it desirable to provide there some system of societies
and itinerant preachers like that which had grown up
in England. As early as 1769, his Conference sent
ministers to New York and Philadelphia. Wesley
himself, in the years immediately following 1770, had
serious thoughts of visiting America, and doubtless
would have done so, had he felt at liberty to leave the
work in England for so long an absence. Methodist
societies after the Wesleyan pattern were springing
up in various parts of the colonies; a Conference of
these societies held in Philadelphia, in 1774, reported
2204 members and seven itinerant preachers.
It was inevitable, therefore, that Wesley should view
with grave concern the increasing dissatisfaction in
America. At first, his sympathies seem to have been
largely with the colonists in their grievances against
the mother country. Little as he might share the
extreme views as to the nature of civil liberty that had
been so loudly proclaimed in England and were now
echoed as loudly in America, he was ready to admit
that the treatment of the colonies had often been very
unwise. In his "Free Thoughts on the State of Public
Affairs," he had said so explicitly: "I do not defend
the measures which have been taken with regard to
America; I doubt whether any man can defend them
either on the foot of law, equity, or prudence." He
claimed only that these obnoxious measures had been

THE YEARS OF SUCCESS 229
the work of the Granville ministry, and that the king
and his present government should not be held re
sponsible for them. Four years later, as the flame of
war was bursting out, — just forty-eight hours before
the battle of Bunker Hill, — he wrote a very striking
letter to the premier, Lord North.1 He will not argue
the question of the American grievances, though he
"cannot avoid thinking, if I think at all, that an ag
grieved people asked for nothing more than their legal
rights, and that in the most modest and inoffensive
manner the nature of the thing would allow." But,
waiving all questions of right in the case, he expostulates
with the minister against the folly of attempting vio
lent measures against America. With almost prophetic
foresight, he warns Lord North that not twenty thou
sand troops, nor treble that number, fighting half
heartedly, three thousand miles away from home and
supplies, can ever hope to conquer a nation of enthu
siasts for liberty, who think, whether they be right or
wrong, that they are contending for their wives, their
children, and their homes. He has information directly
from his preachers, he tells the premier, that these
colonists are not peaceful agriculturists ready to run at
the sight of a redcoat or the sound of a musket, but
rather hardy frontiersmen with training and discipline
that fits them for war, and that they are "terribly
united." "For God's sake," he cries in closing, "for
the sake of the king, of the Nation, of your lovely
family, remember Rehoboam ! Remember Philip the
Second! Remember King Charles the First!"
This was Wesley's position at the middle of June,
1775. And as late as the end of October, writing to
1 Tyerman, III, 197.

230 JOHN WESLEY
one of his American preachers,1 he declares that if he
have an interview with a certain great man, — un
doubtedly either Lord North or Lord Dartmouth, —
he will urge upon him that "love and tender measures
will do far more for America than violence." Yet in
the late summer of that same year, he published that
famous pamphlet which seems to contradict all his
previous utterances on American affairs. The "Calm
Address to our American Colonies" is a brief tract of
only ten pages, in defence of the English right to tax
the colonies without granting them representation.
The colonists, Wesley argues, have all the rights en
joyed by British subjects at home, save such as they
have voluntarily surrendered by leaving England. As
to the claim that the right of representation is implied
in that of taxation, that, he urges, has never been
recognized in England. Most of the ancestors of the
colonists, before they left England, like four-fifths of
the English people, never had any vote for a repre
sentative in Parliament ; yet they were all taxed. They
certainly acquired by emigration no rights and no ex
emptions which they did not enjoy at home. On the
contrary, all precedents show that England has always
reserved the right to tax her colonists, and has often
exercised it. The pamphlet was hardly likely to con
vince those to whom it was addressed ; but it was a terse
and vigorous putting of the main arguments by which
the ministry justified their American policy. And it
was, as the title implied, calm and conciliatory in tone ;
Wesley claimed with truth that there was not a sharp
or bitter word in it.
But Wesley's sudden and apparently inexplicable
1 Letter to John Rankin, Works, XII, 302.

THE YEARS OF SUCCESS 231
change of attitude on American affairs naturally pro
voked surprise and opposition. Before his pamphlet
had been out a month there were many people, he
said, who would be glad to burn it and him together.
It is possible, indeed, to make some defence of Wesley's
consistency. It may be said that, on the one hand, he
had for years been denouncing the new doctrines of
liberty, whether proclaimed by Whigs in England or by
Whigs in America ; and, on the other hand, he had been
convinced that the measures of the Granville ministry
had been unwise, and that the decision of the North
ministry to resort to force was worse than unwise.
He could not heartily defend either the government for
enforcing its rights or the colonists for resisting them.
In similar circumstances, Christian men have often
solemnly deprecated the undue haste of their country
to enforce, by the cruel penalty of war, claims which,
in the abstract, they have admitted to be just.
But while it is possible thus to make a defence of
Wesley's consistency, he himself did not try to make it.
He admitted at once that the "Calm Address" was at
variance with his previous opinions on the American
question. His own explanation of the change was
very simple; he had read Samuel Johnson's "Taxa
tion no Tyranny." As he put it, in the preface to the
second edition of his pamphlet, "As soon as I received
new light myself, I judged it my duty to impart it to
others." Accordingly, he extracted all the argument
from Johnson's tract, simplified its ponderous phrase,
omitted all its abuse, and printed it thus abridged and
altered as his own. Whether he first obtained the
great man's permission before thus popularizing his
pamphlet, is not known; but, in any case, Johnson

232 JOHN WESLEY
was so far from making any complaint, that he de
clared himself flattered by so able a convert, and likened
himself to the philosopher who was content to have all
his audience leave him if only Plato stayed. And, in
fact, if Johnson cared more for his cause than his
fame, he might well be glad of such an auxiliary;
for Wesley's little tract probably reached a hundred
readers where Johnson's labored and magisterial dis
cussion reached one. Moreover, while neither pam
phlet had any effect in America, Wesley's readers in
England were mostly of just that great unrepresented
middle class whose growing discontent with the govern
ment it was most needful, at that time, to allay. Before
it had been issued three months, over fifty thousand
copies had been sold, and its effect, Wesley declared,
exceeded his most sanguine hopes.
But while the "Calm Address" was the most effective
of Wesley's political pamphlets, it is probable that his
own mixed and changing feelings with reference to the
American war may be seen best in two other papers
written in the course of the next two years. The
"Seasonable Address to the Inhabitants of Great
Britain," issued early in 1776, was prompted by his
horror at the fratricidal strife in America and the
virulent passions it excited at home. The justice of
the quarrel he will not discuss. The question at issue,
in any case, he says, is a purely constitutional one,
difficult of decision, and calling for calm and reasoned
consideration. Yet over this delicate question, country
men, children of the same parents, are arrayed in arms
against each other, "murdering each other with all
possible speed" to determine which is in the right in a
dispute over the method of taxation ! And at home in

THE YEARS OF SUCCESS 233
England, men of all parties, instead of seeking the
things that make for peace, are fomenting the quarrel
by angry discussion of matters they cannot understand.
The paper is a plea for a moderate, conciliatory temper,
and for humility and penitence in view of the sins of
the nation.
But in the pamphlet of the next year, "A Calm Ad
dress to the Inhabitants of England," issued in Feb
ruary, 1777, Wesley's temper has changed. Since his
previous writing the Americans had thrown off alle
giance to the mother country, and declared their inde
pendence. Plainly, conciliation or compromise was no
longer possible. The struggle must go on till it end in
victory for one party or the other. In these circum
stances, Wesley finds no attitude possible to a loyal
Englishman but steady support of the government.
The factious Englishmen who defend the cause of
rebellion, and, if they do not plead openly for the
Americans, extenuate their crimes and speak of them
with tenderness, should now remember their duty
not only to fear God but to honor the king. If there
be any such disloyal subjects among the people called
Methodists, Wesley avers — with great plainness of
speech — that he would no more continue in fellow
ship with them than with common swearers, drunkards,
thieves, or whoremongers. As for the colonists, he
now thinks that independence has from the first been
their object. They have set up a government founded
on a false idea of liberty; but in fact no freedom of
action or of speech is allowed among them. Their
military success in the first two years of the war was
alarming ; but since King George proclaimed a general
fast, the tide has turned. General Howe has occupied

234 JOHN WESLEY
Long Island and New York, and the rebel cause grows
desperate. The whole pamphlet is as stout a partisan docu
ment as Lord North could desire. Wesley had evi
dently become convinced that an energetic prosecu
tion of the war was now the shortest path to peace.
Always a stanch defender of the monarchy, he never
had any sympathy with the opposition of Burke and
Fox, and now deemed their attitude little short of
treasonable. It is possible, too, that the vicious at
tacks made upon him for his "Calm Address" to the
colonists — though he would not condescend to
answer them — may have embittered somewhat the
tone of this paper. He had been branded as a turn
coat, a Jesuit, a wolf in sheep's clothing, a sycophant,
a hypocrite with one eye on heaven and the other on
a pension, a priest who ought to be presented not with
lawn sleeves but with a hempen collar. And some
of the worst of these charges came from the Calvin-
istic Methodists, most of whom seem to have leaned
toward the American side in the controversy. Their
organ, the Gospel Magazine, poured out a torrent of
abuse, and Toplady, its editor, fairly outdid himself
in a scurrilous pamphlet which he called "An Old
Fox Tarred and Feathered." Always insisting that
it was the first duty of a good Methodist to be a good
citizen, it is not surprising that Wesley resented keenly
these charges of time-serving and hypocrisy from
Methodists who, as he said, "hated the king and his
ministers only less than they hated an Arminian."
The verdict of the impartial historian must be that,
throughout the American controversy, Wesley was
on the wrong side, and lent his influence to the oppo-

THE YEARS OF SUCCESS 235
nents of constitutional liberty rather than to its friends.
But it would be absurd to impute his conduct to selfish
motives. And if his early sympathies with the colo
nists seem to have been too easily withdrawn by John
son's pamphlet, we must remember that he was strongly
predisposed to the conservative side not only by his
inherited temper of loyalty to the Crown, but by his
abhorrence for the excesses and license that during
the previous ten years had attended the liberal party
in England. Perhaps, indeed, he was not quite so
much influenced by Johnson as he himself thought
he was. He was by native disposition the friend of
order rather than of freedom, and always looked with
suspicion upon the clamor for the extension of popu
lar rights. In his opinion, law, virtue, and religion
had good reason to dread that sort of liberty with
which was always linked the name of John Wilkes.
Yet this was the liberty the Americans had now en
throned. Whatever he may have thought of some
of their grievances in 1774, the course of events in
America through the next two years convinced him
that the revolutionary temper dominant there was
inconsistent with a well-ordered, quiet, religious state.
Fortunately, he lived long enough to see his mistake.
He accepted in good faith the result of the struggle,
and when it was over, resumed at once the most cor
dial relations with the Methodists of the new republic,
and soon granted to them a measure of ecclesiastical
self-government which he was never quite ready to
accord to his societies in England.
The needs of the Methodists in America after the
close of the Revolution were only one of the causes

236 JOHN WESLEY
which forced the attention of Wesley, as he drew near
the close of life, upon the question — what was to be
come of Methodism after he was gone. Thus far, as
we have seen, the whole elaborate system of organiza
tion and government which had grown up through
forty years centred in Wesley himself. The reins of
authority were all in his hands. The societies through
their leaders and pastors were responsible to him.
The preachers were appointed and approved by him;
they met each year for "Conference" with him. The
Methodist chapels, or preaching houses, of which by
1784 there were in the United Kingdom as many as
359, were held, under a form he had devised, by local
trustees "for the use of John Wesley and such other
persons as he might appoint to preach therein."
After his death, this right to appoint preachers was
to vest in his brother Charles, or in the case of the
death of both brothers, in William Grimshaw, should
he survive them. After the death of all three of these
clergymen, the chapels were to be held "for the sole
use of such persons as might be appointed by the
yearly Conference of the people called Methodists."
But this Conference had no legal status, being merely
a private meeting called by Wesley; it was without
power to acquire or to hold property, and at the death
of Wesley might cease to exist altogether. Indeed,
it seemed possible that at the death of its founder the
whole structure of Methodism might drop to pieces.
It was plainly necessary that some measures should
be taken to hold the societies together under a per
manent organization and to secure the ownership
and control of Methodist property, when the personal
government of Wesley should be terminated by his

THE YEARS OF SUCCESS 237
death. Wesley therefore drew up a document nam
ing one hundred of his preachers as permanent mem
bers of the Conference with authority to fill vacancies
in their body, and defining clearly their powers and
duties. This "Deed of Declaration" was enrolled
in the Court of Chancery, and the "Conference" con
stituted was thus given a permanent legal existence.
It was thenceforth impossible for the property of the
societies to revert to private use, or for the societies
themselves to fall apart and become mere separate
congregations. By this one step, Methodism was
guaranteed a perpetual organization and polity.
The condition of the Methodist societies in America
made Wesley deem it necessary to take another step
which was by far the most serious departure from
ecclesiastical order he had yet ventured. When the
Revolution began, there were in the colonies six
preachers sent by Wesley from England; but when
the rupture with the mother country was complete
and the colonies declared their independence, all but
one of these preachers felt it their duty to return
to England. Francis Asbury alone remained. No
more heroic figure is to be found in early American
history than this plain Methodist preacher. He
came of hardy stock. His father was an intelligent
farmer and gardener in Handsworth, Staffordshire;
his mother was a woman of unusual depth and sen
sitiveness of nature, with an almost passionate love
for books and reading. Under the training of such
parents, young Asbury grew up a clean, earnest lad,
and in his early teens, influenced especially by a min
ister — not a Methodist — who was staying at his
father's house, he began a distinctively religious life.

238 JOHN WESLEY
Handsworth is not far from Wednesbury, where, it
will be remembered, the Methodists had suffered
such violent persecution. Asbury naturally asked his
mother who and what sort of people these Methodists
were, and learning from the good woman that they
were pious and peaceable folk, he went to Wednesbury
to see them. Here he found, to his surprise, a kind
of preaching and a type of religious experience dif
ferent from anything he had before known. These
devout, cheerful Methodists seemed to him to em
body the ideal Christian character. He came home
to hold meetings like theirs in his own village and,
when driven from other places, in his father's house.
When he was eighteen he began to preach, and four
years later was enrolled as one of Wesley's itinerants.
Deeply religious, yet without a trace of fanaticism;
with the instinct of command, yet not domineering
or arrogant; rigidly methodical in his habits, yet
easy and affable in manner; thoughtful and studious,
yet keenly sagacious in practical affairs — he pos
sessed just that combination of qualities which John
Wesley most admired. He had been profoundly
impressed by the religious needs of the colonies, and
when, at the Conference of 1771, Wesley called for
volunteers for America, Asbury promptly offered
himself, and sailed in the following September. He
well knew himself to be entering upon a career of
exile and hardship, and he had some misgivings as
to his own fitness for the work. But he wrote in his
Journal, "If God does not acknowledge me in
America, I will soon return to England." He was
never to see England or home again. The next year,
1772, he was appointed by Wesley superintendent of

THE YEARS OF SUCCESS 239
all the itinerants in America, and, although super
seded in that position by another for a short time, he
was for the next twenty years the director of Wesley's
work, the real founder of American Methodism.
At the outbreak of the war, Asbury was in much
uncertainty as to what he ought to do. He early
foresaw the probable issue of the struggle, and hesi
tated to desert the people with whose interests he had
become so closely identified. On the other hand,
his early associations, his memories, his love for his
home and the aged mother to whom he was tenderly
attached, all drew him strongly toward England.
Moreover, he knew that Wesley himself did not heart
ily approve the cause of the colonists, and had advised
all the American preachers to observe a strict neutral
ity that, at such a time, was almost impossible. All
his colleagues from England decided that their posi
tion in America was no longer practicable. But
Asbury could not bring himself to leave the three
thousand Methodists of America. He resolved to
stay and preserve Wesley's discipline and teaching
among the little societies of Methodists scattered
through the country. It is impossible to overesti
mate the importance of that decision. For the next
ten years, Asbury held American Methodism together.
In toils and danger his record matches that of Wesley
himself. He was always in the saddle, journeying
up and down the country, twice a year, from Connecti
cut to the Carolinas. Now he is preaching in Phila
delphia or Richmond, and next month he is pushing
his way through almost pathless woods up the farther
slopes of the Alleghanies, fording mountain streams,
or riding through lonesome valleys on the outmost

240 JOHN WESLEY
frontiers of civilization. In one period of ten months,
he estimated that he had ridden over four thousand
miles on horseback, over the worst possible roads,
and had preached on an average one sermon a day.
His difficulties were, of course, vastly increased by
the war. Most of the American Methodists were
patriots, yet their relations with Wesley and England
brought them everywhere into suspicion; in a few
instances imprudent expressions of loyalty to the
mother country may have justified such suspicion.
In a period of intense partisan feeling, Asbury' s atti
tude of neutrality was naturally interpreted as indif
ference or hostility to the popular cause. The oath
of allegiance very generally imposed upon those whose
patriotism was in doubt he could not conscientiously
take, because it contained a promise of willingness
to take up arms against England, if required to do so.
As a result, he found himself an object of suspicion,
and in the larger towns was several times in personal
danger from mob violence. In Annapolis, a shot
barely missed him, passing through the chaise in
which he was riding. Through the greater part of
two years, he was obliged to confine his labors to the
state of Delaware, and for some weeks in the spring
of 1778 was in close concealment in the house of a
prominent citizen of Dover. By the end of the fol
lowing year, however, he was allowed to resume his
travels; and as he came to be more widely known,
his devotion and self-sacrifice, his intelligence and
the dignified charm of his personality, won him friends
among high and low. Before the close of the war
he was universally respected as a citizen and a Chris
tian minister.

THE YEARS OF SUCCESS 241
As a result of the tireless labors of Asbury during
the period of the Revolution, Methodism in America,
so far from declining, greatly increased. At the close
of the war, it was estimated that there were in the new
republic as many as fifteen thousand Methodists, and
eighty-four itinerant preachers. Besides these itin
erants, there were a goodly number of "local preach
ers," who were carrying Methodism into the outskirts
of civilization which as yet no regular preacher had
reached. And Asbury' s strict notions of discipline
had kept all these American Methodists true to Wes
ley's doctrine and polity. They were gathered into
societies and classes formed after Wesley's pattern
and governed by Wesley's rules. Their lay itinerant
preachers travelled circuits assigned to them at "Con
ferences" held annually. But now that the country
had definitely separated from England, the tie that
bound them to the English societies was felt to be
somewhat weakened. And what was of much more
importance, among all these Methodists, there was
not a single ordained priest who could minister to them
the sacraments of the Church. Their children could
not be baptized ; indeed, many of the members of the
societies had themselves never been baptized. There
was no one to administer the sacrament of the Lord's
Supper. Before the war, the Methodists had been
theoretically members of the English Church, and
depended mostly upon the English clergy in America
for the rites of the Church. But the English Church
no longer existed in America. Throughout those
states in the South where the Methodist societies were
most numerous, the learning and piety of the Eng
lish clergy had sunk to a very low ebb before the war ;

242 JOHN WESLEY
now the clergy had mostly left the country, and their
church edifices were, in many instances, falling into
ruin. In these circumstances, the Methodists had
for some years urgently demanded that their preachers
should assume the power to administer the sacra
ments of baptism and the Lord's Supper; at a Con
ference in 1779, representing most of the societies
south of Philadelphia, the preachers assembled de
cided that it was necessary to do so. But the influ
ence of Asbury, always fearful of any irregularity,
induced them to hold the matter in suspense till the
advice of Wesley could be had ; and when, next year,
Wesley by letter dissuaded them from any such irregu
larity, they consented to allow the matter to remain
for the present without action. But Wesley himself
now saw that his American societies could not much
longer be left without some form of ecclesiastical gov
ernment, and without the most sacred rites of religion.
He had twice entreated the Bishop of London to or
dain one of the Wesleyan preachers who might visit
the American societies; but the bishop declined.
Wesley felt himself confronted with the alternative
either of leaving these societies in their desolate state
to schism and disintegration, or of providing them
with some form of discipline and ministration, even at
the risk of violating ecclesiastical usage. Letters from
America were beseeching his assistance. Fletcher,
his most trusted adviser, urged him to accede to
their request. After long and careful deliberation,
he made up his mind. He preferred the episcopal
form of government ; but he had long been convinced
that there is no difference in orders between bishop
and presbyter. On this conviction he now decided

THE YEARS OF SUCCESS

243

to act. He selected his ablest preacher, Dr. Thomas
Coke, an Oxford graduate and an ordained presbyter,
and determined to send him to America with some
extraordinary powers. Coke, who was an ambitious
man, professed some hesitation at what he charac
terized as "a measure so unprecedented in modern
days," but after considering it for two months, con
sented to go, on condition that Wesley, "by the impo
sition of his hands," should give him the "power of
ordaining others. " x At the summons of Wesley he
came up to Bristol, with two lay preachers, Richard
Whatcoat and Thomas Vasey; and on the 20th of
September, 1780, in his private room, Wesley set apart
the two lay preachers as presbyters, and laying his
hands upon Coke, "set him apart to the office of
Superintendent of the societies in America." Coke
was to proceed to America, and there, in the same
way, ordain Francis Asbury, first as deacon, then as
presbyter, and then as Associate Superintendent of
the work in America. Coke reached America early
in November, and a Conference of all the preachers
was called to meet in Baltimore during Christmas
week. Asbury, sympathizing with the democratic
temper of the American societies, declined to be or
dained Superintendent unless first elected to the posi
tion by his fellow-preachers. The Conference, how
ever, at once satisfied that condition by electing both
Coke and Asbury; after which Coke, with the assist
ance of the presbyters Whatcoat and Vasey, solemnly
set apart the heroic preacher as Associate Superin
tendent, with himself, of all the American societies.
On the following day, twelve of the preachers nomi-
1 Letter to Wesley, August 9, 1784; Tyerman, III, 429.

244 JOHN WESLEY
nated by the Superintendents and elected by the Con
ference, were ordained as deacons and then as pres
byters or elders. Thus were laid the foundations of
the Methodist Episcopal Church.
No act of Wesley's has been so warmly criticised
as this ordination of Coke. For all his previous devi
ations from ecclesiastical usage, his societies, his class
meetings, his field preaching, his lay preachers, he
might have pleaded precedents from the early ages
of the Church. He had sometimes, it is true,
strained rather severely his own obligations to his
ecclesiastical superiors; but he claimed that he had
done nothing in violation of a sound, though rather
broad, churchmanship. But for this action it was
more difficult to find precedent or authority. His
brother Charles, to whom Wesley had not disclosed
his intention, was appalled. The American ordina
tions seemed to him the first long step toward "a
schism as causeless and unprovoked as the American
rebellion." He could hardly bring himself to believe
that his brother, after a long life of love and reverence
for his Church, at the very end of his career, in the
eighty-second year of his age, should, with a cautious
secrecy, assume the episcopal functions, ordain elders,
and consecrate a bishop ! Nothing, he averred, should
now separate him from the brother he had taken for
better and for worse till death should them part; but
he grieved that he had lived long enough to see that
evil day. The American Methodists were, he ad
mitted, in urgent need; but had they been patient
but a very little longer, they might have seen in their
new country a properly consecrated bishop, and have
been kept, like the societies at home, in loving com-

THE YEARS OF SUCCESS 245
munion with the English Church. Now, they were
nothing more or less than separatists and dissenters.
Doubtless Charles Wesley was right in the logic
of his position. From a churchman's point of view,
orders conferred by John Wesley could have no valid
ity. Wesley himself, as early as 1746, after reading
the rather crass and immature work of Lord King
"On the Constitution of the Primitive Church," had
accepted King's conclusion that there is no difference
in orders between bishop and presbyter; and he had
repeated that opinion, with more or less positiveness,
at various times since that year. He now wrote to
Charles, "I firmly believe I am a scriptural episcopos
as much as any man in England, for the uninterrupted
succession I know to be a fable that no man can prove. "
Yet during the forty years in which he had held this
view, he had never ventured to act upon it. Many
of the English Methodists would gladly have received
the sacraments at the hands of their itinerant lay
preachers rather than from an indifferent or hostile
parish priest; but Wesley had declared that for an
unordained preacher to administer within his societies
was "a sin which- he dare not tolerate," while yet he
seems never to have thought of ordaining any of his
lay preachers. His action in the case, of Coke is still
more difficult to reconcile with any notions of church
manship. By his own theory, both Coke and him
self were of the same order, and if there be no differ
ence in order between presbyter and bishop, neither
one of these two presbyters could confer upon the
other any authority beyond what both already pos
sessed. It is true that Wesley was careful to avoid
the word "ordain" in speaking of his action, and he

246 JOHN WESLEY
was irritated at hearing that Coke and Asbury soon
allowed themselves to be called "bishops." But he
had solemnly "set apart by the imposition of my
hands" Coke to exercise ecclesiastical functions per
mitted to no other presbyters. Some years before he
had "appointed" Asbury "Superintendent" of the
work in America; but that appointment carried with
it no episcopal or even priestly functions. Now it
was distinctly understood that Coke and Asbury
were to be "set apart" in order to give to the Ameri
can societies an episcopal form of government; and
Wesley made no objection to the title which the Con
ference in America at once assumed, the "Methodist
Episcopal Church in America." And whatever may
have been his theoretical opinions as to the nature
of the episcopal office, it is hard to believe that so
clear a thinker as Wesley could have been blind to the
practical conclusions that might logically have been
drawn from his action. If any presbyter of the Church
of England, for what seemed to him good and suffi
cient reasons, could invite into his back parlor another
presbyter and there solemnly "set him apart" for
the work — if not for the office — of a bishop, then
ecclesiastical discipline within the Church of England
was plainly at an end.
It is best to admit frankly that Wesley's conduct,
however described, was inconsistent with any strict
churchmanship, and to be defended only by those
who consider forms of church constitution and gov
ernment to be matters of expediency, and not of uni
versal obligation. To those who so believe, it will
be sufficient to say that Wesley was fully justified in
breaking with usage and discipline when convinced

THE YEARS OF SUCCESS 247
that only so could the religious welfare of great num
bers of his fellow-men be conserved. That is the opin
ion of the vast majority of Methodists to-day, on both
sides the Atlantic; that will probably be the verdict
of the impartial historian in the future.
Doubtless this first great departure from strict
churchmanship made the next more easy. The
Methodists in Scotland thought themselves subject to
privations almost equal to those suffered by their
brothers in America. There was, it is true, a branch
of the English Church in Scotland ; but for more than
a hundred years it had been regarded by the mass of
the Scottish people with marked aversion, as little
better than a relic of popery. The Methodists over
the Tweed generally shared this prejudice; while,
in turn, the Anglican clergy there regarded them
with contempt, and in many instances refused them
the sacraments unless they would renounce Method
ist doctrine and discipline. It was natural, there
fore, that the demand for ordained Methodist preachers
should be specially urgent in Scotland. To this de
mand Wesley now acceded, and in 1785 set apart three
of his preachers to minister in Scotland. He would
seem to have taken this step with hesitation and per
haps against his own better judgment; at all events,
in his Journal he says that he yielded to the pressure
of his advisers. In the next two years seven more of
his lay preachers were thus given power to administer
the rites of the Church in Scotland. But only in
Scotland. The moment these ministers crossed the
border into England they subsided into plain lay
preachers. When one of them, after a period of ser
vice in Scotland, returned to take an English circuit,

248 JOHN WESLEY
Wesley insisted that he doff his gown and bands and
lay aside the title of Reverend. It is true that in
1789 he seems to have ordained three of his lay preach
ers without assigning them, as he had all those previ
ously ordained, to Scotland or the West Indies. Yet
it is not quite certain that he expected these three to
exercise their clerical functions in England : it seems
probable that they did not do so during his lifetime.
As Methodism developed a more highly organized
form, it must have been increasingly evident, even to
Wesley himself, that there would be difficulty in con
fining it within the usages and sanction of the Estab
lishment. A complete system of worship and disci
pline had grown up under his direction, with methods
and offices unknown to the English Church of his
time. A large number of men not in orders were
preaching by the authority and under the direction
of a single clergyman, a Fellow of Lincoln College,
and owning responsibility to no other ecclesiastical
superior. The buildings which many of the societies
had erected could be licensed as places of worship
only under the Toleration Act — an act framed solely
for the benefit of Dissenters. The members of the
societies generally felt that they were only half wel
come in church. They chafed under the rule that
their chapels, to them the most sacred places of wor
ship, must always be closed during the hours of church
service. Many of them thought it a hardship that
the sacraments of their faith could be ministered to
them only at the hands of the parish clergy who
regarded them too often with bitter prejudice; and
they not unnaturally desired that the men who were
their pastors and teachers should also be their priests.

THE YEARS OF SUCCESS 249
The truth is that the Wesleyan movement in forty
years had assumed such proportions and elaborated
such a separate organization as to make permanent
inclusion in the Establishment impossible. Had the
earlier attitude of the clergy been more intelligent
and liberal, the Church might perhaps have retained
within its pale, not only Wesley but his followers;
but it was now too late. This conviction must have
forced itself sometimes upon Wesley; but he was
unwilling to admit it. It was only with great reluc
tance that he made any concessions to the spirit of
separation, or relaxed any of those regulations by
which he had thought to bind Methodists to the
Church. At the Conference of 1786, he consented,
in response to numerous requests, that service might
be held in Methodist chapels at the same hours as in
church, but only where the parish minister was a no
toriously wicked man or preached clearly pernicious
doctrine, or when the churches in the town were not
sufficient to contain half the people, or when there
was no church at all within two or three miles of the
chapel. But the next year, he declared that this
permission, even when so closely hedged about, had
probably done no good anywhere in England; and
when, in 1789, Coke — who had returned from
America — ventured to hold service in the largest
Methodist chapel in Dublin during church hours,
Wesley was deeply disturbed, and gave a reluctant
assent to the innovation only on condition that the
chapel should be closed on all Communion days. As
he drew near the close of life, the ritual, the offices,
the traditions of the English Church, endeared by
long memory and association, grew more sacred to

250 JOHN WESLEY
him. He was pained at every indication of dissent.
Visiting one day in 1788 a new chapel in Glasgow,
he notes that it is as large and commodious as his
favorite preaching place in Bath, yet adds, with a
tinge of foreboding, "But oh, the difference! It has
the pulpit on one side, and exactly the look of a Pres
byterian meeting house. Perhaps an omen of what
will be when I am gone." He had certainly allowed
himself larger liberty within the Establishment than
it was easy to defend, and had pained his brother
Charles by acts that really meant separation ; yet, for
himself, he always protested that he would never leave
the Church, nor countenance any one else in doing so.
In a letter to the Dublin Chronicle three years before
his death, he declared, "Unless I see more reasons
for it than I ever yet saw, I will not leave the Church
of England as by law established, while the breath of
God is in my nostrils." And over and over again,
with all publicity, he repeated that statement during
his latest years. He could not be blind to the indica
tions that, after death, many Methodists would sever
a connection that had already become only nominal;
yet to the last he seems to have persuaded himself that
such separation would be only partial and temporary.
He would not think that the great volume of religious
experience and influence which it had been the work
of his life to generate was to pass outside the Church
altogether. His own hopes and fears and wishes are
pathetically blended in the oft-quoted valedictory paper
which he printed in the Arminian Magazine less than
a year before his death : —
"I never had any design of separating from the
Church. I have no such design now. I do not be-

THE YEARS OF SUCCESS 251
lieve the Methodists in general design it, when I am no
more seen. I do, and will do, all that is in my power
to prevent such an event. Nevertheless, in spite of
all that I can do, many of them will separate from
it (although, I am apt to think, not one-half, perhaps
not one- third of them). These will be so bold and
injudicious as to form a separate party, which, conse
quently, will dwindle away into a dry, dull, separate
party. In flat opposition to these, I declare once
more, that I live and die a member of the Church of
England; and that none who regard my judgment
or advice will ever separate from it."
The prediction in this passage is a proof of Wesley's
abiding love and loyalty for his Church ; it is a proof
also of his inability adequately to appreciate the mag
nitude and permanence of the religious movement
that bears his name.

CHAPTER VIII
THE CLOSING YEARS
Wesley's last years were blessed with —
" All that should accompany old age,
As honor, love, obedience, troops of friends."
Active opposition to his work had entirely ceased.
His life of devotion to the highest good of man had
won the respect of all who knew his name, and the
reverent love of thousands who called themselves his
friends. In his journeyings during these later years,
it often happened that a company of his friends would
follow him out from one town, walking beside the
carriage, till they met a similar company approaching
to welcome him from the next town. On his last visit
to Ireland, a year and a half before his death, that
warm-hearted people, rich and poor alike, flocked to
hear him, with warmest demonstrations of affection.
The Journal for those months contains frequent touch
ing records of his partings with families who felt they
were seeing him for the last time.
"A more affectionate family than Mr. McCarty's
I have not found in the Kingdom. This appeared more
particularly in the morning. When we were talking
together, one and another fell on their knees all around
me, and most of them burst into tears and earnest
cries, the like of which I have seldom heard: so that
we scarce knew how to part."1
1 May 26, 1789.
252

THE CLOSING YEARS 253
"I lodged at T. Briscoe's: a lovely family indeed:
just such another as Miss B.'s at Keynsham. . . .
When I took my leave of the family they came all in
tears. It is long since I saw the like."1
When he was to sail back to England, a great
multitude followed him to the ship, crowding about
him with tears to press his hand, while many fell on
his neck and kissed him. Wesley sang a parting hymn
with them, and kneeling on the pier in the centre of
the sorrowing company, prayed for God's blessing on
them, their families, Ireland, and the Church. Then
stepping on board, as the ship slowly drew away, the
venerable man remained standing on deck, his hands
lifted in benediction over the weeping throng who were
to see his face no more. His last visit to Cornwall, in
the same year, was accompanied by similar scenes. In
Falmouth where, forty years before, he was taken pris
oner by a howling mob and escaped by what seemed a
marvellous chance, he now found the street where he
passed lined from one end of the town to the other by
"high and low, out of stark love and kindness, gaping
and staring as if the King were going by." In the
evening he preached on a little hill outside the town to
an immense crowd, and going on thence to Redruth,
preached the following Sunday in the vast natural am
phitheatre of Gwennap, to an audience of over twenty-
five thousand. No wonder the old man of eighty-six
thought it "hardly possible that all should hear."
He was now generally welcome in the churches, and
spoke in many pulpits that, in the early days, had been
indignantly closed against him. In the last year of his
life he writes in the Journal that he has preached in
1 July H, 1789-

254 JOHN WESLEY
Great St. Helen's, London, to a large congregation, and
he adds, "It is, I believe, fifty years since I preached
there before. What hath God wrought since that
time!" In fact, he had not preached there since that
May evening in 1738 when his "heart was so enlarged
to declare the love of God " that he did not wonder at
the sentence of the formal rector, "Sir, you must preach
here no more." Many of his warmest opponents he
now found ready to admit the nobility of his purpose
and the charm of his conversation, and quite willing to
accept his friendship if not his opinions. While in
Cork, in the summer of 1787, — where he was most
hospitably entertained by the mayor, — he was invited
by a prominent gentleman to breakfast "with my old
antagonist, Father O'Leary," a Roman Catholic priest
with whom he had been in warm controversy seven
years before over the Catholic Emancipation Question.
"I was not at all displeased," says Wesley, "at being
disappointed. He is not the stiff, queer man that I
expected; but of an easy, genteel carriage, and seems
not to be wanting either in sense or learning." It is
probably safe to say that Father O'Leary was also
pleasantly disappointed in Wesley.
For Wesley's temper grew more mellow and genial
quite to the end of his life. He never showed anything
of the querulousness or prejudice, the habit of insistent
reminiscence, that sometimes lessen the charm of age.
His conversation in his latest years was even more viva
cious and wide-ranging than in early life. He retained
in increased degree all his liking for books, for music, for
really good society. In particular his love for natural
scenery deepened in his old age. He had passed most of
his life in the open air, and his sense of the beauty of

THE CLOSING YEARS 255
the world was never so keen as in his very last years.
He has an excellent gift of summary description, and
the later pages of the Journal are brightened by many
beguiling glimpses of the scenes through which he trav
els, or in which he stands to preach. On one day he
speaks in a "most pleasing place, shaded with tall,
spreading trees, near which ran a clear river." At
another time he is riding through an Irish valley, "pleas
ant beyond description. At a very small distance on
the left hand the river 'rolled its sinuous train,' beyond
which were shady trees, covering a steep hill, and
rising row above row. On the right hand we had
another sloping mountain, tufted over with trees, some
times forming one green, even wall, sometimes scat
tered up and down, and between them several beauti
ful seats." In the summer of 1783, he made a brief
visit to Holland, and speaks with enthusiasm of the
rich and cultivated charm of that fertile land. "I
never saw such a country before ; I suppose there is no
such summer country in Europe. From Amsterdam to
Mere, it is all a train of most delightful gardens." But
he adds, a few days later, with an old man's fond recol
lection of the scenes endeared to his early years, that the
gardens and walks in Holland, though extremely pleas
ant, are "not to be compared with St. John's or Trinity
Gardens, much less with the parks, Magdalen Water-
Walks, Christ Church Meadows, or the White Walk."
One sees by the Journal that on his constant journey-
ings through England and Scotland he found his choic
est — indeed, almost his only — recreation in visiting
parks and gardens ; the Journal records scores of such
visits. Yet he was more profoundly moved by nature
in her larger and more untutored forms. His favorite

256 JOHN WESLEY
preaching place was the vast natural amphitheatre of
Gwennap, in Cornwall ; and on his last visit to Land's
End, in his eighty-third year, he insisted upon climbing
down the rugged wave-beaten cliff to stand on the wild
spot commemorated by his brother Charles in the
hymn —
" Lo, on a narrow neck of land
' Twixt two unbounded seas I stand. "
But, although the object of universal love and
reverence, and retaining all his sense of the healthy joys
of life, Wesley felt an old man's loneliness as the friends
of earlier years, one after another, were removed by
death. Fletcher of Madeley, the best beloved of all
his preachers, died in 1785, and left a void in Wesley's
heart that no one else could fill. In the same year,
Vincent Perronet, Vicar of Shoreham, the "Archbishop
of Methodism," ninety-two years of age and for almost
half a century friend and adviser of both the Wesleys,
dropped peacefully out of life. "I follow hard after,"
wrote Wesley in the Journal ; " O that I may follow
him in holiness, and may my last end be like his."
The younger men among his preachers, like Coke and
Benson and Adam Clarke, though devoted and earnest,
could never quite take the place of those who had
borne with him the burden and heat of the day. But
the heaviest blow of all fell when he was bereft of his
brother Charles. Widely different in temperament, the
two brothers had often differed sharply in opinion ; but
nothing could ever estrange them in sympathy. In
the later years of his life Charles Wesley had travelled
but little, but lived steadily in London, exercising, in
the absence of John, a kind of paternal watchfulness
over the London societies. His domestic life was very

THE CLOSING YEARS 257
happy; and the celebrity of his two sons made his
house a musical centre in which some of the most fa
mous musicians and most brilliant society of London
listened to concerts by the two remarkable young per
formers. But Charles Wesley's interest in the great
mission of Methodism to poor and humble folk never
in the slightest degree diminished; he preached and
administered the sacrament of the Lord's Supper in
the West Street and City Road Chapels as long as his
failing strength would allow. It is true that he clung
far more tenaciously than John to the usages and tradi
tions of the Church of England. He had been shocked
and alarmed, as we have seen, by the countenance John
had given to separatist tendencies. The American or
dinations ; the demand of some of the English preach
ers to assume ministerial functions; the probability
growing, as he knew, into a practical certainty, that
after the death of his brother the Methodists would be
come a dissenting body — these things gave very genu
ine grief to Charles Wesley in his declining vears. He
felt, as he wrote a friend in 1785, that the action of
John in these matters was likely to "dissolve their part
nership." But nothing could dissolve or alter his affec
tion for his brother. "We have taken each other," he
wrote John in 1784, "for better, for worse, till death
do us part? No; but unite eternally." His health
had been failing for two years when, at the beginning of
1788, he became unable to leave his house, and after
two months of weakness and exhaustion, the sands of
life ran out. He died on the 29th of March. Firm in
his churchmanship to the last, he directed that his fu
neral services should be conducted, not by one of the
Methodist preachers, but by the rector of his parish

258 JOHN WESLEY
church, and that his body should be buried, not in the
cemetery adjoining the City Road Chapel, but in the
consecrated ground of Marylebone Churchyard.
John Wesley had not expected the end so soon, and
was absent from London on one of his tours of visita
tion. It is said that at the very moment of the death
of Charles, John was singing with a congregation in
Shropshire his brother's noble hymn : —
" Come, let us join our friends above
Who have obtained the prize,
And, on the eagle wings of love,
To joys celestial rise.
Let all the saints terrestrial sing,
With those to glory gone :
For all the servants of our King,
In earth and heaven are one.
" One family we dwell in Him,
One church, above, beneath,
Though now divided by the stream,
The narrow stream of death :
One army of the living God,
To His command we bow,
Part of His host have crossed the flood,
And part are crossing now. "
Two weeks later, at Bolton, he gave out that other
famous hymn of his brother's : —
" Come, O thou Traveller Unknown,"
but when he came to the lines —
" My company before is gone
And I am left alone with thee,"
he could read no further, but sat down, buried his face
in his hands, and burst into sobs and tears. For the
widow of Charles he showed a tender and solicitous
care ; and the affection of the old man for her daughter
and namesake, his favorite niece Sally, was very beau-

THE CLOSING YEARS 259
tiful. But he had now outlived all the friends of his
youth. He was as a father to thousands, but he had
no more brothers; and in the few remaining years of
his life, though always active and cheerful, he felt him
self alone.
Occasional references in the Journal betray some
slight and gradual decline in Wesley's health during
these last years, yet he retained his vigor both of mind
and body, in a wonderful degree, almost to the very
close of life. In 1786, when eighty-three years old, he
records with some regret that he cannot now write more
than fifteen hours a day without hurting his eyes. Two
years later, when his friends urged him to ride to a
preaching place six miles out of Bristol, "I am
ashamed," replied this youth of eighty-five, "that any
Methodist preacher in tolerable health should make a
difficulty of this," and tramped away. On his birth
day, that summer, as he enters his eighty-sixth year, he
writes that he cannot run or walk quite so fast as once
he did, that his sight is a little declining, and he has
some twinges of rheumatism ; but hearing, smell, taste,
and appetite are as good as ever they were ; he feels no
such thing as weariness in travelling or preaching, and
finds that he can write as readily and as correctly as
ever. A week before this entry he had breakfasted in
York with one of his ministers, Robert Spence, at three
o'clock in the morning, and ordered his coachman to
have his carriage at the door at four — "I don't mean
a quarter, or five minutes, past, but four;" and as the
clock was striking, Wesley entered the chaise and drove
off. This remarkable preservation of bodily vigor he at
tributed — and no doubt justly — to his constant life in

260 JOHN WESLEY
the open air, to the absolute regularity of his habits, and
to the fact that he had always kept himself free from
needless care and anxiety. He was a striking example
of the familiar truth that work, without worry, never
kills. It was only during the last year and a half of his
life that there was any marked decline of his powers.
On his last birthday, he writes, without complaint or
sadness, but with a quiet recognition of the approach
ing end : "This day I enter into my eighty-eighth year.
For above eighty-six years I found none of the infirmi
ties of age ; my eyes did not wax dim, neither was my
natural strength abated; but last August I found a
sudden change. My eyes were so dim that no glasses
would help them. My strength likewise had quite for
saken me, and probably will not return in this world.
But I feel no pain from head to foot, only it seems
nature is exhausted ; and, humanly speaking, will sink
more and more till —
" ' The weary springs of life stand still at last.' " *
Yet he did not lessen his labors. During the year
1790, he made his circuit of England and Wales, preach
ing in almost every shire, and sometimes riding from
thirty to fifty miles in a day. In October, he was in Col
chester, and one of his audience there has left an inter
esting account of his preaching. . Henry Crabbe Robin
son, then only sixteen years of age, an articled clerk in
an attorney's office, heard then for the first time "that
veteran in the service of God." Wesley stood in a
wide pulpit, on each side of him a minister, and the
two held him up. "I looked upon him," says his
young hearer in a letter written the next day, "with a
respect bordering on enthusiasm. After the people had
1 Journal, June 28, 1790.

JOHN WESLEY.
From an engraving of the painting by Jackson.

THE CLOSING YEARS 261
sung one verse of a hymn, he arose and said, 'It gives
me great pleasure to find you have not lost your sing
ing. Neither men nor women — you have not for
gotten a single note. And I hope that, by the assist
ance of the same God which enables you to sing well,
you may do all other things well.' A universal amen
followed. . . . His discourse was short — the text I
could not hear. After the last prayer, he rose up and
addressed the audience on liberality of sentiment, and
spoke much against refusing to join with any congrega
tion on account of differences of opinion. He said, 'If
they do but fear God, work righteousness, and keep
the Commandments, we have nothing to object to.' "
This young attorney's clerk, as he grew to manhood,
came to know and hear most of the great men of two
generations in England ; but he used to say, never in all
his later life had he seen anything comparable to the
picture of this aged preacher, with the reverend coun
tenance, the long white locks, and the gentle voice,
surrounded by a vast audience of admiring and loving
friends, eager to catch some words from the lips so
soon to be silent.
Two days later Wesley preached at Lowestoft, and
the poet Crabbe, who was in the audience, noted with
admiration, the cheerful serenity of his manner and the
charm of his voice, as he repeated and applied to him
self a favorite passage from Anacreon : —
" Oft am I by woman told,
Poor Anacreon ! thou grow'st old :
See, thine hairs are falling all :
Poor Anacreon, how they fall!
Whether I grow old or no,
By these signs I do not know ;
But this I need not to be told,
' 'Tis time to live, if I grow old.' "

262 JOHN WESLEY
In the opening weeks of the next year, 1 791, he made
plans for his usual journey through England, sent his
chaise and horses before him to Bristol, and had be
spoken seats for himself and his friends in the Bath
coach for about the first of March. As late as the 19th
of February, it appears from one of his letters that he
still hoped to start on the 28th; but on the 25th, which
was Sunday, he was so ill as to be quite unable to
preach, and was obliged to take to his bed. Next day,
however, he was out again ; on Tuesday he preached
in the City Road Chapel, and on Wednesday preached
again at Leatherhead, eighteen miles from London.
Thursday he spent quietly with an old friend, Mr.
Wolff, at Balham, and seemed as active in mind and
cheerful in spirits as ever. It was on this day that he
penned, with trembling hand, his last letter. Inter
ested to the end in all measures of public reform, he
wrote to William Wilberforce x bidding that young
champion God-speed in his crusade against human
slavery. "Go on," wrote Wesley, "in the name of
God and the power of his might, till even American
slavery, the vilest that ever saw the sun, shall vanish
away before it."
On his return to London next day, Friday, Febru
ary 25, he repaired to his room in City Road, and never
left it again. During the three following days, his
strength was fast ebbing, and it was evident that the
end was near. He slept much ; but he knew the friends
who gathered about him in those closing days, and gave
directions for his burial and the disposal of his effects.
In waking intervals he several times sang some lines
1 This Letter in his Works (VII, 237) bears the title " To a Friend " ;
but it is known to have been intended for Wilberforce.

THE CLOSING YEARS 263
from his brother's hymns, and even in the half dream
ing quiet of sleep his failing voice would frame the words
of Scripture or hymn, or bid his friends "Pray and
praise." On Tuesday afternoon he insisted on sitting
up, and while he was assisted to rise broke out into
singing, with a strength that astonished his friends : —
" I'll praise my Maker while I've breath ;
And when my voice is lost in death,
Praise shall employ my nobler powers ;
My days of praise shall ne'er be past,
While life, and thought, and being last,
Or immortality endures."
He sang through two stanzas, and tried to begin a dox-
ology; but the exertion was too much, and he sank
back exhausted, faltering as if in benediction, "Now
we have done; let us all go." When the widow of
Charles Wesley came to his bedside, his eyes already
too dim to see her clearly, he strove to draw down her
face for a farewell kiss, murmuring, "He giveth his
beloved rest." And when she moistened his fevered
lips with cold water, he repeated the grace after meat
which he had used from childhood: "We thank Thee,
O Lord, for this and all Thy mercies. Bless the
Church and King, and grant us truth and peace through
Jesus Christ our Lord." Once during that afternoon,
after trying vainly for some time to make those who
stood by his bed understand what he would say, he
kept silent for a few moments, and then, gathering all
his strength, uttered in a clear, loud voice those words
that became a watchword of Methodism, "The best
of all is, God is with us" ; and after a pause, lifting up
his arms, exclaimed again, "The best of all is, God is
with us!" Through the following night he was un
able to speak, but was heard again and again to mur-

264 JOHN WESLEY
mur the first words of his favorite hymn, "I'll praise,
I'll praise." At ten the next morning, Wednesday,
March 2, 1 791, he opened his eyes, looked round upon
the company of friends about him, said distinctly,
"Farewell," and was gone.
Some years before, Wesley had caused to be prepared
a vault behind the City Road Chapel, for the last rest
ing-place of himself and of such of his itinerants as
should die in London. In his will he had directed that
his body should be borne to the grave by six poor men,
and that at his funeral there should be "no hearse, no
coach, no escutcheon, no pomp except the tears of
them that loved me." These directions were followed.
But by the wish of many of his friends, his body was
carried into the City Road Chapel, the day before in
terment, in his gown and bands, his clerical cap upon
his head, and his Bible in his hand. It was noticed
that in his last sleep the venerable face still had that
expression of cheerful serenity it had worn through life.
As many as ten thousand persons passed through the
chapel that day to take a last look upon the great leader
and the loving friend. The throng was so great, that,
in order to avoid the danger of a crowd and confusion,
it was thought prudent to have the interment in the early
morning, and to issue notices of it only late in the pre
vious evening. Accordingly, the burial service was
held between five and six on the morning of March 9 ;
but even at that hour several hundred persons had
gathered. The burial office was read by Rev. John
Richardson, for thirty years one of Wesley's trusted
preachers; and when he instinctively changed one
word in the solemn sentence of committal and read,

THE CLOSING YEARS 265
"Forasmuch as it hath pleased Almighty God to take
unto himself the soul of our dear Father here departed,"
the grief of his hearers could no longer be controlled,
but broke out into convulsive sobbing and tears.
The quaint inscription on the humble tomb of Wes
ley declares truly, "This great light arose (by the sin
gular providence of God), to enlighten these nations."
When one reflects to-day upon the magnitude of the
work he wrought, and considers the extent, the per
manence, and the beneficence of his influence, one feels
that he might fitly have been given a resting-place in
that great abbey which holds the tombs of a score of
kings, and dust of better men than kings. Yet it is
better as it is. More fitting it is that he should rest, as
he does, in the central roar of vast London, in the throng
and surge of that mass of common men with whom and
for whom he labored, beside that homely chapel which
was the centre, and is still the monument, of that great
religious movement into which he had poured his life.

CHAPTER LX
THE MAN
It is difficult to picture John Wesley in any other
character than that of the religious reformer. True,
he conceived his work broadly. He took intelligent
interest in all political and philanthropic movements.
To his thought, no man was a good Methodist or a
good Christian, unless he were a good citizen. But
his devotion to the plan of duty he had laid down for
himself was so entire and so absorbing, that it left no
time for leisure, hardly for reflection. We never see
him in an hour of ease. He is always on duty. He
too rigidly denied himself those periods of relaxation in
which the bent of a man's nature spontaneously asserts
itself. We feel, as Samuel Johnson felt, that the man
John Wesley will give us no opportunity to make his
acquaintance. He is always going somewhere; at the
beginning of the month in Cornwall, at the end of it,
perhaps, in Yorkshire. It seems a little difficult to get
upon easy terms with a man who has always preached
two hours ago, and is riding fifteen or twenty miles to
preach again to-night. Moreover, Wesley had, as we
have seen, no home, no domestic ties, none of those in
timate relations in which we may often discern most
truly a man's real character. Certain traits of his per
sonality, indeed, stand out prominently enough in any
record of his work, — his energy, his remarkable or-
266

THE MAN 267
ganizing power, his unbending will, his quiet mastery
of men and of circumstances; but to picture him, out
side his work, in the narrower relations of society and
friendship, in his habit as he lived, this is not so easy.
Yet the reader who has familiarized himself with the
details of Wesley's career, and especially with that re
markable record, the Journal, finds the image of the
man which slowly shapes itself in his thought, not by
any means altogether lacking in clearness. First of all,
John Wesley was evidently a gentleman. He made
that impression upon every one ; upon men of the world
and men of religion, upon people of the highest rank
and people of the lowest. He had inherited from four
generations the instincts of the gentleman, and he car
ried into all circumstances whither his work led him,
however narrow and humble, cultivated tastes and gen
tle manners. His looks, his bearing, the very tone of
his voice, bespoke a certain austere refinement. In
dress he was a model of scrupulous neatness and pre
cision. Repeatedly in the record of encounters with
mobs he mentions, as if it were a personal injury, that
some dirt was thrown on his coat or hat. His one
proverb that everybody quotes is, "Cleanliness is next
to godliness." A little man, barely five feet six inches
in height, and carrying no ounce of superfluous flesh,
alert and yet exact in all his movements, with a clear,
piercing glance in his hazel eyes, there was always a
certain distinction in his manner, that set him apart, at
once, from the crowd of men. The best description of
his personal appearance in his later years is that given
by John Hampson, one of his preachers, who was
closely associated with Wesley during the last period
of his life.

268 JOHN WESLEY
"The figure of Mr. Wesley was remarkable. His
stature was of the lowest, his habit of body in every
period of life the reverse of corpulent, and expressive
of strict temperance and continual exercise; and, not
withstanding his small size, his step was firm, and his
appearance, till within a few years of his death, vigor
ous and muscular. His face, for an old man, was
one of the finest we have seen. A clear, smooth fore
head, an aquiline nose, an eye the brightest and the
most piercing that can be conceived, and a freshness of
complexion scarcely ever to be found at his years and
impressive of the most perfect health, conspired to ren
der him a venerable and interesting figure. Few have
seen him without being struck with his appearance;
and many, who have been greatly prejudiced against
him, have been known to change their opinion the mo
ment they were introduced into his presence. In his
countenance and demeanor there was a cheerfulness
mingled with gravity; a sprightliness which was the
natural result of an unusual flow of spirits, and was yet
accompanied with every mark of the most serene tran
quillity. His aspect, particularly in profile, had a
strong character of acuteness and penetration. In
dress he was a pattern of neatness and simplicity. A
narrow, plaited stock, a coat with small upright collar,
no buckles at the knees, no silk or velvet in any part of
his apparel, and a head as white as snow, gave an idea
of something primitive and apostolical ; while an air of
neatness and cleanliness was diffused over his whole
person." 1
Wesley had in very eminent degree two qualities that,
by common consent, mark the gentleman wherever he
1 Quoted in Watson's "Life of Wesley," Ch. XIV.

THE MAN 269
be — courage and courtesy. As for his courage, his
life for the twenty years after 1739 is proof enough of
that. He was tried in the face of almost every sort of
danger; but no peril ever disturbed his absolute cool
ness. His courtesy was of the finest sort, which I take
to be democratic. He had the respect of an English
Conservative for social distinctions, and he numbered
among his friends and correspondents men of the high
est rank in England. Nor was he by any means in
sensible to the charm of art and manners and converse
in a truly refined society; and few men were better
fitted by breadth of knowledge and keenness of intelli
gence to share in such society. "Love," he used to
say, "supplies the essentials of good breeding without
the aid of a dancing master." But his life-work was
mostly to be done with and for the great middle class.
And in his courtesy he knew no social distinctions.
Uniformly affable, with a gentleness of manner rather
surprising when joined with a temper so firm and mas
terful, his bearing was a model of genuine courtesy.
England had no truer gentleman in his century than
John Wesley. He never thought it needful to vulgar
ize his message before any audience, or to make any
concessions to coarseness. On the other hand, he
never held himself above his hearers, or gave himself
any superior or distant airs. He talked with a mechanic
or a tradesman as he talked with a lord. One of his
preachers noticed that he was always especially careful
to take off his hat whenever poor people thanked him
for anything. He knew how to turn a compliment very
neatly, and, if need be, to blend a rebuke with it. He
was lunching one day with one of his preachers at the
table of a gentleman whose daughter was noted for her

270 JOHN WESLEY
beauty. The tactless preacher, noticing that the young
lady wore more rings than he could approve, bluntly
took her hand and turning to Wesley, said, "What do
you think of this, Mr. Wesley, for a Methodist's hand ?"
With a quiet smile for the lady, Wesley replied, "I
think the hand is very beautiful, sir."
It may be admitted that there were some traits of his
character that tended to give it distinction and dignity,
rather than charm. Something of his early asceticism
survived all his days, and he perhaps denied himself
somewhat too strictly the amenities of life. Then, too,
though it is not true, as is sometimes said, that his
temperament was cold, he did have it under perfect
control. He was the most self-possessed of men. He
had no moods, no unregulated impulses. He never let
himself go. He was not the man to fling his inkstand
at the devil. He never hurried, never worried ; his life
was a pattern of order and precision. Now such an
equable temper is doubtless to be coveted, but it cer
tainly does not give that light and shade which make
character interesting. And a man may very possibly
have too much poise to be a thoroughly genial and
sympathetic companion.
Then, so far as appears from his life or his writings,
Wesley had very little gift of humor ; which is a serious
privation in our dull-colored world. He was cheerful
— that came of his temperament — and he had a very
pretty wit, usually with a satiric edge, and shown best
in some mood of criticism or controversy. You ex
pect wit from every man of any eminence in the eigh
teenth century. But of that sympathetic enjoyment of
all the manifold contrasts and incongruities of life which
we call humor, I think Wesley had very little. That

THE MAN

271

usually implies a habit of leisurely observation, which
he would never indulge. It is a pity, when one thinks
what an opportunity he had for the exercise of that
fortunate gift. The great middle class of English peo
ple, the class full of the most varied, racy, humorous
life, Wesley knew, or might have known, better than all
the novelists of that century put together. He lived
with them for fifty years, was their friend, adviser,
father confessor. But you would never guess that he
saw the humors of their life. There were thousands
of Mrs. Poysers among those early Methodists, — there
must have been, — or the Wesleyan movement wouldn't
have been so sane and healthy; but Wesley never
seems to have met them. The infrequent passages of
conscious humor in the Journal almost always have
some satiric quality; it is Wesley the controversialist
who is speaking. "I talked with a warm man who
was always very zealous for the Church when he was
very drunk, and just able to stammer out 'No gown, no
crown.' He was quickly persuaded that, whatever we
were, he was himself a child of the devil. We left him
full of good resolutions, which lasted several days."
Perhaps a consciousness of such a tendency to un
warranted satire made Wesley a little fearful of humor.
When the Bishop of Exeter in his scandalous attack
charged him with having formed a resolution not to
indulge in laughter, Wesley replied, "No, nor ought I
to indulge in it at all if I am conscious to myself that
it hurts my soul." But there is a laughter that doeth
good like a medicine ; I do not think a little more of it
would have hurt the soul of John Wesley. Certainly
it might have been good for his writings. The Journal,
as it is, is one of the most interesting books of the cen-

272 JOHN WESLEY
tury; but if Wesley could have put into it the humor of
that genial old hero, his father, rector of Epworth, the
Journal might have been, like Boswell's " Johnson," a
book that no intelligent man could leave unread. But
John Wesley was the child of his mother; and humor
was not one of the many gifts the great Susannah Wesley
could bequeath to her son.
As it is, almost the only humorous passages in the
Journal are those Wesley himself never suspected of
humor. For instance, he set down gravely these state
ments on the same page : —
"Saturday, Feb. 2. Having received a full answer
from Mr. P., I was clearly resolved that I ought to
marry. For many years I remained single because I
believed I could be more useful in a single than in a
married state. I now as fully believed that in my
present circumstances I might be more useful in a
married state; into which I entered a few days after."
"Wed. Feb. 6., I met the single men and showed
them on how many accounts it was good for those who
had received that gift from God to remain single for
the kingdom of heaven's sake." There is no indica
tion that he felt this homily to the young preachers
humorously ill-timed.
On one occasion when he was riding with a number
of friends from one preaching place to another, the
party was assailed by a mob, who pelted the carriage
with stones; but, says Wesley, "a very large gentle
woman sat in my lap and screened me, so that nothing
came near me." What special providence screened the
large gentlewoman, he doesn't say. First and last, there
are a good number of delightful passages like these,
in which, if the humor is intentional, it is " extra dry."

THE MAN 273
It is not exaggeration to call Wesley a scholar. Not,
indeed, that he could present the modern creden
tials of scholarship. He was not deeply versed in
any special department of knowledge. He discov
ered no new scientific or historic facts; he wrote none
of those dry books of learning which nobody ever
reads. But he was a scholar of the old school — a man
of literary tastes, of broad outlook, and genuine culture.
He could stand Macaulay's test of a scholar — he
could read Greek with his feet on the fender. It is
easy to see in the Journal how keen was his interest
in all things of the intellect and the imagination, not
only in theology and philosophy, but in history, poetry,
art. To use one of Matthew Arnold's pet phrases, he
wanted to know the best that had been thought and
done in the world. Never was so tireless a reader,
though he spent little time within the four walls of a
library. Whenever he travelled, whether on horse
back or by coach, a book was always open before him.
Nobody could adopt more truly Cicero's famous praise
of books, "Delectant domi, non impediunt foris, per-
noctant nobiscum, peregrinantur, rusticantur." Books
were, indeed, almost his only companions in his lonely
and wandering life. In his constant and wearisome
labors, mostly with and for people of scanty ideas and
narrow horizon, he found refreshment and inspira
tion in the world's masterpieces of literature. One
week he has read again Homer's " Odyssey," and breaks
out in a fine burst of admiration for the charm of its
imagery and the nobility of its morals; another day,
while riding to Newcastle, he reads the tenth book of
the "Iliad" ; another time it is a book of the "^Eneid"
or the "Letters" of Cicero. He was familiar not only

274 JOHN WESLEY
with the great works of his own literature, but with those
of the Greek, Latin, Italian, French, German, and he
had a good reading knowledge of Spanish. Among
the authors of classic rank whom he mentions in the
Journal — and that not merely by a word of quotation
or an incidental reference, but in a way to indicate that
he was actually reading them at the time or had long
been familiar with them — are Homer, Plato, Xeno-
phon, Demosthenes, Anacreon ; Lucian, Virgil, Cicero,
Juvenal, Horace ; Ariosto, Tasso ; Voltaire, Rousseau ;
Shakespeare, Milton, Cowley, Dryden, Locke, Pope,
Swift, Prior, Young, Thomson, Gray, Sterne, Johnson,
Ossian. And this is by no means a complete list. His
own incidental comments upon books and authors are
always independent and often very shrewd and curious.
In his tastes he was emphatically a man of the eigh
teenth century; but he accepted the mandate of no
critical authority.
As to the shelfful of volumes, some thirty in number,
that he himself wrote, most of them are doubtless
destined to oblivion. He was not raised up to write
books. There is a virile strength and plainness in
some of his sermons which many readers will say
entitle them to rank with the works of Sherlock or
Tillotson. But sermons, at best, are not a very vital
form of literature, and it is to be doubted whether
Wesley's will find many readers outside of those Method
ists who still prize them as a body of sound doctrine.
The truth is, Wesley had not that union of imagination
and passion and that special gift of phrase which make
writing literature. He was rather afraid of anything
that might seem like affectation or ornament ; his own
style, in sermon, essay, or pamphlet, is clear, direct,

THE MAN

275

and entirely plain. His model was Swift, in whose
style, he says, all the properties of a good writer meet ;
but, unlike Swift, he cannot illumine his page with
constant play of illustration, indignant, pathetic, or
humorous. Wesley only speaks right on. His critical
taste in matters of phrase was severe, almost finical.
His nicer judgment corrected many a careless or ex
travagant line in the hymns of his brother Charles ; and
his own translations of the Moravian hymns, though
sometimes bald, are always dignified.
One of Wesley's books, however, is immortal. Like
so many men in those days when the world was not in
such a hurry, he kept a journal. Indeed, he was so
thoroughly convinced of the value of this practice, that
he used to enjoin it upon all his preachers, and the best
of their efforts were sometimes honored with a place in
his Arminian Magazine. Wesley's own Journal cer
tainly does not lack much of being the most interesting
social document of the eighteenth century. For it is
not so much the story of Wesley's inner life as the
record of his dealings with other people. This precise
and masterful little man in dark clothing goes riding
up and down the country for forty years, and he has
eyes that open outward. He knows all sorts and con
ditions of men ; he is interested in all things that go to
make up the daily life of men. He examines a society
of colliers in some grimy little Yorkshire village, on the
state of their souls, and then he goes to his room and
writes a letter to Lord Dartmouth or Lord North on
the state of the nation. He knows this England ; for
plain people talk with him. They tell him not only of
their religious doubts and fears and joys; they tell
him of the injustice of the squire and the arrogance of

276 JOHN WESLEY
the parson, of the drunkenness at the public house, of
the failure of the crops and the high price of bread, of
the burden of the taxes and the unpopularity of the
ministry. Boswell and Walpole will introduce you to
the literary and the fashionable folk of that century;
but if you want to know that great, pushing English
middle class, coarse often almost to brutality, yet
serious and inclined to be religious, the men who
really did the work and paid the debts and fought the
battles of England, — if you want to know these men,
read Wesley's Journal. You will see them as they
appeared to one bent, first of all, on saving their souls ;
but you will see them as they were. For here the sturdy
simplicity of Wesley's style is admirable. In its homely
realism the Journal is as vivid as Hogarth.
Only such portions of the Journal have been printed
as seemed to Wesley good for edification. The com
plete manuscript still exists, in twenty-six bound
volumes, and it were greatly to be wished that it might
be given to the public entire. It is certain that the un
published parts must contain matter of great interest,
both for the fuller revelation of Wesley's own character,
and for the illustration of the society and religion of his
day. And we may be quite sure that —
" Whatever record leap to light
He never shall be shamed."
As a thinker, Wesley was the child of his age. He
had all the eighteenth-century confidence in sense and
reason. Although it was his mission to bring new
warmth and light to the religious life of England, yet
he shared the general distrust of enthusiasm; of any
conduct that could not be defended by reason. After

THE MAN 277
he emerged from the early influence of the mysticism
of Law and the quietism of the Moravians, he had
little patience with any religious faith that could not
give a clear account of itself. The title of his famous
apology indicates exactly his attitude toward all serious
criticism, "An Appeal to Men of Reason and Religion."
He always professed himself ready to abandon any
position and disclaim any teaching that could not
safely make such appeal. We shall remember his
exclamation quoted on a previous page, "The re
proach of Christ I am willing to bear; but not the
reproach of enthusiasm — if I can help it!" Not in
frequently in the Journal he expresses dissatisfaction
with some members of his societies, — not on account of
irregularities in their conduct or lack of pronounced
emotional experience, but because their faith seems so
unintelligent. A great part of his thinking and writing
was prompted by the desire to give a clear rationale
of the religious life. Himself a logician from the cradle,
he was accustomed all his life long to give reasoned
justification for his belief and his conduct; and he
insisted that other people should do the same. Mr.
Lecky hardly puts it too strongly when he says that
Wesley manifested at all times and on all subjects an
even exaggerated passion for reasoning. No contro
versialist of the century had more respect for an argu
ment. In his own mental processes, as in his outward
habits, he had schooled himself to order and method.
His ideas were as carefully arranged as the papers on his
writing-table. His sermons, read to-day, without the
strange power of his voice and presence, may seem to
lack breadth and color; he sticks narrowly to his sub
ject, and he has not the imagination to illumine or to

278 JOHN WESLEY
illustrate it. But he is always terse, consecutive, logi
cal. It is evident that he is not striving to awaken any
unintelligent feelings; his speech could never have
been sensational in manner or hazy in thought.
It may be said with truth that Wesley was a little
too deferential to a syllogism. He forgot that on most
matters of importance our conclusions are not the
result of a single line of argument, but the resultant of
many lines; nay, in many cases, cannot be decided
exclusively by argument, but rather by sentiment or
instinct. His very confidence in logic made him over-
ready to revise or reverse any accredited opinions that
seemed to be contradicted by a correct course of argu
ment. On historical and scientific questions he was
liable to be the prey of the last plausibly reasoned book
he had read. We have seen how easily he was con
vinced by Johnson's "Taxation no Tyranny." He
reads "An Enquiry into the Proofs of the Charges
Commonly Advanced against Mary Queen of Scots,"
and he is convinced that Mary was an innocent martyr
and Elizabeth "as just and merciful as Nero, and as
good a Christian as Mahomet." He reads Woodrow's
"History of the Sufferings of the Church in Scotland,"
and he pronounces Charles II a monster, and Bloody
Mary of England "a lamb, a mere dove in comparison
with him" — a judgment about equally unjust to both
monarchs. A tract by a Dr. Wilson on the "Circula
tion of the Blood" persuades Tiim that the heart is a
mere vessel to receive the blood, "which moves through
its channels on the mere principle of suction, assisted
by the ethereal fire."
Yet this easy surrender to a line of clear reasoning
is a fault that implies some important virtues. John

THE MAN 279
Wesley was the most candid of men. Seldom has a
great religious reformer been so little of a dogmatist,
or shown so little stubborn persistence in his own views,
simply because they were his own. And this is the
more remarkable when it is remembered that this
openness to persuasion was joined with a will as in
flexible as iron. Moreover, with his direct and logical
cast of thought, it was impossible that his opinions
should be doubtful or befogged; that he should let
his emotions run away with his reason ; that he should
ever maintain at the same time two logically inconsist
ent opinions.
It was a worse fault in his thinking that, in his liking
for a good course of syllogism, Wesley sometimes neg
lected to inquire very carefully what had been put into
the premises of his syllogism. He was curious and
inquisitive, but he had not in any high degree the gift
of scientific observation. Nor did he reason from
facts to laws and causes very correctly; his deduction
was much better than his induction. He has been
often charged with credulity, and not without some good
reason. The charge may easily be exaggerated. Natu
rally he was sceptical rather than credulous ; he was
not usually ready to accept facts on dubious testimony.
He shared the critical temper of his age. His comments
on the legendary element in early history and on con
temporary books of travel, as one of his biographers
remarks,1 often anticipate the criticism of recent
students. Moreover, some of the incidents often cited
from the Journal as examples of his credulity, seem
rather proofs of consistency; as when he expresses
gratitude that a cloud slipped over the sun just as its
1 J. H. Rigg, " The Living Wesley," p. 240.

280 JOHN WESLEY
rays became intolerably hot on his bare head, or that
the rain suddenly ceased as he was about to address
an audience of several thousand people in the open air.
To assert dogmatically that these coincidences were
proof of special divine interposition in his behalf,
would certainly have been arrogant; but Wesley did
not assert that. On the other hand, if a man really
believed — what many profess and do not believe —
that there are no accidents whatever in the government
of the universe, he may as reasonably deny accident to
trifles like these as to the catastrophe that engulfs a
city. Before a universal Providence, distinctions of
great and small vanish. Most of us act as if we thought
the Almighty, like the physician in the next street, did
not bother himself about our little ailments and vexa
tions, but might be induced to take concern in a serious
case of typhoid or a critical surgical operation — which
I take to be a kind of pagan notion.
" When the loose mountain trembles from on high
Will gravitation cease as you go by ? "
asks Pope, with an air of triumph. Why, no; yet if
gravitation be only an exercise of that omniscient Will
.without whose knowledge not a sparrow falls, I may
not irrationally hope that gravitation will wait till I
am past — and be thankful.
But there are other and better grounds for this
charge of credulity against Wesley. Credulous in one
direction, he certainly was. All his life long he gave
too easy assent to anything that savored of the preter
natural, to stories of dreams, visions, second-sight,
ghosts, witchcraft. His interest in such matters was
abnormally excited when he was a boy by the noises
in his father's rectory. Those mysterious knockings

THE MAN 281
and trampings and lifting of latches and moving of
furniture fixed in the mind of young Wesley an unal- .
terable belief in unseen beings that may invade our
human life. His rational temper was not content to
leave any mystery unexplained ; and he found no other
explanation. He always showed a curiosity, not mor
bid but eager, in any accounts of the presence or in
fluence of invisible powers. He emphatically expressed
his opinion that to give up witchcraft was in effect to
give up the Bible — a dilemma that I trust we need not
accept. From the Journal might be gathered an ad
mirable collection of tales of wonder, varying from the
simplest cases of thought transference to the most
delightfully creepy ghost stories. A few of them are
too lurid to be convincing; but the most of them, it
must be admitted, are well enough attested to deserve
examination by the Society for Psychical Research. In
nearly every instance they were doubtless believed by
the good people who told them. Wesley himself,
though often careful to say he does not impose his own
belief upon any one else, certainly did not always
make a careful scrutiny of these tales before accepting
them. He gives one particularly astounding — and
entertaining — narrative, ten pages long, of a young
woman who was visited by the ghost of her uncle and
by a considerable number of other spirits, whose
chamber, in fact, seems to have been a kind of popular
resort for all her departed friends; and to this tale
Wesley fits a very odd series of comments, queries, and
inferences of his own as to the behavior of the ghosts,
which would hardly satisfy the requirements of strict
scientific investigation.1 1 Journal, May 25, 1768.

282 JOHN WESLEY
We may at least credit him with being slow to admit
any evidence of the marvellous that had not come
under his personal observation. He was interested in
the literature of the preternatural, but he was not
generally convinced by it. Glanvill's "Saducismus
Triumphatus" he thought mostly "stark nonsense";
while as to Swedenborg, he concludes that he was
"one of the most ingenious, lively, entertaining madmen
that ever put pen to paper." And before we condemn
Wesley in too superior fashion for his credulity, we
may remember that the most hard-headed philosopher
of that age, Samuel Johnson, shared the belief in
ghosts, and could make an appointment to meet one
in the crypt of St. Sepulchre's Church. We may re
member, too, that there is a well-attested body of phe
nomena not yet explained, which it may not be worth
while to investigate, but which candid men do not deny
with contempt. Wesley's interest in such matters, in
fact, is perhaps not exactly a proof of credulity, but
rather of a singular curiosity with reference to whatever
lies on the border-land of experience. One thinks of
it as an extension beyond scientific limits, and not
guarded by any scientific temper or methods, of that
intense interest in all unfamiliar physical facts which led
him to read with avidity the records of chemical and
physical experiment, and to follow eagerly the new sci
ence of electricity. Most of all, we must insist that this
vein of credulity with reference to the preternatural did
not vitiate his thinking on other matters, and that he did
not allow it to sanction any vagaries of conduct either
in himself or any one else. It might have been thought
that such an interest in Wesley would have encouraged
superstition in his followers ; but there is no proof that

THE MAN 283
it did. For, after all, we must come back to the as
sertion that Wesley's nature was at bottom rational —
not speculative, but practical. He might give rein to
his conjecture in the realm of the unknown, and ex
plain what he thought strange facts by wilder theories ;
but all his operative and efficient beliefs, like a child of
the eighteenth century, he brought rigidly to the tests
of sense and conduct.
In one other respect, Wesley's character is curiously
illustrative of the spirit of the age. Everybody knows
that in England, as everywhere else in Europe, at
about the middle of the eighteenth century, the domi
nant critical reason, largely aristocratic and scholarly,
began to be modified by a romantic sentimentality,
largely democratic and popular. The era of Pope and
Voltaire was passing; the era of Rousseau was begin
ning. In England this democratic and sentimental
impulse manifests itself in various wavs. Literature,
emerging from the clubs and drawing-rooms of Queen
Anne society, throws off the restraints of convention to
gain freer utterance for personal feeling. In poetry,
melancholy becomes a favorite motive, sometimes gentle
and chastened, as in Goldsmith and Gray, sometimes
rhetorical and sonorous, as in Young and Blair. In
fiction, Fielding well represents English common
sense; but Fielding's depictions of burly, red-blooded
life, healthy though coarse, were far less popular than
Richardson's portrayals of tortured, long-suffering
sentiment. And Sterne, the apostle of sentimentality,
was, for a time, a greater favorite than either. Popular
religious literature, appealing to a less cultivated taste,
often shows this sentimentality in its most dishevelled
form. The most widely circulated book in England at

284 JOHN WESLEY
the middle of the century was not poetry or fiction,
but the "Meditations among the Tombs" of Wesley's
college friend, James Hervey. The reader of to-day
who looks into it will probably be surprised to find
it the most rhetorical of books, written in a tone of
unctuous pathos, very unedifying.
Now it is curious to find in Wesley this strain of
sentimentalism grafted upon an essentially critical
temperament. Of course we shall not expect from his
dignified self-possession anything extravagant or un
restrained ; but with his precise and reasoning temper
there certainly was combined a strongly contrasted vein
of sentiment. This may be seen in the series of attach
ments which ended in his unlucky marriage; but a
more interesting and equally convincing proof of it is
found in the comments upon books and authors with
which the Journal abounds. Some of these are very
suggestive of the trend of his taste. He shared the
universal and just admiration of his age for Pope;
but significantly the one poem of Pope with which he
was most familiar was not pointed satire or epigram
matic philosophy, but Pope's one piece of elegant senti
mentalism, the "Elegy on an Unfortunate Lady."
This he quotes again and again, and remarks once that
it has long been a favorite of his. It was not Pope,
however, that, of all the Queen Anne men, Wesley
admired most, but rather Prior. He quotes him re
peatedly in the Journal ; and when Samuel Johnson, in
the newly issued "Lives of the Poets," spoke in terms
of depreciation both of Prior's character and of his
verse, Wesley, then in his eightieth year, came to the
defence of his favorite poet in a most spirited paper.1
1 The Arminian Magazine, 1782.

THE MAN 285
Prior, he asserts, was not half so bad a man as his
critics have painted him ; while as to the Chloe of the
charming lyrics, who had been represented as no better
than she should be, Wesley declares on the authority
of his brother Samuel, who knew her well, that she
was an estimable Miss Taylor of Westminster, who
refused the advances of the poet while he was living,
and spent hours weeping at his tomb after he was dead.
Johnson's criticism of Prior's verse provokes his warm
est protest. The great critic had said it lacks feeling.
"Does it?" cries Wesley, "then I know not with what
eyes or with what heart a man must read it." Prior's
"Henry and Emma," a rather frigid version of the
"Nut-brown Maid" story, he avers to be a poem that
"no man of sensibility can read without tears." Simi
lar expressions of preference for the sentimental and
romantic elements in literature are very frequent
throughout the Journal. Of Thomson's poetry, for in
stance, he had never thought very highly till he read his
romantic tragedy of "Edward and Eleonora," by which,
he says, he was much impressed. Beattie, whose almost
forgotten work, "The Minstrel," is an attempt to give
a romantic flavor to the warmed-over philosophy of
Pope, he pronounces one of the best of poets — an
opinion shared, it is said, by King George III. Home's
sentimental and declamatory drama of "Douglas,"
now remembered only by the lines —
" My name is Norval : on the Grampian hills
My father feeds his flocks,"
he is astonished to find "one of the most excellent
dramas I ever read" — and he had read a good many.
The grandiose declamation of "Ossian," which excited
only the contempt of Johnson, he pronounces deeply

286 JOHN WESLEY
pathetic, "little inferior to Homer and Virgil, and in
some respects superior to both." After reading Vol
taire's "Henriade," which he praises generously, he
remarks that the French language, for all its finish and
precision, lacks pathos and heartiness, and is no more
to be compared with the German or Spanish than is a
bagpipe to an organ. Of contemporary fiction, there is
no evidence that he ever read either Fielding or Richard
son, but it is significant to note his familiarity with that
incarnation of sentimentalism, Sterne. Of the " Senti
mental Journey" he writes, "'Sentimental' — what is
that ? It is not English : he might as well say ' continen
tal.' It is not sense. It conveys no determinate idea.
Yet this nonsensical word is now become a fashionable
one . However, the book agrees well with the title , for one
is as queer as the other. For oddity, uncouthness, and
unlikeness to all the world beside, I suppose the writer
to be without a rival" — an account so very just as to
make it certain he had read the book. The "Tristram
Shandy," too, he must have read, for he points an
argument in one of his pamphlets by an adroit reference
to it. He never wrote a novel himself, — he wrote
almost everything else, — but he did, as stated in a
previous chapter, revise and abridge one that he greatly
admired, and recommended it to Methodist readers.
Henry Brooke's "Fool of Quality" would doubtless
be voted insipid by the modern novel reader; but
Wesley was fascinated by its profuse sentiment. "The
greatest excellence in this book," says he, "is that it
continually strikes at the heart. The strokes are so
fine, so natural and affecting, that I know not who can
read it with tearless eyes." Most readers of to-day
will be able to control their emotions through the

THE MAN 287
perusal; but Wesley's remark is another of the many
proofs scattered through the Journal, that his usual
good judgment was always liable to be misled by this
indulgence to sentiment. Possibly, however, this sym
pathy with the trend of his age was one cause of the
vast influence of Wesley; he had the Zeitgeist on his
side. But all this does not explain Wesley's wonderful
mastery over men. For he was born to command, if
ever man was — a leader and ruler from his earliest
years. And rule he did, as a great religious reformer
seldom has. The whole vast organization of Method
ism depended upon him as its source and centre. He
was absolute commander of the army of itinerant
preachers; he was the judge who finally decided all
cases of conduct or discipline; he had the power to
admit or to exclude every member of every Methodist
society in the United Kingdom. With literal truth he
might have adopted the language of the centurion, "I
say unto this man, Go, and he goeth ; and to another,
Come, and he cometh ; and to my servant, Do this, and
he doeth it." And this authority was quietly assumed
by Wesley, and accepted by the thousands who loved
and obeyed him, as a matter of course, a natural and
inevitable result of their relation. Wesley apparently
made no effort to secure or to maintain it. When, now
and then, a man revolted against his leadership, such
malcontents found it necessary to leave the societies.
But the bitterness of the few who rebelled and the
loyalty of the thousands who obeyed alike attest Wesley's
consummate power of command. Such gift of personal
sway is granted to but few men. Impelled by selfish
motives, it might have made a leader eminent in poli-

288 JOHN WESLEY
tics or in war. In fact, it is probably safe to say that
of all the great generals in the Europe of his century,
no one could claim such an army of devoted followers
as this man John Wesley.
What gave him such power? Tireless and unselfish
devotion to the welfare of men will secure their respect,
often their love ; not always their obedience. Doubtless
no analysis can explain the secret of personality; but
one essential there is without which such mastery over
men as Wesley's is impossible. He had an iron will.
Quiet, soft-spoken, gentle in manner, holding himself
perfectly in command, there was yet a strange domi
nance in his personality. Even his friends sometimes
stood in a certain awe of him, and seldom ventured to
oppose his wishes. There was nothing imperious or
arrogant in his temper, but he seemed to overcome
opposition by sheer force of will. He could overawe a
mob with the still and searching look of his eye. A
recent thoughtful writer on religious phenomena1 sug
gests that the remarkable effects of his preaching —
which, unlike Whitefield's, was not sensational either in
theme or in manner — may have been due in part to
this power of intense personal will which we do not yet
clearly understand.
Certain it is that this concentrated and persistent
power of will largely explains the success of all Wesley's
practical plans. He is often credited, and justly, with
remarkable powers of organization. Yet he invented
little. His whole system was not devised beforehand ;
it was not a scheme, but a growth. Almost every one
of its features, as we have seen in tracing its history,
1 F. M. Davenport, " Primitive Traits in Religious Revivals," pp.
168-169.

THE MAN 289
was adopted by Wesley as a means ready to his hand for
the transmission or extension of his own superintend
ence. It is not the Wesleyan system, but Wesley that
calls for our admiration. Almost any organization
may be efficient, if you have a powerful man to adminis
ter it. His plan once formed, Wesley was as steadfast
as the sun and as sure as the seasons. He was never
discouraged, never impatient at the slowness of re
sults. There was no vacillation or reversal in his pur
pose, nothing spasmodic or fitful in his activity; but
for fifty years, with fixed, unswerving will, he wrought
out his mission. He met every exigency as it arose,
adapted old means to new ends, or, when convinced
that it was necessary, with quick decision, though re
luctantly, cut whatever tie of tradition thwarted or
fettered the work he felt called to do. Where else can
there be found a religious movement with results so
widespread and permanent, directed so entirely by
one man, without influential friends and in spite of
formidable opposition, and bearing the impress of his
personality in all its doctrines, its methods, and its
spirit? To Wesley's keen, practical sagacity, driven
by such quiet energy of will, nothing was impossible.
He had the gift to achieve.
But it is the peculiar glory of Wesley that this domi
nating will was joined with an almost absolutely
unselfish benevolence. The combination is by no
means usual. For no temptations are so subtle or so
strong as those that accompany the consciousness of
superior power. The great general or statesman is
always liable to have a little contempt for the masses
whose wills are so pliant to his own. The masters of
men are seldom the lovers of men. But it would be

290 JOHN WESLEY
difficult to find a man in history whose motives were
more purely altruistic than Wesley's. Even the few
malcontents who complained of his rule as autocratic
or arrogant, never ventured to accuse him of using his
authority to further his private interests or gain. At
worst they only charged him with the ambitious love
of power for its own sake. And no one reads his life
to-day without seeing how false was that charge.
Ambition, in any bad sense, he had none. It was not
power he wanted, but influence and opportunity. The
world was his parish, and he wanted to get at men
everywhere on the common level of human needs and
human destiny. All his plans and machinery had this
one end in view.
And his benevolence was remarkably sane, clear
sighted, practical. There was no effusiveness, no
sentimentality about it. It is evident enough from the
Journal that the gentleman and the scholar in him often
shrank instinctively from the coarseness and ignorance
of those to whom he brought his message. If, as one
writer1 has said, his greatest service was not to the
Church, but to democracy, he was himself by native
inclination conservative and aristocratic. He had no
illusions about the people in the lower stratum of Eng
lish society; he knew them for just what they were
— ignorant, often coarse, brutalized. But he had no
contempt for them and no despair. He did not philoso
phize much over the problems of society, either with the
sociologist or the theologian ; he only knew that at the
root of most of the real ills of life was the fact of sin;
and from sin he knew men could be saved. To induce
them to accept that salvation was the deep, steady,
dominating passion of his life.
1 F. M. Davenport.

THE MAN 291
For the first and the last word with reference to John
Wesley must be that he was a man of religion. The
deepest secret of his success was his faith in God.
Without love of man, such a life of unselfish devotion
would indeed have been impossible; but without
faith in God, this love of man, even in the bravest
souls, may lead in such a world as this to despairing
pessimism. We must add faith to our love, or we shall
lose our hope. Wesley firmly believed that God would,
and that, therefore, man could, mend and lift up this
bad and broken world. He believed that every human
heart, however encased in worldly conventions or sunk
in grosser sins, is accessible to the divine grace; that
every man will feel some impulse of response to the
divine message of warning and love, if only he can be
induced to listen to it. And so, not with a sudden flare
of youthful enthusiasm, but with a steadfast, lifelong
resolution, he gave himself to the work of winning men
to righteousness, from the love of sin to the love of God.
It was this faith in God and the resulting confidence
in the spiritual possibilities of humanity that inspired
his unflagging energy and lifted his life to the calm
levels of heroism.
And Wesley had little confidence in any other means
to uplift and direct mankind, apart from this force of
personal religion. It is true, as we have seen, that he
was in advance of his age in his advocacy of measures
to improve the moral and physical conditions of so
ciety; it may perhaps be true, as the most brilliant of
recent English historians % has said, that the noblest
result of the Wesleyan movement was "the steady
attempt, which has never ceased from that day to this,
1 J. R. Green, " Short History of the English People."

292 JOHN WESLEY
to remedy the guilt, the ignorance, the physical suffer
ing, the social degradation of the profligate and the
poor." Yet we must insist that the Wesleyan move
ment was distinctively a religious revival. Wesley
was no believer in salvation by education and culture,
by economic and social reform. He accepted the
declaration of the Master, "Ye must be born again."
He did assert most positively — as the Master did —
that a genuine religious life must be known by its
fruit in outward conduct, and would admit no man to be
a good Christian who was not also a good citizen. But
he was convinced that the truly righteous life, the life
that realizes the best possibilities of human nature,
must spring from that devout love to God which
changes and directs and controls all a man's desires;
and he knew that such a life is inspired and nurtured
by influences supernatural and divine. Philanthropist,
social reformer, he was first of all, and always, the
preacher of personal religion.
He was not a perfect man, and his followers then
and since then have perhaps often idealized him. Yet
among religious reformers where is there a nobler
figure, a purer example of a life hospitable to truth,
fostering culture, yet subordinating all aspiration, di
recting all culture, to the unselfish service of humanity?
It were idle to ask whether he were the greatest man of
his century. That century was rich in names the world
calls great — great generals like Marlborough, great
monarchs like Frederick, great statesmen like Chatham
and Burke, poets and critics like Pope and Johnson and
Lessing, writers who helped revolutionize society like
Voltaire and Rousseau ; but run over the whole brill
iant list, and where among them all is the man whose

THE MAN 293
motives were so pure, whose life was so unselfish, whose
character was so spotless. And where among them
all is the man whose influence — social, moral, religious
— was productive of such vast good and of so little evil,
as that exerted by this plain man who exemplified him
self, and taught thousands of his fellow-men to know,
what the religion of Jesus Christ really means !

INDEX

Addison, Joseph, 71, 79.
Aldersgate St., meeting in, 58.
America, Methodism in, 228, 236-
246.
American ordinations, 243-246.
American Revolution, 228—235.
Amusements, Wesley's attitude
toward, 216, 220.
Anacreon, 261.
Ancaster, Duchess of, 197.
Annapolis, 240.
Anne, Queen, 71.
Annesley, Samuel, 7.
Anti-Methodist literature, 146.
Antinomianism, 204.
Apostolical Succession, 245.
Armagh, Bishop of, 101.
Arminianism, 103-108, 202-209.
Arminian Magazine, 218.
Arnold, Matthew, 273.
Asbury, Francis, 237-244.
Assurance, doctrine of, 55, 59-60.
Atterbury, Francis, n.
B
*• Ball, Hannah, 217.
Baltimore, 243.
s " Bands," 65.
Bath, 109, 250.
Bawden, 141.
Beattie, James, 189, 285.
Bell, George, 193.
Bennett, John, 124, 175-177.
Benson, Joseph, 205, 214.
Birstall, 109.
Blair, Robert, 283.
Blenheim, 6.
Bohler, Peter, 54-56, 92.

Bolingbroke, Henry, Viscount, 80,
81, 197.
Bolton, 217.
Boswell, James, 276.
Bribery at elections, 214.
Briscoe, T., 253.
Bristol, 67-70, 82, 96, 107, 130, 183,
187, 206.
Brooke, Henry, 286.
Bunhill Fields, 116.
Bunker Hill, battle of, 229.
Burke, Edmund, 225.
Burtley, in.
Burton, John, 41.
Butler, Joseph, Bishop, 79, 80, 81,
85-

" Calm Address to the Inhabitants of
England," 233.
" Calm Address to Our American
Colonies," 230.
Calvinistic controversy, 196-209.
Candor, Wesley's, 279.
Canterbury, 188.
Cards, 72.
Caroline, Queen, 71.
Catholic Emancipation, 254.
Causton, Thomas, 48.
"Cautions and Directions to the
Greatest Professors in the Meth
odist Societies," 195.
Cennick, John, 100, 106.
Chapels, Methodist, 82.
Chapone, Mrs. Hester, 35.
"Character of a Methodist," no.
Charles Edward, the Pretender,
144.
Charleston, S.C., 50.
• Charterhouse School, 15.

295

296

INDEX

" Checks to Antinomianism,"
Fletcher's, 208.
Chesterfield, Earl of, 73, 197, 217.
^^^Children, Wesley's treatment of, 215.
"Chloe" of Prior, 285. ^
Choctaws, 45.
Chowden, 1 11, 112.
Christ Church, Oxford, 18, 26.
Chudleigh, Miss, 73.
Church of England, Wesley's devo
tion to, 250.
Church, Thomas, 156.
Cicero, 273.
City Road Chapel, 188, 262, 264.
^ " Class Meetings," 97.
Clayton, 100.
Clayton, John, 28, 41, 56.
Clough, Arthur Hugh, quoted, 81.
Coke, Thomas, 243-245, 249.
Colchester, 260.
Colliers of Kingswood, 68.
Conference, first, 124.
Conference of 1770, 204.
Conference, powers of, defined and
made permanent, 237.
Controversy, Wesley's dislike of, 147,
209.
Conversion, Wesley's, 58.
Cork, 254.
Cornwall, 124, 133, 135, 253.
Country, morals in, 75.
Courtesy, Wesley's, 269.
Cowper, Miss, 109.
Crabbe, George, 261.
Credulity, Wesley's, 280.

D

Dartmouth, Lord, 230.
David, Christian, 62.
"Deed of Declaration," 237.
Defoe, Daniel, 78.
Deists, 79.
^ Delamotte, Charles, 41, 44, 49.
Delaney, Mrs., see Pendarves, Mrs.
Mary.
Dispensaries, Wesley's, 187.
Doddridge, Philip, 84.
Dodington, Bubb, 197.
Donnington Park, 109.
"Douglas," Home's, 285.
Dover, Del., 240.

Downes, John, 124.
Dress, Wesley's, 120, 268.
E
" Earnest Appeal to Men of Reason
and Religion," 156.
Education, Wesley's interest in, 217.
" Edward and Eleonora," Thomson's,
285.
Election, doctrine of, 103.
Electricity, 187.-
"Elegy on an Unfortunate Lady,"
Pope's, 284.
Elizabeth, Queen, 278.
Ellison, Robert, 163.
Enthusiasm, fear of, 79, 149, 152.
"Enthusiasm of Methodists and Pa
pists Compared," Lavington's, 157.
Episcopacy, Wesley's views of, 245.
Epworth, 1, 113— 115.
Epworth "noises," 13.
Epworth rectory, burning of, 12.
Exeter College, Oxford, 3.

Faith and works, 204.
Faith, sermon on, by Wesley, 60.
Falmouth, 135, 253.
Fetter Lane Society, 65, 69, 92.
Fielding, Henry, 283.
Finsbury Square, 95.
Firmin, Thomas, 212.
Fletcher, John, 167, 193, 204, 207-
208, 256.
Fontenoy, 140.
" Fool of Quality," Brooke's, 286.
Foundery, 95, 130.
Frankland, Lady, 197.
Frederica, Ga., 47.
Frederick, Prince of Wales, 197.
"Free Thoughts on Public Affairs,"
225.
Fuller, Samuel, 2.

Gambold, John, 100.
Gaming, 72.
Ganson, John, 131.
George II, 71.
George III, 222.

INDEX

297

Georgia, 40-50.
Ghost, Epworth, 13.
Ghost stories, 281.
Gibbon, Edward, 18.
Gibson, Edmund, Bishop, 79, 148.
Gilder, R. W., quoted, 120.
Gin drinking, 74.
Glanvill, Joseph, 282.
Glasgow, 250.
Goldsmith, Oliver, 283.
Gospel Magazine, 234.
"NGranville ministry, 229, 231.
Gray, Thomas, 283.

Great St. Helen's, London, 57, 2<;4.VTr;„„„m  j „„i, 10 ' c o
ft™.*™ w,-n; ' ,a»'J'' S4 Kingswood school, 83, 96, 180, 215.

Grimshaw, William, 167, 236.
Gwennap, 253, 256.
Gwynne, Sarah (Mrs. Charles Wes
ley), 166. H
Hall, Westley, 164.
Hampson, John, 140.
Handel, George F., 72.
Harley, Robert, 12.
Haworth, 167.
" Henry and Emma," Prior's, 285.
Herrnhut, 62.
Hervey, James, 28, 284.
Hill, Richard, 208.
Hill, Rowland, 200, 202, 208.
Hodges, John, 124.
Holiness, Wesley's views on, 191.
Holland, 255.
Home, John, 285.
Homer, 273.
Hopkey, Sophia Christina, 48-50.
Howe, John, 121.
Humor, Wesley's lack of, 270.
Huntingdon, Selina, Countess of, 109,
197-200, 205-207.
Hutton, James, 59.

Indians of Georgia, 40, 42, 45.
Ingham, Benjamin, 41, 100.
Ireland, Wesley's visits to, 117, 182,
252, 255. J
James, William, quoted, 58.
"Jeffery," the Epworth ghost, 13.

Jews, Spanish, in Georgia, 46.
Johnson, Samuel, 170, 224, 231,
267, 278, 284.
Journal, Wesley's, 271, 275.
Justification by faith, 55.

Kempis, Thomas a, 20.
Kennicott, Benjamin, 121.
Kennington, 83.
King, Peter, Lord, 245.
Kingswood, 68, 76, 100, 180.

Kirkham, Betty, 34, 173.
Kirkham, Robert, 27.
Knox, Alexander, 16, 173.

Lavington, George, Bishop, 152.
Law, William, 25, 32, 41, 53, 64, 277.
Lay preaching, 100, 127-130.
Leatherhead, 262.
Lecky, W. E. H., quoted, 74, 277.
"Letter to a Roman Catholic," 211.
Liberality, Wesley's, 210.
Liberty, Wesley on, 226.
•Lincoln College, Oxford, 21-33.
Literature in the eighteenth century,
283.
London in 1740, 74-75.
Lowestoft, 261. M
Macaulay, T. B., 273.
Madan, Martin, 219.
Madeley, 168.
Mann, Horace, 197.
Manners in England, 1740, 71-75.
Marienborn, 61.
Marlborough, John Churchill, Duke
of, 6.
Marlborough, Sarah, Duchess of, 71,
197.
Marriage, Wesley's, 178.
Mary, Queen of Scots, 278.
Marylebone, 188.
Mather, Alexander, 129.
Maxfield, Thomas, 101, 124, 194.

298

"Meditations among the Tombs.
Hervey's, 284.
Meriton, John, 124.
Methodist, term first applied, 27.
Methodist Episcopal Church, 244.
Middle class in England, 1740, 77.
Middlesex election agitation, 223.
Miners, in. '
"Minstrel," Beattie's, 285.
Mobs, 130-140.
Molther, Philip, 91-92.
Montanus, 212.
Moorfields, 76, 83.
%Morals in England, 1740, 71-75.
Moravians, 43-50; 53-55. 61-63, 9i-
Morgan, Robert, 27-29.
Murray, Grace, 174-177.
^Music in England, 1740, 72.
"Music in the family of Charles Wes
ley, 188.
x Music, Wesley's love of, 219.
•• Mystics, 53. N
Natural scenery, Wesley's love for,
255-
Neatness, Wesley's, 267.
Nelson, John, 109, 122, 129.
Newcastle, no, 124, 177, 217.
Newburyport, Mass., 199.
Nitschmann, David, 43.
"Noises," Epworth, 13.
North, Lord, 197, 229, 234.
Norwich, 140.
"Notes on the New Testament,"
185.
Nottingham, 129.
Nowell, Dr., of St. Mary's Hall, 202.
O
Oglethorpe, James, 40, 45, 48.
O'Leary, Father, 254.
Olivers, Thomas, 128.
" On the Constitution of the Primi
tive Church," Lord King's, 245.
Opposition to Wesley, grounds of,
141, 158.
Ordinations, Wesley's American, 243-
246.
Ormsby, South, 3.

INDEX
.," XDrphanage, Newcastle, 112.
Ossian, 285.
Oxford, Wesley's love of, 37.

Pamphlets, Anti-Methodist, 146.
Papists, Methodists suspected of be
ing, 144, 152.
Pelagius, 212.
Pelton, in.
Pendarves, Mrs. Mary, 35.
Penfield, 131.
Perronet, Vincent, 166, 177, 256.
Petersham, Caroline, 73.
Physical phenomena attending Wes
ley's preaching, 87.
Piers, Henry, 124.
Pitt, William, Lord Chatham, 197.
Placey, in.
Plato, 212.
Plymouth, 133.
Podmore, Frank, 14.
Politics, Wesley's, 221.
Pope, Alexander, 12, 81, 283.
Preaching, Wesley's manner of, 120-
124.
Predestination, controversy over, 202-
208.
Pretender, the (Charles Edward),
144, 147.
Primitive Church, the, 245.
"Primitive Physic," 186.
Prior, Matthew, 12, 284.
Prison, Oxford, 30.

Queensberry, Duchess of, 197.
R
Raikes, Robert, 217.
Reading, Wesley's, 273.
Reasoning, Wesley's gift of, 277.
Religion in England, 1740, 78-82.
Richards, Thomas, 124.
Richardson, John, 264.
Richardson, Samuel, 78, 283.
Ridotto, 73.
Riots, 130-140.
Robinson, Henry Crabbe, 260.

INDEX

299

Roman Catholic, letter to, 211.
Romley, Rev., Curate of Epworth,
"3-
Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 283.
""Rules for lay preachers, 126.
Ryan, Sarah, 180. \

Sacheverell, Henry, 5, 26.
"Saducismus Triumphatus," Glan-
vill's, 282.
St. Edmund's Hall, Oxford, 201.
St. Helen's Church, London, 57.
St. Ives, Cornwall, 133, 215.
St. Mary's Church, Oxford, 60.
St. Mary's Hall, Oxford, 202.
St. Mary Redcliffe, Bristol, 67.
Sanctification, doctrine of, 191.
Savannah, 43-50, 67, 105.
Schism in Methodism, 106.
Scilly Isles, 124.
Scotland, Methodism in, 247.
"Seasonable Address to the Inhabit
ants of Great Britain," 232.
Sellon, Walter, 208.
Selwyn, George, 197.
Sentiment, Wesley's, 284.
" Sentimental Journey," Sterne's, 286.
Separation from the Church of Eng
land, 248-250.
Sermons, Wesley's, 121.
Servetus, 212.
Shirley, Walter, 206.
Shoreham, 166.
Slavery, 262.
Smith, Adam, 18.
Smuggling, 213.
^ Societies in the English Church, 65.
Societies, Methodist, 94, 99, 107, 124,
190, 213.
Societies, in America, 237-242.
Society in England, 1740, 71-75.
Society for the Propagation of the
Gospel, 40.
Socrates, 212.
Soldiers, Methodist, 140.
South, Robert, 121.
Southey, Robert, 154.
Southampton, 109.
South Sea Scheme, 72.
Spangenberg, Augustus Gottlieb, 43.

Spence, Robert, 259.
Staffordshire, riots in, 135-139.
Steele, Richard, 71.
Sterne, Laurence, 283, 286.
Style, Wesley's, 121, 274.
Sunday schools, 217.
Superintendents of the work in
America, 245.
Swift, Jonathan, 73, 81, 275.
Syllogism, Wesley's respect for, 278.

Taste, Wesley's, 284.
Taylor, Jeremy, 20, 53.
Taylor, John, no.
Taylor, Samuel, 124.
"Taxation no Tyranny," Johnson's,
231.
Texts, Wesley's favorite, 122.
Thomson, James, 285.
"Thoughts on the Causes of the
Present Discontents," Burke's, 225.
"Thoughts upon Liberty," 226.
Toleration Act, 248.
Toplady, Augustus Montagu, 199,
202—204, 208, 234.
Townshend, Charles, Lord, 197.
Travels of Wesley, 117.
Trevecca College, 198, 202, 205.
"Tristram Shandy," Sterne's, 286.
Tucker, Josiah, 147.
Tyburn, 75.
Tyerman, Luke, quoted, 16.
V
Vane, Harry, 73.
Vasey, Thomas, 243.
Vauxhall, 73.
Vazeille, Mrs. (Mrs. John Wesley),
178-181.
Voltaire, F. A. de, 286.
W
Walker, Thomas, 16.
Walpole, Horace, 73, 197, 276.
Walpole, Robert, 71.
Walsal, 138.
Walsh, Thomas, 129.
Wapping, 100.

300

INDEX

Warburton, William, Bishop, 154.
Watts, Isaac, 84.
Wednesbury, 136, 238.
Wesley, Anne (sister of John), 164.
Wesley, Bartholomew (1596-1689), 2.
Wesley, Charles (brother of John),
at Westminster School, 15; en
tered Christ Church, 26; religious
work in Oxford, 28-30; goes to
Georgia, 41; returns to England,
47; strives to dissuade John from
going to Bristol, 69 ; in charge of the
""¦-work in London, 90, 99 ; accused of
favoring the Pretender, 145 ; mar
ries, 162; dissuades Grace Murray
from marriage with John, 176;
displeased at John's marriage, 178;
his London residence a musical
centre, 188; differs with John as
to " sanctification," *S§ ; pro
tests against the ordination of
Coke, 244; last days and death,
2S7-
Wesley, Charles (son of above), 188,
220.
Wesley, Emilia (sister of John), 163.
Wesley, Hetty (sister of John), n,
14, 27, 164.
Wesley, John (163 6-1 668), 2.
Wesley, John, early home training,
**-i2; enters Charterhouse, 15; re
ligious experience there, 17; in
Christ Church, 19; fellow of
Lincoln, 21; curate of Wroote,
25; returns to Oxford, 27; the
Methodists, 28; work in Oxford,
28-34; acquaintance with Betty
Kirkham and Mrs. Pendarves, 34 ;
declines the Epworth living, 38;
goes to Georgia, 40; meets the
Moravians, 43 ; labors in Georgia,
45-48; acquaintance with Sophia
Hopkey, 49; returns to England
in discouragement, 50-54; meets
Bohler, 54; the experience of the
24th of May, 1738, 57; visits the
Moravians, 61 ; preaches in the
open air, 70; work in Bristol, 82;
violations of ecclesiastical disci
pline, 85 ; physical effects attend
ing his preaching, 87; separates
from the Moravians, 91; pur

chases the Foundery, 95; organ--
izes the "classes," 97; authorizes
lay preaching, 101; temporarily
alienated from Whitefield, 102;
trouble with the Bristol society,
106; visits Newcastle, no; founds
orphanage there, 113; his itin
erant life, 117; habits and ap
pearance, 119; style of preaching,
121; calls his first conference, 124;
encounters with mobs, 130-140;
opposition from churchmen, Gib
son, Lavington, Warburton, 146-
156; writes his " Earnest Appeal,"
156; had no home life or intimate
friends, 162; yet loved society,
169; but had no time for it, 170;
acquaintance with Grace Murray,
174-177; unfortunate marriage
with Mrs. Vazeille, 177-181; in
creasing labors and illness, 182-
185 ; resumes his labors, 186-190 ;
his opinion on the doctrine of
sanctification, 189-194; the Cal
vinistic controversy, 196-209 ; his
liberality of opinion, 209—212;
forbids smuggling and bribery,
213-215; his attitude toward
amusements and accomplishments,
215; toward education and lit-—
erature, 217; toward music, 219;-
his political opinions and writings,
221-227; his attitude toward
American affairs, 228-235; takes
measures to make his organiza
tion in England permanent, 236;
"sets apart" Coke for the work in
America, 253; and ministers for
Scotland, 247; yet deplores sep
aratist tendencies, 248; love and
honor for his old age, 253; in
creasing love for books, music,
nature, 255; left lonely by death
of friends, 256; health weakens,
259; last circuit of England and
Wales, 260; final illness and
death, 262 ; characteristics — a
gentleman, 267; personal ap
pearance, manners, 268; lack of
humor, 270; a scholar, 273; his
writings, the Journal, 274; child
of his age in respect for reasoning,

INDEX

301

276; his credulity, 280; senti
ment, 283; mastery of men, 287;
unselfish benevolence, 289 ; reli
gious faith, 298; place in history,
\ 292.
Wesley, Keziah (sister of John), 163.
Wesley, Martha (sister of John), 164.
Wesley, Mary (sister of John), 115.
Wesley, Samuel (father of John), 3-
7, 21, 29, 38, 39.
Wesley, Samuel, Jr. (brother of John),
n. 15. 38, 4i, 56, 64, 85, 89, 285.
Wesley, Samuel (son of Charles Wes
ley), 188, 220.
Wesley, Samuel Sebastian (grandson
of Charles Wesley), 220.
Wesley, Sarah (daughter of Charles
v Wesley), 188.
^¦Wesley, Susanna (mother of John),
7— 11, 41, 108, 116.
Wesley, Susanna (sister of John), 163.
Westminster Assembly, 2.
^ Westminster School, 11.
Whatcoat, Richard, 243.
White, John, 2.
Whitefield, George, at Oxford, 28;
goes to Georgia, 66; preaches to
the Kingswood colliers, 68; in

London, 83; revisits America, 90;
differences with Wesley, 102; re
newed friendship, 165; preaches
to fashionable London, 165; last
visit to America and death, 199.
Whitelamb, John, 113, 115.
"Whole Duty of Man," 31.
Wilberforce, William, 262.
Wilkes, John, 223-227.
Williamson, William, 49.
Windsor, 108.
Witchcraft, 281.
Wolverhampton, 129.
Wordsworth, William, 171.
Works, relation to faith, 204.
Wroote, 25, 113, 115.

X

Xenophon, no.

Yarmouth, 128.

Zanchius, 202.
Zinzendorf, Nikolas L., Count von,
55. 61, 63.

PRIMITIVE TRAITS IN RELIGIOUS
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By FREDERICK MORGAN DAVENPORT
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