John Wesley

THERE have been many lives of Wesley and histories of the rise of Methodism written already, but there is still another before us by Julia Wedgwood, an Englishwoman, who states in her Preface that her book “ is not to be regarded as a biography. It is an attempt to delineate the influence of a particular man upon his age. Hence the background to the central figure is treated with an attention which will seem out of proportion to the slightness of the whole sketch, unless it is constantly borne in mind that the object of representation is, not the vicissitude of a particular life, but that element in the life which impressed itself on the life of a nation, — an element which cannot be understood without a study of aspects of national thought which, on a superficial view, might appear wholly unconnected with it.”On reading the book and comparing it with the previous lives of Wesley, we are pleased by the authoress’s impartiality and the absence of that partisanship or dislike which appeared in his earlier biographers ; it is hard to write of any great man and “ nothing extenuate, nor set down aught in malice ”; she seems to have preserved a happy medium in her sketch. Whether we could have a life of any man so wholly devoted to the interest and welfare of others, and gain from it any impression of the man and his character in all its weakness, strength, and peculiarities, without at the same time studying his influence on and relation to the age in which he lived and labored is very doubtful. Though the condition of society and the various phases of the life of the period are sketched with skill and clearness, we confess to feeling a lack of personality in the narration of Wesley’s private life, but, perhaps, that is a morbid fancy which has grown by what it feeds on, for this is a very anecdote-loving, biographical, lionhunting, interviewing world that we live in, and from, a fallen emperor to the adventurous aeronaut who escapes the Prussian sharpshooter’s ball in fleeing from the besieged city, the actions, sentiments, and habits of each must be chronicled. Perhaps Wesley’s natural coldness of manner and rather imperious habits of command made intimate relations with him difficult; and his infelicitous matrimonial experience would rather strengthen that belief, if the harsh tone of his letters to his wife is taken into consideration.

At the time of Wesley’s appearance as a religious teacher England was in a sad state of irreverence, indifference, and atheism, if the complaints of the writers of that day are worthy of belief. One historian says : “It was the transition period from an age in which the decencies of life were very imperfectly observed, to an age in which decorum was beginning to assert an authority, which has steadily gone on, to preserve a greater semblance of morality, and, therefore, in no inconsiderable degree, to hold fast its substance.” Lord Chesterfield and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, neither of them among those likely to take a severe estimate of vice, mention the low state of morals. Lord Chesterfield, in 1737, in his famous speech against licensing the stage, says, after the fullest admission that the complaint was justified: “When we complain of the licentiousness of the stage, I fear we have more reason to complain of the general decay of virtue and morality amoug the people.” Lady Mary writes in a letter to the Countess of Mar, in 1723: “ I am told that there is at this moment a bill cooking up at a hunting seat in Norfolk to have not taken out of the Commandments, and inserted in the Creed at the ensuing session. It certainly might be carried on with great ease, the world being utterly revenu des bagattelles; and honor, virtue, and reputation, which we used to hear of in our nursery, are as much laid aside as crumpled ribbons.”

If we can judge anything by the amusements of a people, the lower classes were very brutal and degraded. Steele writes, in the Guardian,in 1713 : “ I am sorry that this temper (an enjoyment of the sufferings of animals) is become almost a distinguishing characteristic of our nation, from the observation which is made by foreigners on our beloved amusements, bear-baiting, cock-fighting, and the like. It will be said that these are the amusements of the common people. It is true, but they are the amusements of no other common people. I wish I knew how to answer the reproach which is cast on us thereby.” Hogarth says of his “ Progress of Cruelty,” that if “it has checked the progress of cruelty the very sight of which renders the streets of our metropolis so distressing to every feeling mind, I am more proud of having been the author than I should be of having painted Raphael’s Cartoons.” Richard Lovell Edgeworth, in his egotistical but entertaining Memoir of himself, speaks of his sufferings at school from the ill-treatment of those older than himself, one “ a fullgrown boy, just ready for college. A little boy, with remarkably long flaxen hair, and myself, were the chosen objects of his cruelty; he used to knot our hair together and drag us up and down the school-room stairs, for his diversion.” That may be excused on the ground of the high spirits and playfulness of youth, but in such cases it would seem as if “ the child is father of the man.” There was a brutal indifference to human life. Death, when the result of accident, was considered a fair subject of mirth. During the severe winter of 1737, when the Thames was frozen over and booths erected upon it, an exciseman fell into one of the holes made in the ice, and the brutal jest made on the drowned man, “ that if the owner of the booth had any run goods he was lost, as an exciseman was gone into his cellar,” is merely given as the good saying of a ' merry fellow ’ against the member of an unpopular class. Robberies were committed with perfect impunity in the very heart of London, and ladies returning from the opera were stopped and relieved of their watches and jewels, the thieves being undeterred by the fact that the theft of even as small a sum as five shillings was often punished with hanging, if they were so unfortunate as to be caught. The massacre of the prisoners of Culloden and the merciless laws, so modified and softened by the untiring labor of Romilly, by which people were hung for the most trifling offences, amid the jeers and jests of a drunken and savage crowd gathered for the show, are unpleasant pictures of the refinement of the eighteenth century ; but there is a fair side as well, and we can see the dawning of brighter days in the evident desire for a better state of affairs, by the mere fact of the mention of these events with regret by the writers of that time.

Though there were pure and learned men in the Church at this period, they were the exception rather than the rule, and there was very little respect shown to the clergy; if we may judge of their position by the literature of the day, it was far from enviable. In one letter in a magazine, a writer complained that the chaplain was not expected to remain at table during the second course. Another paper narrates the rebuff experienced by a clergyman who ventured to help himself to a jelly : “ The lady of the house,” says the writer, “ though otherwise a devout woman, told me that it did not become a man of my cloth to delight in such frivolous food.” Knight says : “ The apathy of the clergy at this period was imperious as their indecorum. Their eloquence was of the tamest character.” An accomplished foreigner, M. Grosley, thus describes their sermons : “The pulpit declamation was a tedious monotony. With regard to the truth of this assertion I appeal to themselves and to the progress which religion thus inculcated makes in England.” Dr. Campbell says of the Temple Church, where the brother of Thurlow preached : “The discourse was the most meagre composition, and the delivery worse. He stood like Gulliver stuck in the marrow-bone, with the sermon, newspaper-like in his hand, and, without grace of emphasis, he in slow cadence measured it forth.” Goldsmith wrote of the lower classes : “ They who want instruction most find least in our religious assemblies.” It is evident that the great founders of Methodism filled by their earnest and impressive preaching and fervent prayers a vast and increasing need, especially among the middle and lower classes of England, and Wesley was one of the great leaders in the work.

He was born at Epworth in Lincolnshire in 1703, and passed his early years there ; when only six years of age he very narrowly escaped being burned to death, and in after life commemorated the event by the selection of the saying, “ Is not this a brand snatched from the burning?” for his epitaph. John was the second son of his parents, and there were born to them nineteen children, most of whom died in infancy. His father, from the description given of him, we fancy rather timid and narrow in his views, and though zealous and devout, ill suited to the rough Fenmen over whom he was settled. His mother was a woman of marked character, and her sons referred many doubts and questions to her strong, clear judgment. She evidently influenced them much, and, though stern in her discipline, was not unworthy such sons. We are not surprised at Mrs. Wesley’s account of her management of children, when we reflect on the size of her family. She wrote to John, at his request, telling him her ideas : “ In order to form the minds of children, the first thing to be done is to conquer their will.” This difficulty was overcome so effectually with the little Wesleys, that “ when any of them were ill there was no difficulty in making them take the most unpleasant medicine,” — a triumph which comes vividly home to one’s imagination. “When turned a year old they were taught to fear the rod and cry softly.” Perhaps repression at that early age caused the Wesleys to be so irrepressible and strenuous to be heard in after life. Mrs. Wesley was only following out the common practice in her severe discipline ; at that time obedience of the most rigid kind was exacted by, and usually paid to parents, and even in a Royal Palace we read of a Crown Prince unmercifully beaten with a rattan cane by a stern parent for some trifling offence ; and princesses obliged to stand hours before their mother, till ready to drop with fatigue. People then felt that in sparing the rod they spoilt the child. As the son of a pious and devout mother, Wesley early received from her religious instruction. She wrote to her husband : “ On Thursday I talk with Jacky, and on Saturday with Charles.” We nowhere find any instances of that early and distressing piety usually ascribed to such children, which are probably for the most part fictitious.

He was educated first at the CharterHouse, and entered Christ Church, Oxford, at the age of seventeen. It is stated that the condition of Oxford at that time “ may be regarded as the lowest point in the history of that University ” ; and Cambridge was not behind Oxford in its capacity “ for ruining its students.” Many years later Wilberforce says, “ I was horror-struck at their conduct.” Of Oxford Gibbon wrote, and has portrayed one of his tutors, supposed to be a fair specimen of the class, as one who “remembered that he had a salary to receive, and forgot that he had a duty to perform ” ; and says of the management, “ that at the most precious season of youth, whole days and weeks were suffered to elapse without labor or amusement, without advice or account ” ; and the time he spent there was to him “the most idle and unprofitable period of his life.” Adam Smith, in his “ Wealth of Nations,” says that, “ In the University of Oxford the greater part of the professors have for these many years given up even the. pretence of teaching.”

While at Oxford at the age of twentytwo, Wesley made the first protest against Predestination, “ which, fifty years later, split the body formed by him into two parts, separated by a deadly antagonism ; and it is interesting to mark the complete identity of the nascent and mature thought” ; for a time he was much influenced by William Law, who says, “ I was once a kind of oracle to Mr. Wesley.” Two or three times in a year the brothers John and Charles travelled the whole distance from Oxford to London, on foot, to visit this oracle, — “the mark of a devotion in which they were not singular,” as Law occupied at this time the position of a kind of spiritual physician. One of his remarks to his pupil is worth noting : “We shall do well to aim at the highest degrees of perfection, if we may thereby attain at least at mediocrity.” Wesley became curate at his native place, Epworth, in 1727, but returned to Oxford in 1729, having been previously elected to a fellowship in Lincoln College. At this time he was very unsocial in his habits, and was “strongly tempted to accept the mastership of a Yorkshire school,” from no other attraction than the “frightful description given of the situation, which was,” he writes, “ so pent up between two hills, that it was scarce accessible on any side, so that you can expect little company from without, and within there is none at all.” This pleasant plan of a cheerful residence he was obliged to relinquish, as the school was given to another. He excited dislike in others by his unsocial disposition, and it brought on him manifestations which his mother called “brisk buffoonery,” and which drew from his father the warning, that “it is a callow virtue that cannot bear to be laughed at.” After Wesley’s return to Oxford, he and his brother, with some others, endeavored by their example and teaching to induce many to turn from their evil ways. They brought on themselves much dislike ; and attempts to detach from their little society different members, “ not only by idle lads, but by men of position and learning; by violence, by threats, or by persuasion,” did succeed with some few of their band.

In 1735 General Oglethorpe, then Governor of Georgia, the philanthropist whose “benevolence of soul” is eulogized by Pope, — the accomplished veteran whose life Johnson desired to write, “ the delightful old beau ” of that pink of propriety, Hannah More, — invited John and Charles Wesley to return as parish priests to the young colony founded by him, and settled by the unfortunate people whom he had taken from the debtors’ prisons of London. This proposal they both accepted, though John at first refused on his mother’s account. She was then left to her sons’ care, as Mr. Wesley had died a short time before. John wrote, “ I am the staff of her age, her support and comfort.” She however wrote, when told of his hesitation : “ Had I twenty sons, I should rejoice that they were so employed, though I should never see them more.” General Oglethorpe was accompanied by several Indian chiefs, who appeared at court in European costume, though they had desired at first to wear their usual attire, which was very scanty. “ Prince William, afterwards Duke of Cumberland,—the ‘butcher’ of Culloden notoriety,— now a lad of fourteen,” presented a young chief with a watch, accompanied by the admonition to “call on Jesus Christ every morning, when he looked upon it, which he promised to do”; — “a quaint symbol of the Christian religion, and a singular missionary to preach it,” as the biographer aptly remarks. Wesley was very enthusiastic about these red men, and strongly imbued with an idea of his work among them. To a friend who advised him not to go he wrote as follows : “ I hope to learn the true sense of the Gospel of Christ by preaching it to the heathen. They have no comments to construe away the text, no vain philosophy to corrupt it, no luxurious, sensual, covetous, ambitious expounders to soften the unpleasing truths. They are as little children, humble, willing to learn.” His “high anticipations of his future converts found vent in so glowing a description of the ideal Indian to a friend that she exclaimed, ‘Why, Mr. Wesley, if they are all this already, what more can Christianity do for them?’” Mr. Wesley’s answer is not on record. Wesley and his brother reached Georgia, and he wrote his mother soon after his arrival, “The place is pleasant beyond all description.” On the voyage he became acquainted with some Moravians, and was much interested in their faith.

In Georgia Wesley failed most completely, and neither converted any Indians, nor was he very popular from the first with the colonists. “Oglethorpe and Wesley seem not to have entirely understood each other as to the object of this journey. He had come to America to preach to the Indians ; Oglethorpe designed him for the position, wholly incompatible with this, of parish priest at Savannah.” Wesley had, with a trifling exception, but one conference with the Indians, whom he had crossed the Atlantic to convert. His glowing anticipations were sadly chilled by what he saw and heard of them and their mode ot life. He wrote of them before he left America : “ They have no religion, no laws, no civil government. They are all, except perhaps the Choctaws, liars, gluttons, drunkards, thieves, dissemblers.” And he gives as a reason for his failure in his labor, that he could not find “any Indians on the continent of America who had the least desire of being instructed.” The authoress says that he “ was destined to preach Christianity to heathens quite as savage as the Chickasaw Indians and more accessible to his teaching.” His unfortunate love-affair, added to his rather austere and ascetic habits, finally made him obnoxious to the colonists, and he was forced to return to England. Wesley’s own account of the affair would seem to indicate that the lady took the initiative, and he was pleased, and evidently hoped to convert her first to his ideas of living. He wrote of her in his journal : “ I advised Miss Sophy to sup earlier, and not immediately before she went to bed. She did so ; and on this little circumstance what an inconceivable train of circumstances depend ! Not only ‘all the color of remaining life ’ for her, but perhaps all my happiness too.” After a short absence he writes that he “ found her scarce the shadow of what she was when ” he left her. He endeavored to remonstrate with her, but was not very fortunate in his attempt. He at last submitted the question whether he had better pursue the intimacy into marriage to the Moravians, who answered: “ We advise you to proceed no further in this business.” He answered, “The will of the Lord be done,” though the ending of the intimacy gave him some distress, judging from his own account of the event in his diary.

His field of work was the Old World, and he left to others the task of planting the seeds of Methodism in the New. It is singular to observe that, as the authoress states, “ eight millions of religionists now call themselves disciples of a man who left their continent in disgrace, which we can hardly refrain from calling well deserved.” Wesley had spent nearly two years in Georgia, and during that time been much with the Moravians, and he was led by his interest in their sect to visit their settlement in Germany. Shortly after his return to England he left for Holland, and landing at Rotterdam, he hurried on through Holland ; of which country Voltaire, — who was perhaps of all the men of the eighteenth century the greatest contrast to Wesley,— wrote about that time, “Adieu, pays de canards, de canaux, et de canaille.” Wesley makes but little mention of his route, merely admiring in passing what glimpses he had of the country. He first visited Count Zinzendorf’s abode at Marienborn; thence he went to Hcrrnhut, the Moravian village from which the sect sometimes takes the name of Herrnhutters. After a short visit he returned to England.

Wesley, of a very different nature from Whitefield, — less impulsive, and slower to move, — was not the first to adopt the custom, afterwards so universal among the sect, of field-preaching, and we hear first of Whitefield as drawing immense crowds of eager listeners. Wesley was for some time very unwilling to preach on unconsecrated ground, and wrote, after the churches had been closed to him : “I could scarce reconcile myself, at first, to this strange way of preaching in the fields, of which he (Whitefield) set me an example on Sunday, having been all my life, till very lately, so tenacious of every point relating to decency and order, that I should have thought the saving of souls almost a sin it it had not been done in a church.” In 1772 he wrote : “ To this day field-preaching is a cross to me.” Shortly after he heard Whitefield he began himself to preach, and says in his journal that he had an attendance of three thousand people. One of the first interruptions of Wesley’s field - preaching was at Bath, where Beau Nash, who was then at the zenith of his popularity, “ no doubt trembled for his empire,” when he watched the crowds who thronged to hear his dangerous rival; he confronted him with but little success, and after failing to insult or intimidate Wesley, interrogated the people as to their object in going there ; an old woman in the crowd cried out, “You take care of your body, Mr. Nash. We take care of our souls, and for the good of our souls we come here.” He made a hasty retreat, and left Wesley master of the field. One funny interruption Wesley records in his journal, when “an ass walked gravely in at the door” as he was preaching at Rotterdam, and he adds, “ It was well only serious people were present.”

Whitefield attracted great numbers, and made many fashionable converts in the great world. George II. rallied one of these, the Lady Gertrude Hotham, at court, on her sober but costly attire, which he rightly estimated as “Mr. Whitefield’s choice.” Many of his converts were moved in the same direction as regards dress ; we learn from a magazine that “ ladies who used to wear French silks and French hoops of four yards wide, tête de mouton heads (a kind of wig), and white satin smock petticoats, are now turned Methodists and followers of Mr. Whitefield, whose idea of the new birth has so prevailed over them that they now wear plain stuff gowns, no hoops, common night mobs (caps), and plain bags for underclothes.” Wesley evidently disliked very much contact with the higher classes, and always avoided them as much as possible; while Whitefield was the centre of a fashionable circle in Lady Huntingdon’s drawing-room at Chelsea, and flattered by the doubtful compliments of Lord Chesterfield and Bolingbroke, who were attracted to his preaching as a new sensation. Wesley wrote in 1758: “We need great grace to converse with great people, from which, therefore, except in some rare instances, I am glad to be excused.” And again he writes: “ How unspeakable is the advantage in point of common sense which middling people have over the rich ! There are so many unmeaning words and senseless customs among people of rank ! It is well that a few of the rich and noble are called, but I should rejoice that it were done by the ministry of others.”

Near the close of the year 1741 came the division between the three sects,— the Moravians and the followers of Wesley and Whitefield. The Wesleyan branch rapidly organized under Wesley’s care and management Knight says of the two leaders : “ The characters of Whitefield and Wesley were very different. Whitefield was satisfied with rousing the sinful and indifferent by his own fervid eloquence, without providing for the systematic continuance of his personal efforts. His preaching created a host of followers, who, branching off in their several localities, were content to be led by men without education. Starting up as teachers from lowest ranks, such men, although too vain and presumptuous to see their own incompetence, were nevertheless better judges, in many cases, than the educated clergy of the mode in which rude natures could be most effectually awakened to penitence for sin. Wesley, on the other hand, saw the danger of this indiscriminate admission of every fanatic to be a Gospel preacher ; and he instituted and perfected by his incessant labors that remarkable organization known as Wesleyism.” For many years the sect was much abused and persecuted. Wesley himself was insulted and attacked more than once by furious mobs while preaching. “In 1770 persecution was at end ; fieldpreachers were (with few exceptions) no longer a mark for stones and rotten eggs ; and those intellectual missiles, sometimes as hard as the first, sometimes as unsavory as the last, with which their reverend adversaries had greeted the Methodists, ceased to issue from the press or to be discharged from the pulpit. The result was what no doubt all established religions have exhibited under like circumstances. While individual conviction was the sole basis of Methodism, the Methodists were a picked body of deeply religious persons ; after the lapse of a generation, such members did not form a larger proportion of this sect than of any other; and this inevitable deterioration is more obviously disastrous among those whose bond of union is a common discipline than among those with whom it is a common creed.” Dr. Johnson, who Boswell says “ was himself in a dignified manner a Methodist,” speaking of their success, said: “ Sir, it is owing to their expressing themselves in a plain and familiar manner, which is the only way to do good to the common people.” And “polished periods and glittering sentences ” fly over their heads, “ without any impression on their hearts. The mind, like the body,” he observed, “ delighted in change and novelty.” The observant Frenchman, M. Grosley, says of the Methodists : “ This establishment has borne all the persecutions that it could possibly' apprehend in a country as much disposed to persecution as England is the reverse.” Knight says : “ The light literature of forty years overflows with the ridicule of Methodism. The preachers are pelted by the mob ; the converts are held up to execration as fanatics and hypocrites. Yet Methodism held the ground it gained. It had gone forth to utter the words of truth to men little above the beasts that perish, and it brought them to regard themselves as akin to humanity. The time would come when its earnestness would awaken the Church itself from its somnolency, and the educated classes would not be ashamed to be religious. The power could not be despised which made floods of tears roll down the sooty cheeks of the colliers of Kingswood, and which, penetrating to Scotland, had called forth the lowest of the population of Glasgow to go forth to Cambuslang, and there, ' at the foot of the brae near the kirk,’hear the word preached in the open fields, and surrender themselves to an irresistible influence, such as was wielded by the Puritans of old. To assist in ' the extraordinary work of Cambuslang’ Whitefield came, and saw thirty thousand persons assembled to receive the Sacrament.”

Wesley had written “ Thoughts on a Single Life,” and strongly disapproved of the marriage of ministers; but finally he married, in 1751, a widow by the name of Vizelle, with four children, and an independent fortune, which he settled on her, and of which he declined to make any use. His was a very unfortunate marriage. Southey says of Mrs. Wesley : “ She tormented him in such a manner, by her outrageous jealousy and abominable temper, that she deserves to be classed in a triad with Xantippe and the wife of Job, as one of the three bad wives. Wesley, indeed, was neither so submissive as Socrates nor so patient as the man of Uz.” “ Know me,” said he in one of his letters to her, “ and know yourself. Suspect me no more, asperse me no more, provoke me no more ; do no longer contend for mastery, for power, money, or praise ; be content to be a private, insignificant person, known and loved by God and me.” Speaking of her efforts to vindicate her character by various underhand proceedings, he concludes : Of what importance is your character to mankind ? If you was buried just now, or if you had never lived, what loss would it be to the cause of God ? ” Southey adds : “ This was true, but not very conciliating; and there are few stomachs which could bear to have humility administered in such doses.” It is said that she frequently travelled a hundred miles for the sole purpose of watching from a window who was in the carriage with him when he entered a town. She searched his pockets, opened his letters, put his papers into the hands of those unfriendly to him, in hope that they might use them to injure his character, and sometimes rudely treated him and tore his venerable and scanty locks. After thus trying him for twenty years, she left him for the last time, and carried with her parts of his journal and other private papers. He simply states the fact of her departure in his journal, and adds, “ I did not forsake her, I did not dismiss her, I will not recall her.” Whitefield’s wife and Mrs. Wesley are spoken of by Berridge of Everton as “ a brace of ferrets.”

Till Wesley was sixty-nine years old he travelled always on horseback ; and he says, “ I commonly read on horseback, having other employment at other times.” He used to lay the rein on the horse’s neck, and in that way he “ rode in the course of his life above a hundred thousand miles.” We can only admire the energy of the man who travelled so constantly over roads which Arthur Young in 1770 wrote of as follows: “The roads of the North, and especially Lancashire, were mostly execrable.” Speaking of one turnpike road, this shrewd observer says : “ Let me most seriously caution all travellers, who may accidentally purpose to travel this terrible county, to avoid it as they would the Devil.” Wesley’s friends, fearing some accident for him, at last persuaded him to travel in a carriage. He continued to travel and preach till very near his end, and showed great endurance. “ He notices every birthday, only to wonder at his marvellous immunity from all the trials of old age. At the age of seventy-three he writes, ‘ I am better able to preach than I was at twenty-three.’” At eighty-five he writes, “ How little have I suffered by ‘ the rush of numerous years.’ ” One biographer speaks of him as “ rising in the morning at four, travelling from thirty to seventy miles a day, preaching daily four or five sermons, reading, writing, visiting the sick, and superintending the societies wherever he came, after he was more than fourscore.” He himself writes that he travelled above “four thousand miles a year.”

Southey says of his appearance at this time : “ His face was remarkably fine, his complexion fresh to the last week of his life, his eye quick, keen, and active, and his long hair white and bright as silver.” For some months before his death he was very feeble. Crabb Robinson, in his Diary lately published, describes hearing and seeing Wesley : “ I was at an exhibition equally admirable [he had just heard Erskine] and which had an equal effect on my mind. It was, I believe, in October, 1790, and not long before his death, that I heard John Wesley in the great round meeting-house in Colches ter. He stood in a wide pulpit, and on each side of him stood a minister, and the two held him up, having their hands under his armpits. His feeble voice was barely audible. But his reverend countenance, especially his long white locks, formed a picture never to be forgotten. There was a vast crowd of lovers and admirers. It was for the most part pantomime, but the pantomime went to the heart. Of the kind I never saw anything comparable to it in after life.” He writes his brother more at length, and says ; “ Not knowing the man, I should almost have ridiculed his figure. Far from it now. I looked upon him with a respect bordering on enthusiasm. After the people had sung one verse of a hymn he arose and said: ‘It gives me great pleasure to find that you have not lost your singing, neither men nor women; you have not forgotten a single note. And I hope that by the assistance of the same God which enables you to sing well you may do all other things well.’” Mr. Robinson’s biographer adds: “ I have heard Mr. Robinson tell this more than once at his own table, with the addition, that so greatly was the preacher revered, that the people stood in a double line to see him as he passed through the street on his way to the chapel.” Wesley died March 2, 1791, after a short illness, which was more the exhaustion of nature than any active disease.

He seemed to work on the fear and imagination of the assemblies he addressed, and it is worthy of note that neither Charles Wesley nor Whitefield produced a like effect ; and the fact that Charles Wesley’s notification “on one occasion that any one who was convulsed should be carried out of the congregation insured perfect quiet, is enough to prove, what we might be sure of without any proof, that the love of producing a sensation was sometimes the agent at work.” There must have been something in the personal influence of Wesley, for his sermons certainly do not produce any such exciting effect on the reader. It is interesting to observe, as we read his life, how very unwilling Wesley was to destroy the old landmarks and barriers of form. Whatever he felt later, he did not at first desire to leave the Church of England. His biographer says of him and his relation to that body: “He was ready to occupy towards the Church of England a position only so far different from that which Ignatius Loyola occupied in the Church of Rome as the circumstances of the Anglican Church in the eighteenth century differed from those of the Roman Catholic in the sixteenth.” The English bishops did not realize his state of religious conviction ; “it was not in their power to crush the new order, but the strange anomalies of the English law had left it in their power to force it to become a sect.” In that way they lost all the advantage which they might with care and moderation have turned to the future welfare and glory of their church.

Wesley’s own temperament was rather cold, and he had probably from that cold and calm nature, and the great self-control and presence of mind which he possessed, the power to awe, subdue, and thrill an audience. While Whitefield on many occasions preached dissolved in tears, and so moved vast numbers, the strong and determined will of Wesley was almost electrical in its influence and even frightful in its effects on the assemblages he preached betore. Frequently, when he had concluded his discourse, the whole of his congregation appeared to be riveted to the ground, and not a person moved till he had retired. We have perhaps the best proof of Wesley’s power over an audience, and the extraordinary effect of his preaching, in an incident he himself records in his journal. The account of it is rather comical to read. On one occasion a long wall, built of loose stones, on which many of his hearers were seated, suddenly gave way and fell down ; it did not produce any interruption of his discourse, or divert the attention of his audience. “ None of those who had fallen,” he observes, “ screamed ; and none being hurt, they appeared sitting at the bottom just as they had sat at the top.”

It was evidently more the manner than the matter of his sermons that moved and agitated his hearers. “ His own temptations were those of a cold temperament, and he never considered any other. His characteristic word of approval was ' lively ’ ; and a congregation in a satisfactory state was a ‘lively congregation,’ ” says the biographer. Judging from the descriptions of the scenes attending his preaching, we should use much stronger language than “lively ’ to describe it, for we read of people struck down as with a sudden blow, and Writhing on the ground in convulsions and paroxysms of the most violent and distressing kind ; and only Wesley himself, with the same eloquence which caused these manifestations of awful excitement, could soothe and quiet the victims of the attacks.

Johnson said “he could scarcely doubt the sincerity of that man who travelled nine hundred miles in a month, and preached twelve times in a week ; for no adequate reward, merely temporal, could be given for such indefatigable labors.” Southey says that “ no conqueror or poet was ever more ambitious than John Wesley.” Macaulay eulogizes him as “ a man whose eloquence and logical acuteness might have made him eminent in literature, whose genius for government was not inferior to that of Richelieu.” Though that may appear rather extravagant, it would seem that he may with justice be classed among the great religious teachers of the world, as one largely gifted with the eloquence to move and convince an audience, the clear executive mind to organize, and the tact and energy to control and govern with success a large and constantly increasing number of followers. He may without too great encomium be named in the long list of the great reformers of the world, as one of the last but not the least in that “glorious company.”

G. A. E.