The life of John Wesley

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 movement of which Wesley was the leader, I have the most hearty sympathy; but I have endeavored to consider his^QjdLwithout narrowing denominational jjias, and have emphasized certain important phases of his character that have often received comparatively little ^ltentiom__ Wesley was, indeed, primarily 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 probably 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 Century Company, a few paragraphs from these papers are inserted, without essential change, in the following pages.

Chapter I Page

Epworth ... ...

i

The Wesley ancestry .

Samuel Wesley

Susanna Wesley

Her system of family discipline

Burning of the rectory

The " Epworth noises "

• 13

John Wesley at the Charterhouse

• »5

CHAPTER II Wesley entered at Christ's 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

CHAPTER III 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

PAGE

54 57

59 61

65 66 68 69 70

CHAPTER IV The Early Work, i 739-1 742

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

CHAPTER V Wesley visits the north

Preaches in Newcastle and vicinity

71 73 74 77 79

87 90

91 94 97

99 101 103 107

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

154 156 158

CHAPTER VI Had no home

Unfortunate marriages of his sisters

Had few intimate friends : Perronet, Grimshaw

John Fletcher

Not indifferent to the charm of society

The Grace Murray episode

Marriage with Mrs. Vazeille

Unhappy domestic life

Increasing labors and burdens

First serious illness

Recovers and resumes his work

His economies and charities

163 163 166 169

Chapter VII

After 1760 opposition mostly ceases Fanaticism and dissension among Methodists The doctrine of " sanctification "

George Bell and Thomas Maxfield

190 191 192 193

Xll

The Calvinistic controversy

Whitefield and the Countess of Huntingdon

Toplady and Rowland Hill

The " minutes " of the Conference of 177°

Lady Huntingdon's protest • .

Fletcher publishes his "Checks to Antinomianism

Results of the controversy .

Wesley's remarkable liberality and tolerance

Sane and practical type of religion in his societies

Effect upon public morals ; smuggling, bribery

His attitude toward amusements, recreations, accomplishments

Encourages popular education ; Sunday Schools

And popular literature

Interest in music

His interest in politics

The Wilkes agitation

Wesley's pamphlets, " Free Thoughts on Public Affairs "

And '• Thoughts on Liberty " ...

His early opinions on American affairs

Changed before he published his " Calm Address to our American

Colonies "

And his " Calm Address to the Inhabitants of England" . Explanation of his inconsistency

Plans to perpetuate the Wesleyan organization in England ; the " Deed of Declaration " .

And in America ... ...

Francis Asbury .

American Methodism at the close of the Revolution .

Wesley "sets apart" Thomas Coke as superintendent of the work in America

Criticism of this action

Inevitable tendency of Methodists to separate from the Church

Always deplored and resisted by Wesley

CHAPTER VIII The Closing Years Respect and love for Wesley His last visit to Ireland 204 206 208 209

210 212 214

221 223 225 226 228

230 233 234

237 238 241

245 248 250

252 253 xm

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

His courage, courtesy, self-possession .

Lack of humor

A scholar in tastes and habits ; his reading

His own writings ; the Journal

As a thinker the child of his age

Respect for reasoning

Charge of credulity

Vein of sentiment characteristic of his century

His mastery over men

Unselfish benevolence, sane and practical .

Above all things a man of religion

His place in history

267 269

Chapter I

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 boorish, their speech vulgar and profane, their domestic morals corrupt. Of religion, even of its outward and conventional observances, they were for the most part a JOHN WESLEY

quite oblivious ; many of the children born in .Ite 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 uninviting 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 Commonwealth, both were in sympathy with the Puritan cause, and both were ejected from their livings 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, Thomas Fuller, and it is perhaps this strain in his blood that accounts for the quaint humor of her son.

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 teaching nor the temper of Mr. Martin's academy much to his liking, and was prompted by the bitter controversial 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 recommended to the little parish of South Ormsby in Lincolnshire. 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 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 England, 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 Normanby, 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.

Always 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 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 affirms — 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 Methodist 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.

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 famous 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 interested 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 tenfold, "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 recalled 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 clearness and force of intellect, in practical judgment, in deliberative steadiness of purpose, she was unquestionably 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 always accustomed to do her own thinking. Her union with her husband was one of singular beauty and loyalty ; but it did not imply any tame conformity of opinion, 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 long absences in London in attendance upon Convocation, ventured to remonstrate with her for having gathered 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 appointed, 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, unlawfully."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.

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 dispersed 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 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 mentioning 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 admirably clear body of explanation upon the Catechism and the Creed, and she was accustomed to meet them separately once a week, at a specified time, for an hour of religious conversation and instruction. Long afterward, 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 requirements 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 organization 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 infancy. 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 Testament 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 cheerfully, 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 influence 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, 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 incident 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 consumed. 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 retained 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 onlya certain 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 for the Charterhouse School in London. Through the 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, fearing the noises might portend some disaster to him, refrained from mentioning them in his presence. When, however, he learned of them and attempted an investigation 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 sympathies, 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 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 trustworthy persons and extending over so long a period as due to pure hallucination . and almost equally difficult, 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 trickster. 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 Wesley 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 irruption of the rtptfrpr 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