CHAPTER V.
NONCONFORMIST PLACES OF WORSHIP.
There are in Horncastle five Nonconformist religious communities, the Wesleyan, Congregational, Primitive Methodist, Baptist, and New Church or Swedenborgian, each now having substantially built chapels, resident ministers, with Sunday, and, in one case, Day Schools. Through the courtesy of the Rev. John Percy, late Head Minister of the Wesleyan Society, we are enabled to give a fairly full account of its origin and growth, down to the present 20th century. As this is the most important religious body in the town, next to the Church of England, although it is not the oldest, we take the Wesleyans first. As will be seen in the following account, this Society arose from a very small beginning, but at the present time, with perhaps the exception of the Baptists, it is the most numerous and influential body among Nonconformists. Although, locally, rather fewer in numbers in recent years, than formerly, it is generally growing, and in the year 1904, as published statistics show, it acquired in the United Kingdom an addition of 10,705 full members, with 11,874 members on trial, and junior members 4,367; a total increase of 26,946.
THE WESLEYANS.
The founder of this Society was, as its name implies, John Wesley, probably of the same stock as the great Duke of Wellington, whose family name was variously written Wellesley, or Wesley. [64] We take the immediately following particulars mainly from the History of England, by Henry Walter, B.D. and F.R.S., Fellow of St. John’s College, Cambridge, Professor in the
East India College, Hertford, Chaplain to the Duke of Northumberland, &c., &c., himself a Lincolnshire man.
John and Charles Wesley were the second and third sons of Samuel Wesley, Rector of Epworth, near Gainsborough; [65] John being born in 1703 (June 17), and Charles in 1708 (Dec. 18). John was educated at the Charterhouse, and Charles at Westminster School. In due course they both entered at Oxford University; John eventually being elected to a Fellowship at Lincoln College, and Charles to a Studentship at Christchurch. In 1725 John was ordained deacon of the Church of England. He left Oxford for a time to act as his father’s curate, Charles remained as Tutor to his college. He, with some of his undergraduate pupils, formed a custom of meeting on certain evenings every week for scripture study and devotion, they carefully observed the Church’s fasts and festivals, and partook of the Holy Communion every Sunday. From the strict regularity of their lives the name was given to them, by those who were laxer in conduct, of “Methodists.”
In 1729 the Rector of Lincoln College summoned John Wesley to resume residence at Oxford, and he became Tutor of the College. In this capacity he was careful to look after the souls, as well as the intellectual training, of those under his influence. The brothers began missionary work in Oxford, about the year 1730, in which they were assisted by a few other kindred spirits. They visited the sick and needy, with the permission of the parish clergy, as
well as offenders confined in the gaol. This continued for some time, but gradually John began to long for a wider field for his spiritual energies. He had gathered about him a small band of equally earnest associates, and they went out to Georgia, North America, in 1735, to work among the English settlers and North American Indians. After two years John returned to England, in 1737, and then began the work of his life.
It is said that he was a good deal influenced by the De Imitatione Christi of Thomas a Kempis (of which he published an abridged edition in 1777), [66a] also by Jeremy Taylor’s Holy Living and Dying; and he imputed his own conversion to his study of Law’s Serious Call. His “first impression of genuine Christianity,” as he called it, was from the Moravian sect, with whom he came in contact at Hirnuth in Saxony, which he visited in 1738, after his return from America; but his complete “conversion,” he was wont to say, occurred at a meeting of friends, in Aldersgate Street, London, where one of them was reading Luther’s Preface to St. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, the exact time being 8.45 p.m., May 24, 1738.