The enforcement of Discipline was not the least difficult task. He requests that the curate will direct the churchwardens to enforce the ninetieth canon, and diligently see that all the parishioners resort to church, and not stay idling in the churchyard or porch; and that he keep the churchwardens themselves from the alehouse during divine service. He states that he had always brought to public penance anti-nuptial and no-nuptial fornicators. He advises that there be no disputations with Dissenters, for when he first came to Epworth he had practised this, but his opponents always outfaced and outlunged him, and, at the end, they were just where they were at the beginning.
Mr Wesley then concludes by saying, that he had spent some weeks in writing “this tedious and most unfashionable letter;” and adds, “Go on in the way of duty. I hope there will be no dispute between us, but who shall run fastest and fairest; and if I am distanced, I will limp after you as fast as I can with such a weight.”
Such are the salient points and facts in Mr Wesley’s letter to a young clergyman. John Wesley acted upon some of its advices in Georgia with respect to visiting and catechising, and strongly urged the same upon his first itinerants; and George Whitefield acknowledged, in 1737, that the letter had been of service to himself.[[269]]
Thus did Mr Wesley labour to benefit the church and to bless mankind. Meanwhile, as usual, he was struggling with embarrassments, and with no ordinary trials. Mrs Wesley, in 1721, states that she was rarely in health, and Mr Wesley began to suffer from the infirmities of age. Emily had been compelled to become a teacher in a boarding-school; Sukey had been married to a man little better than a fiend; other children were at home, wanting neither industry nor capacity for business; but the parents could do nothing for them. The eldest daughter was absent, the second ruined, and all the rest in great distress. The parsonage was not half furnished, nor the family half clothed, but amid all, the venerable man was patient, and his wife loving. “Did I not know,” she writes, “that Almighty wisdom hath views and ends in fixing the bounds of our habitation, which are out of our ken, I should think it a thousand pities that a man of his brightness, and rare endowments of learning and useful knowledge, in relation to the Church of God, should be confined to an obscure corner of the country, where his talents are buried, and he determined to a way of life for which he is not so well qualified as I could wish.”
In the midst of all this, he obtained, in 1726, the small rectory of Wroot, about five miles from Epworth, and here he sometimes resided, but this added but little to his domestic comforts, as the profits barely covered the expenses of serving it.[[270]] Even as late as 1821, the number of houses in the parish were not more than fifty-four, and contained a population of only two hundred and eighty-five.[[271]] The church, in the days of Wesley, was a small brick building, having, however, some ancient sepulchral monuments.[[272]] The parsonage-house was covered with a roof of thatch, the country round about was little better than a swamp, and the inhabitants are thus described by the gifted pen of Mehetabel Wesley in lines addressed to her sister Emilia:—
“Fortune has fixed thee in a place
Debarred of wisdom, wit, and grace—
High births and virtue equally they scorn,
As asses dull, on dunghills born;
Impervious as the stones, their heads are found;