Samuel Wesley himself says: “Mr Morton was an ingenious and universally learned man; but his chiefest excellency lay in mathematics. He had many gentlemen of estate, who paid him well; but he thought more of the glory of God than of his own private profit. He only wished to save himself harmless; and, therefore, if he had little for some, he valued it not, so as it was barely made up by others, and he could send out new ministers to be ordained by presbyters.” While, however, Mr Wesley speaks so commendably of Mr Morton, his language is widely different in reference to Mr Morton’s pupils. He writes: “The pupils entertained a mortal aversion to the Episcopal order; and there were but very few but what abhorred monarchy itself. The king-killing doctrines were generally received and defended.”
On one occasion some of the students went out at midnight to a little hill not far from Newington, and, with a speaking trumpet, alarmed the town, and then, through the trumpet, bellowed scandalous stories respecting the clergyman of the place, the Rev. Mr S.
Those among them who composed the bitterest and most ill-mannered sarcasms on the public prayers and liturgy of the Church, were caressed, hugged, encouraged, and commended by the heads of the Dissenting party, Wesley himself sharing in the applause awarded.
The students, also, were in the habit of reading “the most lewd, abominable books that ever blasted Christian eye;” but it is right to add, that this was done without the knowledge of their tutors.
Mr Morton’s was the principal Dissenting academy in the land, containing forty or fifty pupils, and having annexed to it “a fine garden, a bowling-green, a fish-pond, and a laboratory furnished with all sorts of mathematical instruments.”[[16]]
The two gentlemen under whose care Samuel Wesley was placed in London were men of learning, of piety, and of general excellence; and well would it have been if he had had no worse advisers than these; but he writes: “Some of their (the Dissenters) gravest, eldest, and most learned ministers encouraged me in my silly lampoons, both on Church and State. They gave me subjects, and furnished me with matter; some of them transcribed my writings, and several of them revised and corrected them before they were printed.”
Wesley began to write his “silly lampoons” soon after he came to London. Some of his first squibs were thrown at a worthy man, who deserved more respectful treatment, both from him and some others. The Rev. Thomas Doolittle, whom he wantonly attacked, was a man of distinguished merit. Born at Kidderminster in 1630, and educated in the College of Pembroke Hall, Cambridge, he was, for nine years, the incumbent of the parish of St Alphage, London. After being ejected by the Act of Uniformity, he opened a boarding school, and, though against the law, a meeting-house in Bunhill Fields. Here he preached to a numerous congregation, and had many seals to his ministry, until at length, on a Saturday, at midnight, the train bands came to arrest him; but he managed to escape. Next morning, while another person was preaching for him, the soldiers rushed into the chapel, and the officer, addressing the preacher, shouted, “I command you, in the king’s name, to come down.” The preacher replied, “I command you, in the name of the King of kings, not to disturb His worship, but to let me go on.” The officer ordered his men to fire. The undaunted preacher clapped his hand upon his heart, and said, “Shoot, if you please; you can only kill the body.” Great confusion followed, in the midst of which the brave-hearted preacher escaped; but Doolittle’s pulpit was pulled to pieces, and the doors of his meeting-house were fastened, and were branded with the king’s broad arrow. After this Doolittle opened a private academy at Islington, where, among other distinguished pupils, he had the care of Matthew Henry, the author of the most practical Commentary on the sacred Scriptures ever published; and also of Edward Calamy, the well known writer of the “Nonconformists’ Memorials.” It was at this time that Mr Doolittle published his work entitled, “The Lord’s Last Sufferings,” and prefixed to it a copy of Greek verses. Doolittle’s academy at Islington, and Veal’s at Stepney, seem to have been sworn enemies to each other, and eagerly longed for an opportunity to display their prowess in academic conflict. For want of a more proper subject, they made the verses, prefixed to Doolittle’s book, the occasion of the clash of arms; and, as young Wesley was already “celebrated for his vein at poetry,” he took, as Dunton tells us, a prominent part in a skirmish, which seems to have been wantonly begun, and not too honourably carried on. The squibs which Wesley published are lost—a thing not to be regretted.
Doolittle was far too good a man to be lampooned by the clever, impertinent striplings belonging to a neighbouring school; but the man whose goods had been seized and sold, and whose house and person had been threatened by persecuting foes, was not likely to be crestfallen on account of the pretentious swagger of young Wesley and his coxcomb companions.
Another of Wesley’s lampoons, written while he was at Morton’s Academy, was directed against Dr Williams, Bishop of Chichester, a man whom Dunton describes as “of solid worth and distinguished goodness.” Wesley says he was requested to write his satire against Williams by a Dissenting minister of no mean fame, and that the occasion of it was as follows:—A man, killed by a mob, had been buried, and Williams had ordered his body to be taken up, that a coroner’s inquest might be held upon it. Wesley knew nothing of the affair himself, but obtained full instructions from a minister near Clapham, who also gave the young Horace a guinea or two for encouragement. The lampoon was written, and Dr Williams, together with the whole order of bishops, abused to the very utmost of the young poet’s power, while his juvenile satirical performance, as he tells us, “was sufficiently applauded” by the unwise and dishonourable ministers who had prompted him to undertake such a work. The bishops of that period might not be as praiseworthy as was desirable; but it was a mean action for Christian ministers to do dirty work by proxy, and to employ a young fellow, cleverer than themselves, to write a pasquinade which, perhaps, they had not the ability to write.
All this was discreditable, both to young Wesley and to his prompters; but there was something else, which, but for his own good sense, might have been even worse. In the same year that Samuel Wesley was born, Biddle, “the father of the English Unitarians,” died. Biddle had been the master of the Free School of St Mary de Crypt, in Gloucester, and had adopted the Unitarian doctrines respecting the Trinity. Among other works embodying his creed, he published a tract, entitled, “Twelve Arguments, drawn out of the Scriptures, wherein the commonly-received opinion touching the Deity of the Holy Spirit is clearly and fully refuted.” The House of Parliament ordered this tract to be burnt by the common hangman, and, for its publication, the writer was doomed to five years’ imprisonment. Biddle was repeatedly imprisoned after this, and died September 22, 1662.