Most of Samuel Wesley’s life was spent in rural districts; and therefore amid the marshes, fens, forests, and heaths, the impassable roads, and the highway dangers just described. He was an author; but printing presses in the country did not exist. He was a man of education and of public spirit; but to obtain a newspaper was almost impossible. He was the head of a family; but to get coals, and other imported household comforts at Wroote and at Epworth, was a thing never contemplated. He was a student; but the difficulty and expense of conveying books from London to Lincolnshire were so great, that a folio was longer in reaching its way from Paternoster Row to Epworth, than it now is in reaching Kentucky. For a poor rector like him to buy and to get books, was a thing almost impracticable; and to borrow, such as he wanted, was impossible. Few knights of the shire had libraries so good as may now universally be found in a servant’s hall, or in the back parlour of a small shopkeeper. An esquire passed among his neighbours for a great scholar, if Hudibras, and Baker’s Chronicles, Tarlton’s Jests, and the Seven Champions of Christendom, lay in his hall window among his fishing rods and guns. Many lords of manors, in point of education, differed but very little from their menial servants; and heirs of estates often had no better tutors than grooms and gamekeepers, and scarce attained learning enough to sign their names to a mittimus. Their chief serious employment was the care of their property. They examined samples of grain, handled pigs, and, on market days, made bargains over a tankard with corn merchants and drovers. Their chief pleasures were commonly derived from field sports, and from an unrefined sensuality. Their oaths, coarse jests, and scurrilous terms of abuse were uttered with the broadest accent of their province; while the litter of their farm-yards gathered under the windows of their bed-chambers, and cabbages and gooseberry bushes grew up to their very doors. These were the kind of country neighbours which Samuel Wesley was privileged to have for a period of more than forty years.
The state of the common people may be judged from the state of those above them. Four-fifths of them, throughout the country, were employed in agriculture; and four shillings a-week were fair agricultural wages. There were few articles, important to the working man, as coffee, tea, sugar, &c., the price of which was not double what it is at present. Beer was much cheaper; and meat was also cheaper; but the latter was even then so dear that hundreds of thousands of families scarcely knew the taste of it. Bread, such as is now given to the inmates of a workhouse, was then seldom seen, even on the trencher of a shopkeeper or of a yeoman. The great majority of the nation lived almost entirely on rye, oats, and barley. Such was the general condition of Samuel Wesley’s Lincolnshire parishioners.
We refrain, at present, from any lengthy remarks respecting the religion and morals of the nation. It may be added, however, that the manners of the people were exceedingly coarse and vicious. The discipline of workshops, of schools, and of private families was harsh to an extreme. The implacability of hostile factions was such as, at the present day, we can scarcely conceive. Sufferers by the law experienced but little mercy. Put an offender in the pillory, and it was well if he escaped with his life from the showers of stones and brick-bats thrown at him. Tie him to the cart’s tail, and the crowd pressed round him, begging the hangman to give it to the fellow well, and to make him howl. Fights, compared with which a boxing match is a refined and humane spectacle, were among the favourite diversions of a large part of the town. Multitudes assembled to see gladiators hack each other in pieces; and shouted with delight when one of the combatants lost a finger or an eye. Prisons were hells on earth, and seminaries of every disease and of every crime.
It would not be difficult to multiply such facts as these; but enough has been said to show that when Samuel Wesley began his ministry, England and the English people were very different from what they are at present. The Christian minister even now has difficulties and discouragements; but, as a rule, he is almost a stranger to the trials encountered by young Wesley. For a penny he has his newspaper every morning; and for a trifle more he has his monthly review and magazine. He lives in an age when even the poorest of his parishioners will hardly deign to ride in the stage-waggon, but all aspire to be conveyed by the swift railway train. Books are published by millions; and circulating libraries, in one shape or in another, may be found in almost every hamlet of the land. Education is general; and not merely country squires, but country peasants, study classical and scientific books. Work is plentiful; and, except in a few bucolic districts, wages are sufficient to make the poor man’s cottage a neat and a happy home. It was otherwise one hundred and seventy-seven years ago, when Samuel Wesley, a young man of twenty-six years of age, first entered upon the office and duties of a clergyman of the Church of England.
[This chapter is chiefly taken from Macaulay, from Knight, from the Encyclopædia Britannica, and from Baxter’s Life and Times.]
CHAPTER VI.
ORDINATION AND MARRIAGE—1688–1689.
Mr Wesley took his degree of Bachelor of Arts at Oxford on the 19th of June 1688. Exactly seven weeks afterwards, he was ordained a deacon of the Church of England. He writes: “I tarried in Exeter College, though I met with some hardships I had before been unacquainted with, till I was of standing sufficient to take my Bachelor’s degree; and not being able to subsist there afterwards, I came to London during the time of my Lord Bishop of London’s suspension by the High Commission, and was instituted into deacon’s orders by my Lord Bishop of Rochester, at his palace at Bromley, August 7, 1688.” It is an incident worth remembering, that Mr Wesley left Oxford during the trial of the seven bishops, and was ordained amid the intense excitement which arose out of that event.
In the above quotation he makes mention of his “hardships” in Exeter College. We are left to guess what the hardships were; but remembering that, when he entered, all the money he had was only about forty shillings—remembering that he remained in the college for nearly five years,—and remembering that, for that, length of time, he had to support himself by serving others; and that the only assistance he received from his friends was a five shillings piece, there can be no difficulty in perceiving that his collegiate life must have been no ordinary struggle.
Mr Wesley was ordained a deacon at Bromley by the Bishop of Rochester, the well-known Dr Thomas Sprat. This prelate was a man of considerable eminence. He began life as a fellow of Wadham College, Oxford, where, on the death of Oliver Cromwell, he gave a specimen of his poetical talents in an “Ode to the Happy Memory of the late Lord Protector.” He subsequently became a fellow of the Royal Society, chaplain to George, Duke of Buckingham, chaplain in ordinary to King Charles II., canon of Windsor, Dean of Westminster, clerk of the closet to King James II., dean of the Chapel Royal, and Bishop of Rochester. He was an intimate friend of the poet Cowley, who, by his last will, left to his care his printed works and MSS. His preferment to the bench of bishops was considered as a reward for the service he rendered in drawing up, at the command of King Charles II., an account of the Rye House Plot. His known sympathy for James II. brought upon him a large amount of popular indignation; so much so that, at the trial of the seven bishops, while the air rang with loud huzzas for the persecuted prelates, it was also filled with execrations against Sprat and his fawning associates. Strangely enough, it was just at this time that Sprat ordained Samuel Wesley. An odd incident happened four years afterwards. His principles being so well known, Bishop Sprat was involved with others in an information laid before the Privy Council of a pretended conspiracy for restoring James II. Sprat was arrested, and kept under a strict guard for eleven days, but effectually cleared himself of the accusation. He was so much affected, however, by the danger to which it had exposed him, that, to the end of his days, he commemorated his deliverance by an annual thanksgiving. He died in 1713. Though somewhat of a time-server, he was a man of great ability. Dunton, in his “Characters of Eminent Conformists,” is most extravagant in praising him: his style is matchless, his wit flowing, his thoughts deep, and his poems beautiful.
“Nature rejoiced beneath his charming power;