Of Geometry he writes: “All our most necessary as well as most noble arts and sciences depend on it. None of the mechanical arts can ever be brought to perfection without it; and if painters were ignorant of proportion, angles, circles, and squares, all their works would want beauty, and themselves would want satisfaction. A joiner cannot so much as cut a round table unless he understands a circle; nor a carpenter square a piece of timber unless he know, by the rule of square figures, when his work is finished. The watch and clock makers would be at a loss, if it were not for this science; and no builder could regularly design a fabric without a knowledge of geometrical problems. Navigation and gunnery can never be understood without geometry; and to these I may add, fortification, dialling, music, astronomy, and surveying. It would be needless to say any more of the advantages of geometry, here being enough to fire the mind of any ingenious student to a diligent inquiry into it.”
Writing on Optics, he says: “’Tis pleasant to undeceive the eye in the common accidents of life, and to see it approach, in some measure, towards that certainty of judging and apprehending visibles that it will attain to at the day of resurrection, when it will be above the power of being cheated by concave or convex, or deluded by a refraction or reflection. This may, in a great measure, be accomplished in this world by such as give themselves up to the study of optics.”
There are other articles on painting, astronomy, and navigation, and glances at geography, music, architecture, grammar, and rhetoric. The general “Essay on all Sorts of Learning” concludes thus: “Whoever makes a trial of the worth of learning will find that all encomiums come far short of the thing itself; and that those only can best reflect upon its value who are sensible of the enjoyment of it.”
Such, then, is a general outline of the contents of “The Young Student’s Library,” published in 1692; but no one can form an adequate idea of the work without seeing it. None but immense readers and careful writers like Samuel Wesley and his Athenian friends could have put such a book together.
It was the intention of the Athenian Society to have followed up the publication of the “Young Student’s Library” with another work—“A New System of Experimental Philosophy upon the Four Elements”—and embracing a description of strange appearances, noises, strange winds, subterranean steams, waters, their properties and inhabitants, earths of all sorts, plants and trees, husbandry, animals, insects, birds, reptiles, fishes, extraordinary buildings and extraordinary persons, antiquities, &c.;[[74]] but I am not aware that this was ever issued.
Contemporaneously with the publication of the “Young Student’s Library,” Mr Wesley was employed upon another work, which has never yet been noticed by any Wesleyan biographer. In vol. vi. of the Athenian Gazette, it is announced that the Athenian Society have bought the right to a “Monthly Journal of Books,” and that this journal will now be carried on by a “London Divine,” under the title of “The Complete Library; or, News for the Ingenious;” and that it will be issued monthly, beginning with the month of May 1692.
The work was published accordingly. We have seen and examined three of the volumes, containing between four and five hundred pages each, and extending from May 1692 to March 1694. The numbers are divided into three sections: 1. Original pieces; 2. An account of the choicest books printed in England and on the Continent of Europe; 3. Notes on current events.
The first article is entitled, “A Discourse concerning the Integrity and Purity of the Hebrew Bible; by the Author of a Discourse concerning the Antiquity of the Hebrew Points, Vowels, and Accents,”—thus plainly intimating that the “London Divine,” who had the management of the work, was none other than Samuel Wesley. Besides, no one acquainted with Mr Wesley’s mode of thinking and style of writing, can have any hesitation in pronouncing him the author.
He maintains that all religion stands or falls as we can defend and prove the integrity of the Hebrew copy of the Bible; and his principal object is to refute the opinions of Capellus, the leader of all those who say the Hebrew Bible has been corrupted. The article is learned and able, and fills twenty-four small quarto pages.
In succeeding numbers there are kindred articles, evidently by the same practised pen. One is on “Scripture Chronology;” another is, “A Critical Inquiry into the Number, Names, Division, and Order of the Books of the Old Testament;” another is, “The Ancient Manner of Reading, Writing, and Preserving the Law of Moses, as an evidence of the unparalleled care taken in former times to preserve the Bible in its purity and perfection;” another is, “A Scriptural Account of the Nature, Original, and Divine Authority of the Bible, as it is Canonical, in opposition to the Apocrypha, and all other books of human composition or oral tradition;” and another is, “On the Evidences of the Divine Original of the Scriptures; on the Ways and Means of understanding the Scriptures; and on the Necessity and Excellency of their use and Study.”