“Or murmuring deep with harsh incondite tone,
With eyes reversed, and many a brutal groan,
We are the favour’d few, the elect alone.”
Badcock, in the Gentleman’s Magazine for 1784, tells us that Wesley’s “heroic poem, the ‘Life of Christ,’ excited the ridicule of the wits.” John Wesley, in his reply to this, in the same periodical for 1785, p. 246, simply states, that his father’s own account of it was, “The cuts are good; the notes pretty good; the verses so-so.” Samuel Wesley, jun., ardently loved his father, and admired his genius, but speaks of his “Life of Christ” in the following measured terms:—
“Whate’er his strains, still glorious was his end:
Faith to assert, and virtue to defend.
He sung how God his Saviour deigned to expire,
With Vida’s piety, though not his fire.”
John Wesley, who, though he seldom wrote poetry, had as fine poetic taste as any member of his family, observes: “In my father’s poem on the ‘Life of Christ’ there are many excellent lines, but they must be taken in connexion with the rest. It would not be at all proper to print them separate.”[[77]]
Dr Adam Clarke, in reference to the same production, writes: “When a poet, no matter of what abilities, takes for the subject of his verse the sayings or acts of the Almighty, as recorded in the Bible, he must of necessity fail, speak untruths, and sink below himself. Who can add to the dignity, importance, or majesty of the words of God by any poetical clothing? The attempt to do it is almost impious; and, in the execution, how many words are attributed to God which He never spake, and acts which He never did! The life of our Lord was never found, and never will be found, but in the four evangelists.”[[78]]