The “Life and Times of the Rev. John Wesley,” by Tyerman, is, if we may judge of the whole from the first volume, the most satisfactory exhibit of that good and great man with which I am acquainted. It is impartial and exhaustive. It gives all the known facts, and, in difficult questions, leaves the reader to form his own opinions. The portrait, therefore, is full, round, and lifelike. With all his rare and, in many respects, unrivaled excellences, Mr. Wesley was a man with like passions with other men. The work reminds one of the “Life and Epistles of St Paul,” by Conybeare & Howson. It will, I doubt not, have a wide circulation. It merits it.—Rev. Levi Scott, D.D., Bishop M. E. Church.
I have examined the volume carefully, and consider it vastly superior to any biography of Mr. Wesley which has heretofore appeared.—Rev. M. Simpson, D.D., Bishop M. E. Church.
I have read the volume with pleasure and profit. It is by far the best work that has as yet been written on that subject. I trust it will have an extensive circulation.—Rev. E. R. Ames, D.D., Bishop M. E. Church.
I prize the volume very highly indeed, for the sake of the author and the subject.—Rev. E. S. Janes, D.D., Bishop M. E. Church.
My conviction is that it is by far the most exhaustive and trustworthy life of Wesley extant. The plan of the work, by the division into years, is convenient and happy; and, although no pretensions are made to a finished literary style, and the writing is rather careless than complete, it is both racy and readable. In Mr. Tyerman’s desire for scrupulous impartiality he has sometimes, by a not uncommon mental process, landed on the other side of it. There are some details which might have been well omitted; there are some expressions of opinion which I deem to be hasty and mistaken; and it is, at best, a dubious wisdom to have rescued so many foul pamphlets of the former time from the chandler’s basket. But, with these small drawbacks, the work is a monument of industry and painstaking, and a faithful portrait of a man in whom the strongest light has failed to discover any but small impurities—like thin clouds which just relieve the eye of the beholder, and through which, hardly dimmed by their shadows, we see the sun in his strength.—Rev. W. Morley Punshon.
An indispensable standard of Methodist literature, and you confer an important favor upon the denomination by its publication.—Rev. Abel Stevens, LL.D.
I am fully convinced that it far excels any other biography of the founder of Methodism. The candor of the author, his critical and correct taste, his laborious research, which has been rewarded with the discovery of much unpublished matter, his shunning of fulsome adulation, and yet ardent sympathy with his subject and profound appreciation of the mission of the son of the Epworth rector, conspire to place his work in the front rank of ecclesiastical biography.—Rev. J. F. Hurst, D.D., Drew Theological Seminary.
Mr. Tyerman’s work was fairly called for, both by the fact that no life of Wesley had been published for forty years, and because Southey’s, the only one tolerably written as a literary performance, is the production of a writer who was not himself a member of the Society, who in few points of character resembled the subject of his memoir, and possessed no sources of information which were not already before the world. Mr. Tyerman is a Wesleyan minister, and his materials, both printed and in manuscript, have been accumulating for seventeen years. He has made most diligent use of them; and his history, in regard to its facts, is incomparably more full than any that preceded it.—Saturday Review, London.
The time had fairly come for a new and original life of Wesley, embodying, as such a work must, a history of the forming period of Methodism.... The changes wrought by the lapse of time have prepared the way for fuller, fairer, and more appreciative examination and statement of the subject, and it is well that the execution of that task has devolved upon one so competent. Mr. Tyerman is thoroughly a Wesleyan, and yet he is able to discuss the subject taken in hand with judicial calmness. A ripe scholar—having made Methodist history a specialty—and a practiced writer, he possessed peculiar fitness for that kind of work, and viewing his subject from so great a distance of time, and in the softened light of a hundred years ago, he was better situated than any of his predecessors in the same field to see the subject in its true relations and circumstances. He has been charged with injustice to the good name of Wesley, but to us it seems quite otherwise. Time and its changes have removed the halo in which it was once encircled and its real character hidden. Some of this false glory having passed away, its unreality is recognized; but as all true greatness appears greatest when set in the clearest light, so nowhere else are the character and the works of Wesley shown to so great advantage as in these pages. We have read the work with real pleasure, and we trust it will meet with a large sale, and be widely read by both Methodists and others.—N. Y. Christian Advocate.