Stobart accompanied Mr. Wesley from Bristol to St. Ives, then back to Bristol by a different route, taking the south coast of Cornwall and Devonshire. From Bristol they crossed to Ireland; and returned by Milford Haven through Wales to London, a tour that lasted till the first days of October.
Wesley was then fifty-seven years of age, in the zenith of his renown as the founder of a sect that had spread itself abroad with amazing power since the day when a handful of young men at Oxford, poor, obscure, unpretending, had met together in each other's rooms to pray and expound the Scriptures, and by their orderly habits, and the method with which they conducted all their spiritual exercises, had won for themselves the name of "methodists." From those quiet rooms at Oxford had arisen a power that had shaken the Church of England, and which might have reinforced and strengthened that Church with an infinite access of vigour, enthusiasm, and piety, had English churchmen so willed. But the Methodists had been driven from the fold and cast upon their own resources. They were shut out of the churches; but, as one of the society protested, the fields were open to them, and they had the hills for their pulpit, the heavens for their sounding board.
George Stobart flung himself heart and soul into his work as an itinerant preacher, riding through the country with Mr. Wesley, preaching at any of the smaller towns and outlying villages to which his leader sent him, and confronting the malice of "baptized barbarians" with a courage as imperturbable as Wesley's. To be welcomed with pious enthusiasm, or to be assailed with the vilest abuse, seemed a matter of indifference to the Methodist itinerants. Their mission was to carry the tidings of salvation to the lost sheep of Israel; and more or less of ill usage suffered on their way counted for little in the sum of their lives. 'Twas a miracle, considering the violence of the mob and the inefficiency of rustic constables, that not one of these enthusiasts lost his life at the hands of enemies scarce less ferocious than the Indians on the banks of the Monongahela. But in those savage scenes it seemed ever as if a special providence guarded John Wesley and his followers. Many and many a time the rabble rout seemed possessed by Moloch, and the storm of stones and clods flew fast around the preacher's head; and again and again he passed unharmed out of the demoniac herd. Missiles often glanced aside and wounded the enemy, for the aim of blind hate was seldom true; and if Wesley did not escape injury on every occasion, his wounds were never serious enough to drive him from the stand he had taken by the market cross or in the churchyard, in outhouse or street, on common or hillside. He might finish his discourse while a stream of blood trickled down his face, or the arm that he would fain have raised in exhortation hung powerless from a blow; but in none of his wanderings had he been silenced or acknowledged defeat.
It was John Wesley's privilege, or his misfortune, at this time to stand alone in the world, unfettered by any tie that could hamper him in his life's labour. He was childless; and hard fate had given him a wife so uncongenial, so tormenting in her causeless jealousy and petty tyranny, that 'twas but an act of self-defence to leave her. In the earlier years of their marriage she accompanied him on his journeys; but as she quarrelled with his sister-in-law, Charles Wesley's amiable helpmeet, and insulted every woman he called his friend, her companionship must have been a thorn in the flesh rather than a blessing. His brother Charles—once the other half of his soul—was now estranged. Their opinions differed upon many points, and John, as the bolder spirit, had gone far beyond the order-loving and placable poet, who deemed no misfortune so terrible for the Methodists as to stand outside the pale of the Church, albeit they might be strong enough in their own unaided power to gather half the Protestant world within their fold. Charles thought of himself and his brother Methodists only as more fervent members of the Church of England, never as the founders of an independent establishment, primitive in the simplicity of its doctrine and observances, modern in its fitness to the needs of modern life.
John Wesley was now almost at the height of his power, and strong enough in the number of his followers, and in their profound affection for his person, to laugh at insult, and to defy even so formidable an assailant as Dr. Lavington, Bishop of Exeter, with whom he was carrying on a pamphlet war.
George Stobart loved the man and honoured the teacher. It was a pleasure to him to share the rough and smooth of Wesley's pilgrimage, to ride a sorry jade, even, for the privilege of riding at the side of one of the worst and boldest horsemen in England, who was not unlikely to come by a bad fall before the end of his journey. In those long stages there was ample leisure for the two friends to share their burden of sorrows and perplexities, and for heart to converse with heart.
Wesley was too profound a student of his fellow men not to have fathomed George Stobart's mind in past years, when Antonia's lover was himself but half conscious of the passion that enslaved him; and, remembering this, he was careful not to say too much of the young wife who was gone, or the love-match which had ended so sadly. He knew that in heart, at least, Stobart had been unfaithful to that sacred tie; but although he deplored the sin he could not withhold his compassion from the sinner. The Methodist leader had been singularly unlucky in affairs of the heart, from the day when at Savannah he allowed himself to be persuaded out of an engagement with a girl he loved, to the hour when he took a Zantippe for his spouse; and it may be that his own unfortunate marriage, and the memory of Grace Murray, that other woman once so dearly loved and once his plighted wife, made him better able to sympathise with the victim of a misplaced affection.
It was after Stobart had been working with him all through the summer and autumn, and when that eventful year of 1760 was waning, that Wesley for the first time spoke of Antonia.
"Your kinswoman Lady Kilrush?" he inquired. "What has become of so much beauty and fashion? I have not seen the lady's name in the evening papers for an age."