The missing qualities in Wesley’s religious state at this time [at Oxford] are obvious, It utterly lacked the element of joy. Religion is meant to have for the spiritual landscape the office of sunshine, but in Wesley’s spiritual sky burned no divine light, whether of certainty or of hope. He imagined he could distil the rich wine of spiritual gladness out of mechanical religious exercises; but he found himself, to his own distress, and in his own words, “dull, flat, and unaffected in the use of the most solemn ordinances.” Fear, too, like a shadow, haunted his mind: fear that he was not accepted before God; fear that he might lose what grace he had; fear both of life and of death. He dare not grant himself, he declared, the liberty that others enjoyed. His brother Samuel, whose letters are always rich in the salt of common sense, had remonstrated with his younger brother for the austerities he practised and the rigors of alarmed self-interrogation under which he lived. John Wesley defends himself by the plea—in which there is an unconscious pathos—that he lacks his brother’s strength and dare take no risks.
“Mirth, I grant,” he says, “is very fit for you. But does it follow that it is fit for me? If you are to rejoice evermore because you have put your enemies to flight, am I to do the same while they continually assault me? You are very glad because you have passed from death to life. Well! but let him be afraid who knows not whether he is to live or die. Whether this be my condition or no, who can tell better than myself?”—W. H. Fitchett, “Wesley and His Century.”
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Fearlessness of Death—See [Martyr Spirit].
Feast of the Soul—See [Chains].
Fecundity—See [Destruction Necessary].
FECUNDITY OF LIFE
An English naturalist has figured out that a single-stem mother of the common aphids, or “green-fly” of the rose, would give origin, at its regular rate of multiplication and provided each individual born lived out its natural life, which is only a few days at best, to over thirty-three quintrillions of rose aphids in a single season, equal in weight to more than a billion and a half of men. Of course such a thing never happens, because so many of the young aphids get eaten by lady-bird beetles and flower-fly larvæ and other enemies before they come to be old enough to produce young.—Vernon L. Kellogg, “Insect Stories.”
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FEEDING TOO MUCH