(3.) John Wesley and the Evangelical Reaction of the Eighteenth Century. By Julia Wedgewood. Macmillan and Co.
(4.) The Poetical Works of John and Charles Wesley. Vols. I.—XI. Methodist Book Room.
(5.) John Wesley's Place in Church History. Bell and Daldy.
(6.) Wesley and Methodism. By Isaac Taylor. Bell and Daldy.
(7.) John Wesley: His Life and His Work. By the Rev. M. Lelièvre. Translated from the French by the Rev. A. J. French, B.A. Wesleyan Conference Office.
(8.) John Wesley; or, the Theology of Conscience, By the author of the 'Philosophy of Evangelicism.' Bell and Daldy.
Protestantism has never shown any especial pride in its hagiology, it does not treasure very highly the lives of its saints; yet it has an illustrious succession of eminent and noble men—great by endurance and self-denial, by the majesty and multiplicity of their labours, by the fervent enthusiasm of their character, and by their exalted intercourse with divine truths and things. Among the most eminent of these lives, great by its endowments and virtues, transcendent by incessant and immeasurable activity, extraordinary by its protracted period of service, stands that of John Wesley, mild and modest, but conspicuous and renowned, alike in the Old World and the New. Shall we be doing a needless thing if we devote some pages to an attempt at an estimate of the man, his ideas, his work, and his influence? First, the man. Pleasant, it has been said, is the task to trace up to their mountain source the streams which, broadening into great rivers, descend to run among the hills and water the valleys; to drink at the fountain-head, where perhaps all seems bleak and drear, compared with the fertility through which the river wanders below; thus, also, it is pleasant to trace some great benevolent flood of influence and thought back to its obscure fountain, its unlikely, perhaps unsuspected, spring. Thus also it is that in the kitchen of a poorly furnished Lincolnshire parsonage, in its atmosphere of poverty and piety, Methodism really had its origin; the early life of its founder was lightened by its special providences, his sense of wonder was excited by its supernatural voices, his frame was nourished by its hard discipline. Such was the cradle and the early aliment of John Wesley; and the first element in Methodism is the quality and character of the man.
Even at this day, Epworth is a quiet old village town, lying on the windy side of a Lincolnshire upland; no railway has, we believe, disturbed its solitary stillness, and the rest of its inhabitants is unbroken by the shrill whistle of the locomotive. We may figure to ourselves its loneliness a hundred and seventy years since, when in its old parsonage John Wesley's eyes first opened to the light. Samuel Wesley, his father, was the rector of the little village; quite a notable man to us, and by no means an obscure man in his day. Epworth, considering those times, was not a poor living, it was worth £200 a year; it is now worth nearly £1,000; but excellent and admirable man as he appears to have been, the old rector was usually in debts and difficulties. Perhaps even Goldsmith's typical clergyman would not have 'passed rich with £40 a year,' if, in addition to that wealth, he had found his quiver filled by nineteen children; although we know wonderful Robert Walker became a rich man, kept out of debt and danger, and accumulated a fortune in his incumbency of Seathwait on an annual income of £10! Few well-authenticated stories are more romantic than that of Epworth parsonage; among old houses it has a distinguished pre-eminence. Both the pastor and his wife were extraordinary people: on both sides their ancestors were remarkable, and they in turn became parents of an offspring, marvellous not merely in number, but in the singular versatility of their genius. The old rector was one of the stupendous scholars, of whom there were so many in the lone and obscure retreats of village life in that age; one of those men who, patiently trimming the midnight lamp, or kindling it before the earliest glow of the summer's sunbeam, thought or wrote with equal facility in Hebrew, Greek, or Latin, and published their works in huge quartos or folios. Of him probably we should now know nothing, but for the work of his remarkable children. Yet he was himself a huge folio of a man, a poet, too, in virtue of a considerable power of conception, fertility of illustration, and melody of expression; those queer old volumes, the 'Athenian Oracle,' which are a choice amusement and recreation for the bookworm, received large contributions, and on the most curious subjects, from his pen: he possessed a nimble wit, and his posthumous work on Job is said to contain—for it has never fallen in our way—a vast wealth of scholarship. Susannah Wesley, his wife, was at once a saint and a scholar, far more equal to the discussion of many knotty matters in divinity than some of the bishops of that day; and she also had an intense concern for the souls of the parishioners round about her. The household of that parsonage vividly reflects that old twilight time. Twice the rectory was consumed by fire: it was supposed to be the work of incendiaries, for the rector was very unpopular, and the story has often been told in prose and in painting, how, on one of these occasions, the infant John nearly perished in the flames, how he was rescued, and how the brave rector knelt with his children on the village green, exclaiming, 'Come, neighbours, let us kneel down, let us give thanks to God, He has given me all my eight children—I am rich enough.' But in the fire he lost not only his house, but his furniture and his precious library, all his manuscripts, and his sermons, and moreover a work on Hebrew poetry, which, from what we know of his pen, must have been very valuable. Grim shadows often fell over the rectory. One circumstance gives it a most singular notoriety, and was probably not without influence on the mind of John. We allude to its celebrated ghost. Among ghost stories, this of the apparition or polter-geisterie of Epworth—for the hauntings were noisy racketings rather than appearances—has always been held to be one of the most inexplicable. Dr. Southey quite inclines to a belief in the genuineness of the ghostly visitations, and Mr. Tyerman expresses himself as reluctantly driven to the conclusion that the noises and other circumstances were occasioned by the direct and immediate agency of some unseen spirit; Isaac Taylor also seems forced to a similar admission. Thus it was a singular old house and household; much there was calculated in every way to stir the souls of such children and youths as John and Charles Wesley, not to mention the less famous, but scarcely less ingenious, Samuel and Mehetabel, Amelia and Keziah; it is interesting to think of that family in those old Epworth fields and lanes and hedgerows, and to follow them in all their strange, varied, and parti-coloured existence.
In due time, John left home for college; he studied at Christ-church, Oxford, after he had fulfilled his earlier course at the Charter House. It was long before he found his way into the work which has made his name so eminent; nor can it be said that in earlier life he gave much promise of that especial excellence to which he attained. He was a hard and industrious student, an exemplary and pious youth and young man. It is not uninteresting to notice that at this time he had rather a close and not unaffectionate correspondence with Mary Granville, then a young widow, which suggests suspicious possibilities. Talented, beautiful, and accomplished, we know her principally as the old lady, Mrs. Delany, the cherished friend of George III., to whom he paid such courtly and beautiful deference in her old age at Windsor. Mr. Tyerman seems to think, and we think too, that Wesley had a 'fair escape;' that he was not at all uninteresting to the fair widow is certain. What would have become of Methodism had the intimacy been closer? He was elected a fellow of Lincoln College, Oxford; but his ideas of Christian truth appear to have been very crude and confused. In his twenty-fifth year he was ordained a priest of the Church of England, and ministered for some time at a wretched little Lincolnshire village called Wroote; the population was under three hundred, 'and the people,' says Mehetabel Wesley, 'were as dull as asses and impervious as stone.' It is true there was at this time a small cluster of Oxford students who had received the denomination of 'Methodists,' and Wesley was one of them; he was called even the 'Curator of the Holy Club,' and a 'crack-brained enthusiast.' His brother Charles regarded him with reverence, and all looked up to him as the worthy leader of the little band. He appears to have led the life of an ascetic, and his charity to the poor was limited only by his very scanty means. An instance shows us something of the character of the man. On one cold winter day, a young girl, whom these earlier Methodists kept at school, called upon him in a state nearly frozen. The young man said to her, 'You seem half-starved; have you nothing to wear but that linen gown?' She said, 'Sir, it is all I have!' Wesley felt in his pocket, but it was almost empty; the walls of his chamber, however, were hung with pictures, and these now seemed to him to become his accusers. 'It struck me,' says he, 'will thy Master say to thee, "Well done, good and faithful steward, thou hast adorned thy walls with the money which might have screened this poor creature from the cold." O justice! O mercy! are not these pictures the blood of this poor maid?' When he had reached the age of seventy-three, the Commissioners of Excise—in all generations a race of monetary ferrets—addressed to him a circular, expressing that beyond a doubt he had neglected to make a proper entry and return of his silver plate. The letter was very curt and peremptory. Wesley evidently thought the application to him was ridiculous, and he replied in a note still more curt. 'Sir, I have two silver spoons at London and two at Bristol; this is all the plate that I have at present, and I shall not buy any more while so many round me want bread. I am, Sir, your most humble servant, John Wesley.' Thus the reflection of the young student realized itself in the active life of the old man.
For some time, however, John Wesley appears before us as a kind of eighteenth century Puseyite, or rather such an one as Hurrell Froude; his notions were cast in a mould of High Church idealism, not unmixed with a certain morbid pietism; and Oxford Methodism almost anticipates that other mighty reaction, the great religious movement of our age; but the Methodism of Oxford, indeed, although it numbered among its adherents such men as the Wesleys, and Whitefield, and Hervey, and Ingram, soon came to an end, and, but for Wesley's after career, would have been buried in oblivion, for Mr. Tyerman truly characterizes it as 'misty, austere, gloomy, and forbidding, while yet intensely earnest, sincere, and self-denying.'