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WESLEY.

SAMUEL WESLEY, whose mother was a niece of Thomas Fuller, the church historian, was in his earliest years thrown by family circumstances among the party of the dissenters; but he abandoned them in disgust, and entered at Exeter College, Oxford, in 1684. He afterwards obtained the livings of Epworth and Wroote, in Lincolnshire; and at the former of those places, June 17, 1703, was born his second son John. Six years afterwards, the house was set on fire by some refractory parishioners, and the boy was forgotten in the first confusion. He was presently discovered at a window, and by great exertion rescued at the very moment which promised to be his last. John Wesley saw the hand of Providence in this preservation, and made it in after life a subject of reflection and gratitude.

At the age of seventeen he was removed from the Charterhouse School, where he had made some pro

ficiency, to Christchurch, Oxford; and the reputation by which he was then distinguished was that of a skilful logician and acute disputant. He was destined for the Church; and when the time for ordination arrived, after some faint scruples which he professed respecting the damnatory clauses of the Athanasian Creed and the supposed Calvinistic tendency discoverable in the Articles had been removed, he entered into orders; and, as the book which had especially excited him on the most serious meditation to undertake that office was Jeremy Taylor's' Rules of Holy Living and Dying,' so was it with the deepest earnestness that his resolution was taken, and with a fixed determination to dedicate his life and his death, his whole thoughts, feelings, and energies, to the service of God. Accordingly, in the selection of his acquaintance, he avoided all who did not embrace his principles; and, having now obtained a fellowship at Lincoln College, he had the means of assembling round him a little society of religious friends or disciples, over whom his superior talents and piety gave him a natural influence. These, through their strict and methodical manner of living, acquired from their fellow-students the appellation of Methodists,-a name derived from the schools of ancient science, and thus destined, through its capricious application by a few thoughtless boys, to designate a large and vital portion of the Christian world.

About this time Wesley entered upon his parochial duties as his father's curate at Epworth*, and presently afterwards, on the approaching death of that respectable person, he was strongly urged by his family to obtain, as he probably might have done, the next presentation for himself. Had he yielded to

It was, strictly speaking, during this his absence from Oxford that his little society then (of which the leading member was his younger brother Charles) acquired the name of Methodist.

their solicitations, he might have passed his days in humble and peaceful obscurity; but his mind was too large for the limits of a country parish, and he already felt that he was intended to serve his Maker in a larger field. So, evading the arguments and withstanding the entreaties of his friends, he went back to reside for a while upon his fellowship at Oxford.

In the year 1735 he engaged in the more public exercise of the ministry in the character of a missionary. He set sail for the new colony of Georgia in America; he had the countenance of the civil authorities, and the object which he principally professed was the conversion of the Indians. His habits at this period were deeply tinged with ascetism. In his extreme self-denial and mortification, in respect to diet, clothing, and the ordinary comforts of life, he affected a more than monastic austerity, and realized the tales of eremitical fanaticism. He even declaimed against the study of classical authors, and discouraged, as sinful, any application to profane literature. And the extravagance of his zeal took a direction, such indeed as might be expected from his birth and education, but ill adapted to recommend him to the affections of the colonists. He adhered, with the obstinacy of a bigot, to the rubric of the Church; he refused to administer baptism except by immersion; he withheld the communion from a pious dissenter, unless he should first consent to be rebaptized; he declined to perform the burial service over another; and, while he was exciting much enmity by this excessive strictness, he formed an indiscreet, though innocent, connexion with a young woman named Sophia Causton, which led him into difficulty, and occasioned, after some ludricous and some very serious scenes, his sudden and not very creditable departure from America.

He remained there a year and nine months without making, so far as we learn, a single attempt to

introduce Christianity among the Indians. He alleged that the Indians had expressed no wish for conversion; and if his conscience was indeed thus easily satisfied, he was yet very far removed from Christian perfection. Thus much indeed he certainly appears to have learnt from this first experiment on his own powers, that he was not yet qualified for the office of missionary; for he felt that he, who would have converted others, was not yet converted himself.

Wesley had sailed to America in the society of some Moravian missionaries, whose exalted piety had wrought deeply on his feelings, and given them some influence over his conduct. On his return to England, while he was already impressed with some sense of his own unworthiness, he became closely connected with Peter Boehler, a man of talents and authority, and a Moravian. Through his instructions Wesley became thoroughly convinced of his own unbelief, and began to pray, with all the ardour of his enthusiastic soul, for an instantaneous conversion. It was not long before he believed that his blessing was vouchsafed to him. On the evening of the 24th of May, 1733, as one of a society in Aldersgate Street was reading in his presence Luther's Preface to the Epistle to the Romans,' About a quarter before nine," says Wesley, "while he was describing the change which God works in the heart through faith in Christ, I felt my heart strangely warmed; I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone, for salvation; and an assurance was given me that He had taken away my sins, even mine, and saved me from the law of sin and death." Howbeit, when he returned home, he had still some more struggles with the evil one, and was again buffeted by temptations; but he was now triumphant through earnest prayer. “And herein," he adds, “I found the difference

between this and my former state chiefly to consist. I was striving, yea fighting, with all my might under the law, as well as under grace; but then I was sometimes, if not often, conquered; now I am always conqueror." This is justly considered as a remarkable day in the history of methodism; and Wesley himself attached so much importance to the change that had been wrought in him, that he scrupled not to proclaim, to the great scandal of some of his unregenerate friends, that he had never been a Christian until then.

His first act after his conversion was to set out on a visit to the celebrated Moravian colony, established, under the patronage of Count Zinzendorf, at Hernnhut in Lusatia. There he employed a fortnight in examining the doctrines and discipline of that sect, and then returned, as he went, on foot, "I would gladly have spent my life here; but my Master calling me to labour in another part of the vineyard, I was constrained to take my leave of this happy place." Yet he perceived clearly enough the imperfections in their method; and his intercourse with their noble patron was not such as to flatter the ambition, or even the independence, of his character. But he had acquired a knowledge of their system, and was thus qualified to apply to his own purposes any part of it which might hereafter serve them.

Wesley returned from his visit to Germany burning with religious enthusiasm, and presently entered into the path which Whitefield, his friend and disciple, had opened for him. The latter, who was a few years younger than Wesley, and like him educated at Oxford, and in orders, had begun a short time before to address the people in the air, at Kingswood near Bristol. Wesley, after some little hesitation, proceeding from his respect for

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