RELIGIOUS ENCYCLOPEDIA
Wesley
WESLEY, JOHN.
Youth (§ 1). Yn Oxford and Georgia (§ 2). Conversion; Open-air Preaching (§ 3).
Persecutions; Lay Preaching (§ 4). Chapels and Organizations (§ 5). Ordination of Ministers (§ 6).
Doctrines (§ 8). Personality and Activities (§ 9). Literary Work (§ 10).
Advocacy of Arminianism (§ 7).
John Wesley, the father of the doctrinal and practical system of Methodism, was born at Epworth (23 m. n.w. of Lincoln) June 28, 1703, and died in London Mar. 2, 1791. The Wesleys were of ancient
Saxon lineage, the family history being 1. Youth. traced backward to the time of Athelstan the Saxon, when Guy Wesley, or Wellesley, was created a thane or member of parliament. John Wesley was the son of Samuel Wesley (q.v.), a graduate of Oxford, and a minister of the Church of England, who had married in 1689 Susannah, the twenty-fifth child of Dr. Samuel Annesley, and herself became the mother of nineteen children; in 1696 he was appointed rector of Epworth, where John, the fifteenth child, was born. He was christened John Benjamin, but he never used the second name. An incident of his childhood was his rescue, at the age of six, from the burning rectory. The manner of his escape made a deep impression on his mind; and he spoke of himself as a “ brand plucked from the burning,” and as a child of Providence. The early education of all the children was given by Mrs. Wesley, a woman of remarkable intelligence and deep piety, apt in teaching, and wise and firm in governing. In 1713 John was admitted to the Charterhouse School, London, where he lived the studious, methodical, and (for a while) religious life in which he had been trained at home. In 1720 he entered Christ Church College, Oxford (M.A., 1727), was ordained deacon in 1725 and elected fellow of Lincoln College in the following year. He served his father as curate two years, and then returned to Oxford to fulfil his functions as fellow.
The year of his return to Oxford (1729) marks the beginning of the rise of Methodism. The famous “holy club” was formed; and its members, including John and Charles Wesley, were derisively called “ Methodists,”’ because of their methodical habits.
John had enjoyed during his early years
2. In a deep religious experience. He went, Oxford and says one of his best biographers, Georgia. Tyerman, to Charterhouse a saint; but he became negligent of his religious
duties, and left a sinner. In the year of his ordination he read Thomas 4 Kempis and Jeremy Taylor, and began to grope after those religious truths which underlay the great revival of the eighteenth century. The reading of Law’s Christian Perfection and Serious Call gave him, he said, a sublimer view of the law of God; and he resolved to keep it, inwardly and outwardly, as sacredly as possible, believing that in this obedience he should find salvation. He pursued a rigidly methodical and abstemious life; studied the Scriptures, and performed his religious duties with great diligence; deprived himself that he might have alms to give; and gave his heart, mind, and soul to the effort to live a godly life. When, in 1735, a clergyman “inured to contempt of the ornaments and conveniences of life, to bodily austerities, and to serious thoughts,” was wanted
by Governor Oglethorpe to go to Georgia, Wesley responded, and remained in the colony two years, returning to England in 1738, feeling that his mission, which was to convert the Indians and deepen and regulate the religious life of the colonists, had been a failure. His High-church notions, his strict enforcement of the regulations of the church, especially concerning the administration of the holy communion, were not agreeable to the colonists; and he left Georgia with several indictments pending against him (largely due to malice) for alleged violation of church law.
As Wesley’s spiritual state is the key to his whole career, an account of his conversion in the year of his return from Georgia may not be omitted. For
ten years he had fought against sin,
3. Conver- striven to fulfil the law of the Gospel, sion; Open- endeavored to manifest his righteousair ness; but he had not, he wrote, ob- Preaching. tained freedom from sin, nor the witness of the Spirit, because he sought
it, not by faith, but “‘ by the works of the law.”’ He had learned from the Moravians that true faith was inseparably connected with dominion over sin and constant peace proceeding from a sense of forgiveness, and that saving faith is given in a moment. This saving faith he obtained May 24, 1737-88, at a Moravian meeting in Aldersgate Street, London, while listening to the reading of Luther’s preface to the Epistle to the Romans, in which explanation of faith and the doctrine of justification by faith is given. “TI felt,” he wrote, ‘“ 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.” Two or three weeks later he preached a remarkable sermon, enforcing the doctrine of present personal salvation by faith, which was followed by another, on God’s grace “‘free in all, and free for all.’”” He never ceased in his whole subsequent career to preach this doctrine and that of the witness of the Spirit. He allied himself with the Moravian society in Fetter Lane, and in 1738 went to Herrnhut, the Moravian headquarters in Germany, to learn more of a people to whom he felt deeply indebted. On his return to England he drew up rules for the bands into which the Fetter Lane Society was divided, and published a collection of hymns for them. He met frequently with this and other religious societies in London, but did not preach often in 1738, because most of the parish churches were closed to him. His friend, George Whitefield (q.v.), the great evangelist, upon his return from America, was likewise excluded from the churches of Bristol; and, going to the neighboring village of Kingswood, he there preached in the open air, Feb., 1739, to a company of miners. This was a bold step, and Wesley hesitated to accept Whitefield’s earnest request to follow him in this innovation, But he overcame his scru-
Wesley
ples, and in April preached his first sermon in the open air, near Bristol. He said he could hardly reconcile himself to field-preaching, and would have thought, “ till very lately,” such a method of saving souls as “almost a sin.’”’ These open-air services were very successful; and he never again hesitated to preach in any place where an assembly could be got together, more than once using his father’s tombstone at Epworth as a pulpit. He spent upward of fifty years in field-preaching—entering churches when he was invited, taking his stand in the fields, in halls, cottages, and chapels, when the churches would not receive him. Late in 1739 a rupture with the Moravians in London occurred. Wesley had helped them organize in May, 1738, the Fetter Lane Society; and the converts of the preaching of himself, his brother, and Whitefield, had become members of their bands. But finding, as he said, that they had fallen into heresies, especially quietism, a separation took place; and so, at the close of 1739, Wesley was led to form his followers into a separate society. ‘“‘ Thus,” he wrote, “without any previous plan, began the Methodist Society in England.” Similar societies were soon formed in Bristol and Kingswood, and wherever Wesley and his coadjutors made converts. From 1739 onward Wesley and the Methodists were persecuted by clergymen and magistrates, attacked in sermon, tract, and book, 4. Persecu- mobbed by the populace, often in contions; Lay troversy, always at work among the Preaching. neglected and needy, and ever increasing. ‘They were denounced as promulgators of strange doctrines, fomenters of religious disturbances; as blind fanatics, leading the people astray, claiming miraculous gifts, inveighing against the clergy of the Church of England, and endeavoring to reestablish popery. Wesley was frequently mobbed, and great violence was done both to the persons and property of Methodists. Seeing, however, that the church failed in its duty to call sinners to repentance, that its clergymen were worldly minded, and that souls were perishing in their sins, he regarded himself as commissioned of God to warn men to flee from the wrath to come; and no opposition, or persecution, or obstacles were permitted by him to prevail against the divine urgency and authority of his commission. The prejudices of his Highchurch training, his strict notions of the methods and proprieties of public worship, his views of the apostolic succession and the prerogatives of the priest, even his most cherished convictions, were not allowed to stand in the way in which Providence seemed to lead. Unwilling that ungodly men should perish in their sins and unable to reach them from the pulpits of the Church, he began field-preaching. Seeing that he and the few clergymen cooperating with him could not do the work that needed to be done, he was led, as early as 1739, to approve tacitly, soon after openly, of lay preaching; and men who were not episcopally ordained were permitted to preach and do pastoral work. Thus one of the great features of Methodism, to which it has largely owed its success, was adopted by Wesley in answer to a necessity.