of the opposition of the churchwardens to his opinions and teaching, he now devoted himself with great energy to the spiritual improvement of prisoners in gaols, and the miners in Cornwall, Northumberland, and Yorkshire—sharing his brother's peculiar labours, persecutions, and success. On the 8th of April, 1749, he married Miss Sarah Gwynne, a young lady in every respect suitable to him, and with whom he lived happily many years. Our space does not allow us to enumerate the many controversies in which he took a part with churchmen, Roman catholics, Moravians, and dissenters, or his journeys in different parts of England and Ireland in connection with the development of Methodism. He died on the 29th of March, 1788; and his monument in his brother's chapel in the City Road describes him as "a firm and pious believer in the doctrines of the gospel, and a sincere friend to the Church of England." He was little in stature, short-sighted, abrupt in his manners, well versed in classical and biblical literature, but his chief power was that of a hymn-writer. Had he devoted himself to secular literature, he would have taken a high rank among the poets of his country. In satire he proved himself not inferior to Churchill; in fluency and vigour he sometimes approached Dryden himself. As a hymn-writer, he disputes the palm with Dr. Watts, who did not scruple to say that the verses by Charles Wesley, entitled "Wrestling Jacob," were worth all the poetry he himself had written. The fluency of his versification was extraordinary. He had a hymn for every occasion, and could compose a new psalm for a funeral or a wedding with equal facility. It is doubtful whether any human agency whatever, the Book of Common Prayer excepted, has contributed more to form the character of English Christianity in many parts of the world than the hymns of Charles Wesley.—T. J.
WESLEY, John, the founder of Methodism in its principal form, and the form which bears his name; and more than this, a leader, sharing this distinction with George Whitefield, in that great renovation of christian life in England and in America, which has had its course in the last hundred years. Charles Wesley, his younger brother, will necessarily, from their intimate connection, he frequently mentioned in the present memoir. John Wesley, born at Epworth, Lincolnshire, 17th June, 1703, was the second son of Samuel Wesley, or Westley, rector of that parish, who was grandson of one of the ejected ministers of 1662, and who had imbibed the firm principles of the puritan and nonconforming party; but having conceived a disgust at some extravagance which he had witnessed among them, he had conformed to the church, had received his education at Exeter college, Oxford, and had obtained preferment. His wife, Susannah, a woman of great intelligence, much good sense, and fervent piety, was the daughter of Dr. Annesley, an ejected minister; but she also had conformed, and, in doing so, had taken higher ground than her husband, and had refused to acknowledge the prince of Orange as the lawful king of England. Thus it may be thought that John Wesley inherited from his parents whatever, either in the principles and spirit of nonconformity or of conformity, of liberalism or of nonjuring loyalty, might best fit him for the work of his life. Samuel was the eldest of the three sons of this family, and Charles the youngest; and it was he who, although of a very different conformation of mind, gave the aid of his good judgment, and of his deep piety, and his eminent talents as a poet, to his brother John in his public course as the founder and the head of Methodism. The three sons—Samuel (eleven years older than John), John, and Charles —had received an excellent training under the paternal roof, and especially as this religious influence was directed by their mother. John was sent to the Charter-house school at a very early age, where the hardships he cheerfully endured seemed to have reconciled him to a system in the treatment of boys which, with amazing unconsciousness of its baneful severity, he carried out afterwards in the school at Kingswood. In his seventeenth year he entered Christ church, Oxford, where his assiduity, his quick apprehension, and his steadiness of conduct, brought him into notice, while these solid qualities were recommended by vivacity and a social disposition. He obtained a fellowship in Lincoln college in 1726, and presently afterwards was appointed Greek lecturer. When the time for his ordination drew near, his sense of the responsibility of the christian ministry impelled him to hesitate; nor was it until after much serious thought, and a renewed attention to theological studies, that this conscientious reluctance gave way. He received deacon's orders from Dr. Potter, bishop of Oxford, in 1725, and not long afterwards officiated as curate to his father at Wroote, where he continued two years, during which time he was ordained priest. Already his sense of religion had been deepened by the perusal of the De Imitatione, and still more so by the study of Jeremy Taylor's Rules of Holy Living and Dying; and then on his return to Oxford, where his brother Charles was pursuing his studies, he found himself by his brother's introduction one of a band of young men whose devotedness and zeal had already drawn upon them a designation which was destined to endure. "Methodism" had received its title some while before the time when it took to itself Wesley's name. In this society of earnest young men, the foremost place was soon granted to the strongest —to the governing mind. But the two Wesleys, John and Charles, with Hervey, author of the Meditations, and George Whitefield, constituted the nucleus of the company—mocked as fools and enthusiasts by those about them; but in truth, notwithstanding many errors of the moment, cherishing in their hearts the true wisdom. John Wesley's intercourse with William Law, author of the books, Christian Perfection and the Serious Call, had great effect in deepening his religious impressions, although in the end he rejected with vivacity the teaching of this, not enlightened, but earnest writer. Extreme in his own ascetic practices, he wished to rest these practices upon ground of his own choosing; and self-reliant as men are who are destined to do great things, he refused the offer of succeeding his father at Epworth, setting at nought the earnest wishes and the advice of his father, of his brother Samuel, and of the bishop who had ordained him. Soon after his father's death he acceded to the proposal of General Oglethorpe to accompany him as secretary to Georgia, a recently established colony; and he embarked for that destination with his brother Charles, in October, 1735. On board the ship there was a party of Moravian missionaries, with whom Wesley formed an intimacy which had great effect upon his opinions and his course in after years. His stay in the colony was short; nor was his residence there, or his connection with the governor, in any sense auspicious. He returned to England after an absence of little more than two years. In these two years ascetic methodism had passed into a new mode—a mode more free, more evangelic—mainly under the guidance of Whitefield, who had already become popular as a preacher, we may say as an orator. But Whitefield had sailed for Georgia when Wesley landed in England. He now renewed his intimacy with the Moravian brethren, from whom, although he afterwards broke off all connection, he drew much religious advantage; and while still inclined to listen to these teachers, he visited their establishment at Herrnhut in 1738. On his return to England he found Whitefield returned also from Georgia, and who in London and at Bristol was making great progress as an evangelic preacher. The two men, differing so greatly as they did in qualifications and dispositions, nevertheless worked well in conjunction, until their divergence in doctrine impelled them to take different paths, still intending alike the welfare of their fellows and the glory of God. Whitefield had set the example of out-of-doors preaching, which Wesley, not without reluctance, at length followed. Led forward by his zeal, and driven forward also by the blind intolerance of ecclesiastical persons, he advanced on the course of irregular evangelization, admitting the aid of lay preachers, and giving encouragement, step by step, to modes of worship which the episcopal church disallowed, and which it still disallows. Motives of the highest order carried Wesley forward into the midst of what might have issued in wide-spread confusion; but his genius for government, and his spirit of order, soon brought this chaos under the most perfect control. Thus it was that a pattern of ecclesiastical mechanism has had its birth, under excitements which seemed to threaten a very different result. A large room in Fetter Lane was the cradle of Methodism, and here Wesley and Whitefield, still cordially at one, presided at meetings that were often continued through the night. At Bristol, the moving eloquence of the latter among the savage population of the Kingswood collieries, gave an impulse to this religious movement, which probably would never have resulted from the less general preaching of the former. It was now demonstrated in a manner the most signal and conclusive, that the gospel, when it is freely proclaimed, has power, as at first, to vanquish the human heart, and to reclaim the lost and the obdurate. It is a fact worthy of deep attention, that while Whitefield's moving eloquence touched the hearts of the
