For the purpose of bringing out to view the distinctive characteristics in the mind and temper of remarkable men, it is customary to institute comparisons between such as seem to have been the most nearly allied, and this method has been attempted in the instance of John Wesley; but the attempt fails, inasmuch as the imagined analogies are factitious, not real. Wesley was not the founder of a religious order for the few, but an evangelist toward the mass of the people. He was not a reformer in theology, he was not an Athanasius, not an Augustine, not a Luther, not a John Knox. He was not a hierarchical machinator after the manner of Loyola. He was no philosopher or promulgator of a new light. He was not an orator born, even as Whitefield, to move the souls of men by the forces of vivid and profound emotion. Wesley's constitutional credulity was in fact a prominent feature in his temperament; yet his religious convictions were founded on reason. As a skilled formal logician he dealt only with words and propositions—only with the forms of thought; he did not touch intellectually upon the reality of things. But the better instincts of christian feeling carried him with force through all scholastic sophisms, and put him, as a preacher and as the chief of a community, in the place of command over the common reason and the consciences of men. In an Oxford disputation he might vanquish his opponent by syllogism; but he overthrew the illusions of self-love in the impenitent by the power of the greatest truths. Ambition was not Wesley's passion as a man, although he availed himself of motives and talents of this order as the means of accomplishing a purpose greater than secular ambition can grasp or can understand. That which he supremely desired was granted to him; for thousands of men were rescued from sin and perdition through his preaching; and since his death, in these seventy years, there is a vast multitude within the Wesleyan communion and beyond its pale that has accepted Christianity through the instrumentality of its preachers. At the present moment the statistics of Wesleyan methodism, roughly taken, and embracing the societies in Great Britain and America, whether in communion with the parent body or severed from it, the people and their ministers together show a number little short of two millions eight hundred thousand; and in so accepting this estimate, it should be granted that the fact of membership in the Wesleyan communion, if it does not imply quite so much as does membership in some other and much smaller christian sects, it implies something more than is supposed in those broad estimates of membership in national churches, which are based upon the mere fact of occupying pews in churches on the Sunday. The authentic sources of information concerning Wesley are—his own Journals, Letters, Sermons, and works, and the Life compiled by his executors. Coke and Moore: compilations many have from time to time appeared, some undertaken in the style of apologies, others apparently in malice, and some under a guise of philosophic impartiality.—I. T.
WESLEY, Samuel, father of the celebrated John and Charles Wesley, was born about the year 1662, and educated at Stoke Newington as a dissenting minister; but, shocked at the judicial murder of King Charles I., he joined the Church of England, walked to Oxford, and, about the age of sixteen, entered himself at Exeter college. With wonderful resolution, he supported himself by tuition till he took his degree. He was ordained in due course, and appointed a naval chaplain. He refused to read King James II.'s declaration in favour of popery, and, though a high churchman, he was the first who wrote in defence of the revolution in 1688. This work he dedicated to Queen Mary, who gave him the living of Epworth in Lincolnshire about 1693, and in 1723 he was presented to that of Wroote in the same county. Had Queen Mary lived, it is probable that he would have received valuable promotion. His "Commentary on Job" is the most elaborate of his numerous writings. Some of his minor poems are also worthy of notice on account of their grace and fluency. He died in 1735. His income was small, his family large, yet he was generous to the last, and his deathbed was as conspicuous for resignation as his life had been for diligence. Susannah Wesley, his wife, was a remarkable woman, and contributed much to the formation of her husband's and children's character. She died July 30, 1712, in the presence of her distinguished son. A little before she lost her speech, she said, "Children, as soon as I am released, sing a psalm of praise to God," a request dutifully complied with. An almost countless multitude attended her funeral.—T. J.
WESLEY, Samuel, M.A., son of the foregoing, born in 1693, was sent to Westminster school in 1704, and admitted a king's scholar in 1707. He could not speak till he was four years old, but then suddenly answered a question proposed to him. From early childhood he had a deep reverence for the Church of England. In 1711 he was elected to Christ church, Oxford, and soon after taking his degree was appointed usher at Westminster school. His intimacy with the earl of Oxford, Bishop Atterbury, and Mr. Pope, and his wit against Sir Robert Walpole, the minister of that day, prevented his appointment as second master of Westminster. At the age of forty-two he accepted the headmastership of the free school at Tiverton, where he died November 6, 1739, aged forty-eight years. His celebrated hymn, beginning "The morning flowers display their sweets," is sung and appreciated wherever the English language is known.—T. J.
WESSEL, Johann, a famous German scholar, was born at Groningen in 1419. After acquiring great proficiency during his curriculum at gymnasium and college, he declined to take the cowl; yet Delia Rovere, general of the Franciscan order, warmly patronized him, and on becoming pope, by the title of Sixtus IV., sent for him to Rome. His Holiness offered him any gift which he might request, and he asked only for a copy of the scriptures in Hebrew and Greek, which he had seen in the Vatican library. He soon retired from the papal court, and after a brief abode in various places he returned to his native city, where he taught philosophy and metaphysics till his death on the 4th of October, 1489. Wessel's influence was very great in his own times, and he himself was early influenced by Thomas à Kempis and the brethren of the Common Lot. In heart he was opposed to the Romish church. He longed to see around him a free, living piety, not the dead routine of ecclesiastical ceremony. He was, in short, what has been happily styled a reformer before the Reformation. The editions of his works are incomplete.—J. E.
WESSELING, Peter, a distinguished humanist, was born at Steinfurt, Westphalia, in 1692. He devoted himself to the study of classical literature in the universities of Franeker and Leyden, and in 1723 was appointed professor of eloquence and history in the former university. In 1735 he was called in the same capacity to Utrecht, where he died in 1764. Among his various editions those of Diodorns of Sicily, and of Herodotus are of the greatest value; and among his numerous treatises his "Romanorum Itineraria," his "Observationes Variæ," and his "Probabilia," deserve especial mention.—K. E.
WEST, Benjamin, president of the Royal Academy, one of the chiefs of the English school of historical painters, was by birth an American, though English by descent. He was of Quaker parentage, and was born at Springfield in Pennsylvania on the 10th of October, 1738. Having received some practical instruction from a painter of the name of Williams, young West set up as a portrait painter, first at Philadelphia, then at New York. In July, 1760, still but a youth, he went to Italy, and remained in that country, chiefly at Rome, three years. He then determined to return home, taking England on his way, but here he found an attraction he little dreamt of, one valuable connection following another in such a manner that he determined to settle here. He arrived in England in 1763; a young lady he had engaged himself to joined him here, and they were married in 1765. Dr. Drummond, archbishop of York, introduced West to the king, George III., and he was from that time almost exclusively employed by the king for upwards of thirty years, until 1811, when he had his last interview with his royal patron. The painter, however, seems to have been a gainer by the loss of the illustrious patronage, upon which he had so long depended. West received, on an average, above £1000 a year from George III., which was a considerable income at that time. His best pictures, however, and his largest prices, belong to the period subsequent to the year 1811, such as "Christ Healing the Sick;" "Christ Rejected;" "Death on the Pale Horse," &c. He was one of the original thirty-six members of the Royal Academy, established in 1768; and in 1792 he succeeded Sir Joshua Reynolds as president, a position he held till his death on the 11th of March, 1820. He loft two sons. His wife died in 1817. West lived at 14 Newman Street; and after his death, in 1822, an exhibition of his works was arranged in the three rooms constituting his gallery there, which consisted of no less than one hundred and forty-one pictures, comprising some of very large dimensions, including the great picture of "Christ Rejected," when they cry "Away with him, away with him,
