John Wesley
Born: June 28, 1703, Epworth, Lincolnshire, England.
Died: March 2, 1791, London, England.
Buried: City Road Chapel, London, England.
In the preface to the 1779 Collection of Hymns for the Use of the People called Methodists, John wrote:
I beg leave to mention a thought which has been long upon my mind, and which I should long ago have inserted in the public papers, had I not been unwilling to stir up a nest of hornets. Many gentlemen have done my brother and me (though without naming us) the honor to reprint many of our hymns. Now they are perfectly welcome to do so, provided they print them just as they are. But I desire they would not attempt to mend them, for they are really not able. None of them is able to mend either the sense or the verse. Therefore, I must beg of them these two favors: either to let them stand just as they are, to take things for better or worse, or to add the true reading in the margin, or at the bottom of the page, that we may no longer be accountable either for the nonsense or for the doggerel of other men.
John and his brother Charles founded the
movement which became the Methodist denomination. Charles was the main hymnist
in the family, but John translated a number of hymns (mostly German) himself. He
began studying the German language on board the ship Simmons, which
carried him and Charles to Georgia in 1735. Also on the ship were 26 German
Moravian colonists, and Wesley wanted to be able to talk with them and share in
their worship services.
John was born at Epworth in Lincolnshire, June 17, 1703. An
eminent evangelist and divine, the founder of the Methodists. He was the son of
a clergyman of the Church of England, and he himself became a clergyman, after
having been educated at the Charterhouse School, and at Christ Church, Oxford.
The year after Wesley took orders (1725) he was chosen a Fellow of Lincoln
College, and was appointed lecturer on Greek; but shortly afterwards he became
curate to his father, and labored at Epworth and in the neighborhood, where his
father was vicar, until he returned to Oxford in 1729. It was during his
residence at Oxford that the first Methodist Society was formed, and his brother
Charles, being accustomed to meet together with a few others for the purpose of
mutual edification. Wesley continued to act as tutor at Oxford until 1735, when
he was induced to visit Georgia in North America. After about two years he
returned to England, and soon after commenced preaching in association with his
friend George Whitefield, from whom, however, he separated in 1740 on account of
a difference in theological belief. His labors were incessant. During fifty
years he traveled all over the country everywhere preaching the gospel, and
founding societies. At the same time, he administered the affairs of an
organization which at the time of his death embraced no fewer than 80,0000
members, and during the whole period, he was a very copious writer. His works,
when first collected, amounted to no fewer than 32 volumes. During the whole of
his career he continued still, professedly, a minister of the Church of England.
Wesley died in the house adjoining his chapel in the City Road, London, 1791,
and in the adjoining graveyard he was buried. His brother Charles, who died
three years before him, is chiefly celebrated as the author of numerous hymns,
some of which are considered among the best in the language.
A defining image of John Wesley's life is that of 6-year-old
"Jacky," as he was known, being rescued from an upper window of the
blazing rectory in Epworth, England. This dramatic event gave rise to the
biblical description of him by his mother, Susannah, as "a brand plucked
out of the burning" - someone whom God had saved for a special purpose.
This conviction drove the founder of the Methodist movement
throughout his life, for he felt the hand of providence upon him.
The story of the Epworth rectory fire traditionally handed
down is that, shortly before midnight on Feb. 9, 1709, members of the Wesley
household awoke to find the thatched roof of the rectory ablaze and the house
filling with smoke. John Wesley's father, Samuel, his wife and servants hurried
the children downstairs and out into the garden, but only to find one of them,
young Jacky - the second of their three sons at this time - missing. Repeatedly,
the rector tried to fight his way back into the house, but the flames drove him
back.
Then a small figure appeared against the glow of the flames
in an upstairs window. Jacky had awakened to find himself alone in the house
with the rafters above his head on fire. He groped his way to the head of the
stairs, only to find them impassable. Though trapped, Wesley seemed to know even
then how to keep his head in a crisis. Dragging a chest to the bedroom window,
he climbed onto it, and someone in the yard below spotted him.
Would-be rescuers had no time to fetch a ladder, and the
boy's plight seemed desperate. Then someone had an idea and ran toward the
house, calling a companion to follow him. One of them climbed on the shoulders
of the other, and though they barely reached the windowsill, the two saved the
boy. A moment later, the rectory's roof crashed down.
The Wesley family had lost everything and was homeless until
the rectory was rebuilt, but what did it matter, as long as everyone was safe?
Nearly 200 years later, a footnote to the episode of the
rectory fire appeared in an edition of the British weekly newspaper, the
Methodist Recorder, published in 1903. A letter arrived at the London-based
Recorder from a Mrs. Rowson of Taylors' Falls in Chicago, widow of a Methodist
Episcopal minister, the Rev. A.E. Rowson. Referring to a previous article in the
newspaper about Epworth, she wrote:
"The whole article was interesting to me, but I
specially noted the sentence referring to the rescue of John Wesley from the
burning rectory, which said: 'The names of those two men should have been handed
down to posterity, for who can realize the benefit they conferred upon
humanity?' "I am proud to inform you I am a descendant of the man who stood
on the shoulders of another and took the boy from the window of the burning
house. My sainted and honored father, the late William Kirk, of Retford,
Nottinghamshire, was born at a village in the Isle of Axholme, just a few miles
from Epworth, and this man, whose name was 'Clark,' was his
great-great-grandfather."
So this was the man who, literally, plucked the brand from
the burning.
Wesley's own sense of the importance of that event became
evident in November 1753 when, at age 50, he fell ill and believed he would die
from consumption. He went so far as to write the inscription that he desired to
have placed on his tombstone:
"Here lieth the Body of John Wesley, a brand plucked out
of the burning: who died of a consumption in the fifty-first year of his age,
not leaving, after his debts are paid, ten pounds behind him: praying, God be
mercifully to me, an unprofitable servant!"
Fortunately, Wesley recovered and went on to live for another
37 years, achieving much more as a "brand plucked out of the burning."
John Wesley was a life-long opponent of slavery. His
biography is well known, and is told in many places, both on the web and in many
published works. His opposition to slavery and the slave trade began long before
the issue had received widespread attention, and was sustained throughout his
life. Indeed, his attitudes to slavery were formed early. In 1736-7 Wesley
visited the then British colony of Georgia in North America where he came into
contact with slaves. At the same time, he read Thomas Southerne's play Oroonoko,
which was based on Aphra Behn's novel of the same name, and which related the
tragedy of Oroonoko, an African prince kidnapped and sold into slavery. On his
return to England, he passed the time on the long transatlantic voyage by
teaching a young black man, presumably a slave, how to read and write.
These experiences fostered in Wesley an abhorrence of
slavery, but it was not an abhorrence he felt able to act upon. In his journal,
Wesley records meeting with people involved in the slave trade - including the
slave-ship captain John Newton, now more famous as the author of the hymn
"Amazing Grace". Newton's conversion to Christianity was later
followed by a conversion to anti-slavery, but it is not recorded if he and
Wesley discussed the issue. In 1772, the Somerset case, brought before the
courts by Granville Sharp, put slavery in the news.
Wesley remained actively
opposed to slavery until his death. In August 1787, he wrote to the Abolition
Committee to express his support, and he pledged to reprint Thoughts Upon
Slavery in "a new large edition". For some reason this fifth
edition did not appear until 1792, a year after Wesley's death. In 1788, when
the abolition campaign was at its height, he preached a sermon in Bristol, one
of the foremost slave trading ports. In such a location, at such a time, an
anti-slavery sermon could not have been preached without considerable personal
risk to the preacher. Indeed, during the sermon a disturbance took place which
Wesley recorded in his journal:
About the middle of the discourse, while there was on every side attention still as night, a vehement noise arose, none could tell why, and shot like lightening through the whole congregation. The terror and confusion were inexpressible. You might have imagined it was a city taken by storm. The people rushed upon each other with the utmost violence; the benches were broke in pieces, and nine-tenths of the congregation appeared to be struck with the same panic.Wesley ascribed the confusion to "some preternatural influence. Satan fought, lest his kingdom should be delivered up." A more likely cause, perhaps, was a plot by slave-traders, anxious to disrupt a piece of abolitionist rhetoric being sounded deep in their territory. How strong this rhetoric was is impossible to tell as the 1788 sermon has not survived. Nonetheless, it is reasonable to assume that it was based in some measure on his pamphlet Thoughts Upon Slavery which was strongly argued. Wesley maintained an interest in the abolition movement until the end: on his death-bed, he was reading the Interesting Narrative of Olaudah Equiano, a text which Wesley discussed in his last letter - to William Wilberforce - written six days before he died, on 2 March 1791.
Hymns
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