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So they were married, and were miserable ever afterward.

Mrs. Wesley was glib, shallow, fussy, and never knew that her husband belonged to the world, and to her only incidentally. She took sole charge of him and his affairs; ordered people away who wanted to see him if she did not like their looks; opened his mail; rifled his pockets; insisted that he should not go to the homes of poor people; timed his hours of work; and religiously read his private journal and demanded that it should be explained. This woman should have married a man who kept no journal, and one for whom no one cared. As it was, no doubt she suffered up to her capacity, which perhaps was not great, for God puts a quick limit on the sensibilities of the stupid.

She even pulled him about by the hair before they had been married a year; and made faces at him as he preached, saying sotto voce, “I’ve heard that so often that I’m sick of it.” In company, she would sometimes explain to the assembled guests what a great and splendid man her first husband was.

But worst of all, she took Wesley’s faithful saddle-horse “Timothy,” and hitched him alongside of a horse of her own to a chaise, with a postboy in a red suit on his back, tooting a horn.

Poor Wesley groaned, and inwardly said, “It is a trial sent by God–I must bear it all.”

Finally the woman renounced him and left for Scotland. He then stole his own horse from her stable, and rode away as in the good old days. But alas! in a month she was on his trail. She caught up with him at Birmingham and fell on his neck, after the service, explaining that she was Mrs. John Wesley. The poor man could neither deny it nor run away, without making a scene, and so she accompanied him to his lodgings.

Her protests of reformation vanished in a week, and the marks of her nails were again on his fine face. This program was kept up for thirty-one years, with all the variations possible to a jealous woman, who had an income sufficient to allow her to indulge her vagaries and still move in good society. On October Fourteenth, Seventeen Hundred Eighty-one, Wesley wrote in his Journal, “I am told my wife died Monday and was buried on this evening.”

Wesley once wrote to Asbury, “She has cut short my life full twenty years.” If this were true, one can see how Wesley would otherwise have made the century run. However, Wesley was right: it was not all bad; the Law of Compensation never sleeps, and as a result of his unfortunate marriage, Wesley knew things which men happily married never know.

John Wesley did not blame anybody for anything. Once when he saw a drunken man reeling through the street, he turned to a friend and said, “But for the grace of God, there goes John Wesley!” All his biographies agree that after his fiftieth year his power as a preacher increased constantly until he was seventy-five. He grew more gentle, more tender, and there was about him an aura of love and veneration, so that even his enemies removed their hats and stood silent in his presence. And we might here paraphrase his own words and truly say of him, as he said of Josiah Wedgwood, “He loved flowers and horses and children–and his soul was near to God!”

The actual reason for breaking away or “coming out” is a personal antipathy for the leader. Like children playing a game, theologians reach a point where they say, “I’ll not play in your back yard.” And not liking a man, we dislike his music, his art, his creed. So they divide on free grace, foreordination, baptism, regeneration, freedom of the will, endless punishment, endless consequences, conversion, transubstantiation, sanctification, infant baptism, or any one of a dozen reasons which do not represent truth, but are all merely a point of view, and can honestly be believed before breakfast and rejected afterward.