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John Wesley
by
John Wesley did not convert the Indians, because he could not find them, they being away on wars with the other tribes. Besides that, he could not speak their language and was wholly unused to their ways. The Indian does not unbosom himself to those who do not know him, and the few Indians Wesley saw were stubbornly set in the idea that they had quite as good a religion as his. And Wesley was persuaded that probably they had.
In the city of Savannah, there were just five hundred eighteen people when John Wesley was there. About half of these were degenerate sons of aristocrats, ex-convicts, soldiers of fortune, and religious enthusiasts–the rest were plain, every-day folk.
Pioneer people are too intent on maintaining life to go into the abstrusities of either ethics or theology. Wesley soon saw that his powers demanded a wider field. The experience, though, had done him much good, especially in two ways. He had gotten a glimpse of chattel slavery and made a remark about it that is forever fixed in literature, “Human slavery is the sum of all villainies.” Then he had met on shipboard a party of Moravians, and was so impressed by them that he straightway began to study German. In six weeks’ time he could carry on an acceptable conversation in that language. At the end of the two years which he spent in Georgia, through attending the services of the Moravians, he could read, write and preach in the German language.
The Moravians seemed to him the only genuine Christians he had ever seen, and their example of simple faith, industry, directness of speech, and purity of life made such an impress upon him that thereafter Methodism and Moravianism were closely akin.
At Savannah there were some people too poor to afford shoes, and when these people appeared at church in bare feet they were smiled at by the alleged nobility. Seeing this, on the following Sunday, John Wesley appeared barefoot in the pulpit, and this was his habit as long as he was in Georgia. This gave much offense to the aristocrats; and Wesley also made himself obnoxious by preaching salvation to the slaves. Indeed, this was the main cause of his misunderstanding with the Governor. Oglethorpe considered any discussion or criticism of slavery “an interference with property-rights.”
And so Wesley sailed back to England, sobered by a sense of failure, but encouraged by the example of the Moravians, who accepted whatever Providence sent, and counted it gain.
The overseers of Oxford, like Oglethorpe, had no special personal sympathy with the peculiar ideas of Wesley; but as a matter of policy they recognized that his influence in the great educational center was needed for moral ballast. And so his services were secured as Greek Professor and occasional preacher.
Concerning the moral status of Oxford at this time, Miss Wedgwood further says:
The condition of Oxford at the time of the rise of Methodism has been too little noted among those who have studied the great Evangelical Revival. Contemplating this important movement in its latter stage, they have forgotten that it took its rise in the attempt made by an Oxford tutor to bring back to the national institution for education something of that method which was at this time so disgracefully neglected. To surround a young man with illustrations of one kind of error is the inevitable preparation for making him a vehement partisan of its opposite, and in education the influence on which we can reckon most certainly is that of reaction. The hard external code and needless restrictions of Methodism should be regarded with reference to what Wesley saw in the years he spent in that abode of talent undirected and folly unrestrained.
It was to the Oxford here described–the Oxford where Gibbon and Adam Smith wasted the best years of their lives, and many of their unremembered contemporaries followed in their steps with issues not less disastrous to themselves, however unimportant to others–to the Oxford where young men swore to observe laws which they never read, and renewed a solemn promise when they had discovered the impossibility of keeping it–that Wesley, about a score of years after his entrance to the University, poured forth from the pulpit of Saint Mary’s such burning words as must have reached many a conscience in the congregation.