who was the first child I ever taught, learned the alphabet in a few hours." 1

Now it happened that a sense of public duty made the rector an assiduous attendant at meetings of Convocation. This was at an expense which his household could not properly afford. Also, it was at an expenditure of time somewhat to the disadvantage of the parish. During the periods of absence there was no Sunday afternoon service at Epworth. On the Sunday evenings the minister's wife would gather the family about her, pray with them, read a sermon, and then lead in religious conversation. Neighbours happening to come in were admitted to the circle. The numbers increased, and Mrs. Wesley was soon speaking to as many as two hundred people. When the absent rector was told that more were coming than the room would hold he felt impelled to write his wife a strong 1 Southey's Life of Wesley, p. 9.

word of objection. Because of her sex he said such arrangements "looked particular." Moreover, a scandalized curate had been writing the rector about the same irregularities. Correspondence on this difficulty goes to show that Susannah Wesley was a woman with a mind, and a mind of her own. Although having no vote in the realm of England, she could on occasion bring things to pass. Hear the dutiful

wife as she closes the discussion in which you are sure she had won the day :

"If you do, after all, think fit to dissolve this assembly, do not tell me that you desire me to do it, for that will not satisfy my conscience; but send me your positive command, in such full and express terms as may absolve me from guilt and punishment for neglecting this opportunity of doing good, when you and I shall appear before the great and awful tribunal of our Lord Jesus Christ."

1 Southey, p. 13.

III

THE SCHOLAR

1

On our way to finding, if we can, the hidings of the energy of John Wesley as of one exerting a religious influence "greater than that exercised by any individual Christian during the last three hundred years,” 1 we are under compulsion to take account of his scholarship and of the breadth of his mental life. To begin with, nothing is clearer than that he came of intellectual stock. The paternal grandmother was a niece of Thomas Fuller, the wit and historian, of whom Coleridge said that he was incomparably the most sensible, the least pre

1 Wm. Boyd Carpenter, Popular History of the Church of England, p. 364.

Indeed, his

judiced, great man of an age that boasted a galaxy of great men. Wesley's grandfather and namesake was, as we have seen, acknowledged a scholar in his University at Cambridge. The versatile rector of Epworth, John's father, graduated B.A. at Exeter College in the same University, was assuredly a man of parts. He published a life of Christ, a Latin commentary on the Book of Job, besides some minor writings and several volumes of verse. long poem on the Battle of Blenheim proved so acceptable-acceptable, that is, to the persons concerned that the Duke of Marlborough made Samuel Wesley, sen., the chaplain of a regiment. John was prepared for college at the Charterhouse school in London, and he was entered at Christ Church, Oxford, when he was seventeen. By that time he had already made good progress in Hebrew, thanks to the tutelage of an older brother, Samuel, who was after

wards headmaster at Blundell's.

Conceded

that the University was not in those days at its best estate, the undergraduate's training in the classics seems to have been of the typical Oxford quality, so that he was at home with his authors. From the year 1731 it became the life-long habit of John and Charles Wesley to correspond with each other in Latin. Long before he left the University he had accumulated material for a critical annotation of Horace. Seeing that Wesley was endowed with a relentlessly logical mind, it is not surprising to learn that logic was with him a subject of especial devotion. The narrative goes to show that logic was, to him, something that had to do with the business of life. So it is not without good grounds that Mr. Paul Elmer More, in one of his Shelburne Essays, touches on the "evangelical absolutism" of Wesley; or that Baron Friedrich von Hügel, the accomplished Roman