A Strange Missionary

Wesley’s mission to America, as we have seen, might be fitly described as a pilgrimage in search of a religion. And it was a pilgrimage which failed! He embarked for Georgia on October 13, 1735, and landed on his return at Deal on February 1, 1738, thus spending nearly two years and a half in the experiment. He emerged from it, in the end, more profoundly dissatisfied with himself than at the beginning. The spiritual progress of those twenty-eight arduous and suffering months can be measured by two significant extracts with dates. On October 10, 1735, before embarking for Georgia, he describes in words already quoted what he expected to find in America: —

“My chief motive is the hope of saving my own soul. I hope to learn the true sense of the Gospel of Christ by preaching it to the heathen. I cannot hope to attain the same degree of holiness here which I may there.”

In his Journal, when on his “way back from America, he sums up what he had actually gained under American skies: —

“I went to America to convert the Indians; but, O! who shall convert me? ... It is now two years and almost four months since I left my native country in order to teach the Georgian Indians the nature of Christianity; but what have I learned myself in the meantime? Why, what I the least of all suspected; that I who went to America to convert others was never myself converted to God.”

It is true that when, many years afterwards, Wesley reprinted those sentences in his Journal, he added the significant note, “I am not sure of this”; but the words at least expressed faithfully his judgment on himself when he landed on English soil again. He had gone to America in the hope of finding there what Oxford and the Holy Club had failed to yield him — a clear religious experience. He returns with a more bitter and crushing self-discontent than ever. And the story of those months on a strange soil and under strange skies is not the least instructive chapter in Wesley’s spiritual history.

The little group of missionaries consisted of John Wesley, his brother Charles — who held the post of secretary to General Oglethorpe, the governor of the colony — Benjamin Ingham, and Charles Delamotte, both members of the Holy Club. Two others, Hall and Salmon, were to join the party; but Hall, who was Wesley’s brother-in-law, almost at the moment of embarkation received news of his appointment to a benefice, and promptly unpacked his luggage. He was not of the stuff of which martyrs and saints are made! Salmon was intercepted by his friends and prevented from going almost by force.

The voyage lasted from October 14, 1735, to February 5, 1736, a fact which shows how leisurely was the navigation of those days. With the voyage begins Wesley’s immortal Journal, a bit of literature once strangely neglected, and now almost over-praised. For naturalness, incident, variety, and imperishable interest it undoubtedly deserves to be classed with “Boswell.” Over Boswell’s “Johnson,” indeed, the Journal has the advantage that it deals with a greater figure than even the famous lexicographer, and the hero of it is also the writer. The Journal, again, is not a book of gossip; it is an autobiography. It gives us Wesley, not as seen from the outside, but as Wesley saw himself. It enables us, in a word, to look at men, books, and events through John Wesley’s eyes and to see Wesley himself as interpreted — and sometimes as misinterpreted — by his own conscience.

If the voyage was leisurely, Wesley and his companions spent it in no leisurely mood. They began by drawing up and signing a solemn bond betwixt themselves. It bears date November 3, and runs: —

“In the name of God, Amen! We, whose names are underwritten, being fully convinced that it is impossible either to promote the work of God among the heathen without an entire union among ourselves, or that such a union should subsist unless each one will give up his single judgment to that of the majority, do agree, by the help of God: — First, that none of us will undertake anything of importance without first proposing it to the other three; secondly, that whenever our judgments differ, any one shall give up his single judgment or inclination to the others; thirdly, that in case of an equality, after begging God’s direction, the matter shall be decided by lot.

John Wesley.
V Charles Wesley.

Benjamin Ingham.
Chables Delamottk.”

Here we have Wesley’s iustiuct for order and fellowship registering itself. The missiouaries were not to be separate units, but a disciplined company. In the last words of that bond, too, we have the practice of sortilege — which runs intermittently through all Wesley’s after years — erected into a law and made the ultimate standard of decision in all doubtful matters.

The voyage was regarded by the little group as an opportunity for trying all sorts of heroic experiments with themselves. It gave them a welcome chance of shedding old habits. They reduced the number of their meals, and limited their diet to rice and biscuits. Wesley, owing to an accident, had to sleep on the floor one night without a bed, and so made the delightful discovery that a bed was a suj)erfluity. It could in future be dispensed with. The ascetic, not to say the monk, was emerging once more in Wesley’s life! He acted on the theory that his soul was a besieged fortress, and each physical sense was an avenue standing wide open to his foes. An appetite starved into submission, or otherwise suppressed, was a traitor hanged!

In other ways the ship that carried these strange missionaries was turned into a floating monastery. Each hour of the day was assigned to a specific task. They rose at four o’clock in the morning, and went through a succession of ordered tasks — meditations and spiritual exercises — that left not one moment of perilous space for leisure, till ten o’clock at night when sleep came.

One incident of the voyage served as a sharp test to Wesley of his own spiritual condition. Amongst the passengers he found a little group of Moravian exiles, who, by the simplicity and seriousness of their piety, strangely interested him. A storm broke over the ship one evening just as these simple-minded Germans had begun a religious service; Wesley describes what follows: — “In the midst of the Psalm wherewith their service began, the sea broke over, split the mainsail in pieces, covered the ship, and poured in between the decks as if the great deep had already swallowed us up. A terrible screaming began amongst the English. The Germans calmly sang on. I asked one of them afterwards, ‘Was you not afraid?’ He answered, ‘I thank God, no.’ I asked, ‘But were not your women and children afraid?’ He replied mildly, ‘No; our women and children are not afraid to die.’ From them I went to their crying, trembling neighbours, and pointed out to them the difference in the hour of trial between him that feareth God and him that feareth Him not.”

Now, Wesley knew that he had not mastered the secret of that strange contempt of death. “I have a sin of fear,” he said then, and for many a day afterwards. And he knew that the touch of death has for religion the oflBce of an acid on gold. It is a test — the most searching of tests. And under the touch of that dreadful acid of fear, Wesley’s religion at this stage failed him.

It was not that he recoiled from the mere icy breath of death; else would he have had less courage than the recruiting sergeant can buy in every market for a few pence a day. But there are mysterious elements in death, which make it the symbol of sin’s triumph, the crowning act of sin’s dark reign. The human soul is dimly conscious that in moral evil there are dark and strange forces — depths unsounded, relations with God and His universe unrealised — and death brings the soul face to face with these last and uttermost elements of wrong-doing. So it is that sin and death, while strangely akin, are strangely abhorrent to each other. And as Wesley’s religion at this stage failed to deliver him from the fear of death, he judged, right enough, that he had not yet found in it any complete deliverance from sin, death’s sad ancestress.

Directly he landed, too, Wesley found himself face to face with the challenge of what was to him a quite new type of piety. He eagerly sought out the head of the little Moravian community’, August Spangenberg, and, with that fine humility which was characteristic of one side of his nature, asked his advice — as Wesley himself puts it — “with regard to my own conduct.” The simple-minded Moravian pastor proceeded to put Wesley to the question: —

“He said, ‘My brother, I must first ask you one or two questions. Have you the witness within yourself? Does the Spirit

of God bear witness with your spirit that you are a child of God?’” ‘I was surprised,’ records Wesley, ‘and knew not what to

answer. He observed it, and asked, “Do you know Jesus Christ?”

I paused and said, “I, know He is the Saviour of the world.” “‘True,’ he replied; ‘but do you know He has saved youT’” ‘I answered, “I hope He has died to save me.” He only

added, “Do you know yourself?” I said, “I do.” But I fear they

were vain words.’”

Wesley was the last man in the world to resent questioning so frank and courageous; but it is clear that the challenge of the plain-spoken Moravian disquieted him. He does not seem to have been struck by the circumstance that an echo of his father’s dying words — “The inward witness, son, the inward witness” — from the lips of a man of another race and another theological school, thus met him as he put his foot on the soil of the new world.

Wesley, however, was strangely drawn to the Moravians. He lived with them for a while, and saw their piety in what might be called its household dress. It was the most beautiful form of piety he had yet witnessed — the ordered devoutness and diligence of the Epworth Rectory repeated, with a strain of gladness running through it the Epworth household hardly knew. Wesley was pressent, again, at a Moravian service held for the election and ordination of a bishop, and he records how the grave simplicity of the proceedings made him forget the seventeen centuries that had fled, and imagine himself in one of those assemblies where form and state were not, but Paul the tentmaker, or Peter the fisherman, presided.

It is curious to note, however, that though the simplicity of Moravin piety moved Wesley’s admiration, and the certainty of Moravian faith awakened his envy, yet all this did not in the least abate the fury of his own sacerdotal zeal. The very centre of his religion was, no doubt, unconsciously shifting; but the outer crust of the High Churchman — the external habit of his life — was almost more rigid and austere than ever.

It was a strange human field on which Wesley was now at work. The colony of Georgia represents, perhaps, the most generous experiment in settlement known to history. Its founder was General Oglethorpe — scholar, soldier, politician, knight-errant, philanthropist, and through it all — for he was the son of an Irish mother — a generous, hot-blooded, irresponsible Irishman. He had been a student at Oxford, a soldier in the British Army; he had fought on the Continent under Prince Eugene, and in the British Parliament had anticipated Howard as a philanthropist. The condition of debtors in English prisons moved his warm-hearted pity. He secured the appointment of a Parliamentry Committee to report on the condition of the great English prisons, the Fleet and the Marshalsea; and as an incidental result, the plan for forming a settlement in South Carolina emerged. The settlement was vested in trustees; Oglethorpe was appointed governor; large sums of money were raised to start the colony; and a code of regulations was drawn up, which, if not in every detail of perfect wisdom, at least represented very noble ideals.

One clause prohibited slavery, as contrary not only to the Gospel, but to the fundamental laws of England. It would have been well for the Southern States of America, and for the whole history of the English-speaking race, if Oglethorpe’s regulations for his settlement at this point had been universally adopted. Their ab.sence was, later, to cost the United States the most dreadful civil war known to history. The most difficult social and political problem the great transatlantic Republic has to solve would never have existed if the Georgian precedent had been followed.

But the new colony not only represented a great social experiment; it offered a refuge for social failures of every kind — English debtors. Highland .Jacobites, Moravian refugees, the wrecks of commerce and of politics, the victims of religious persecution. The settlement was thus a cluster of unrelated human atoms, representing social, political, and racial types of very diverse kinds. It was, moreover, planted on the soil, and breathed the airs of a new world, with ancient conventions forgotten, and a new liberty fermenting in its very blood. It constituted an ideal field for social and religious experiments. And, as his contribution to the peace of the new settlement, We.sley was bent on enforcing, by priestly discipline, the strictest reading of the rubric! He would stamj) the usages — or what he imagined to be the usages — of the first Christian century on a community living in the eighteenth!

This proves how completely the ecclesiastic and the sacerdotalist were dominant in Wesley. He worked solely on what mky be called the ecclesiastical plane. Thus he instituted both early and forenoon services for every day. He divided the morning service, taking the Litany apart.- He celebrated the Lord’s Supper every week, but refused it to all who had not been episcopally baptized. He revived what he believed to be the Apostolic practice of baptism by immersion. He re-baptized the children of dissenters, and refused admission to the Lord’s Supper to the pastor of the Salzburgers because — though he had been baptized — it was not done in severely correct canonical fashion. Nearly twenty years afterwards, recalling this incident, he wrote, “Can High Church bigotry go farther than this? And how well since I have been beaten with mine own staff.” The indictment against Wesley, drawn up by the grand jury of Savannah in 1737, consists of ten articles, and to one of these Wesley with every sign of penitence pleaded guilty. His crime consisted of having baptized an Indian trader’s child with only two sponsors! “This,” cries the conscience-stricken ritualist, “I own, was wrong; I ought at all hazards to have refused baptizing it till he had procured a third.”

There spoke the true High Churchman, who not only believes that spiritual and eternal issues hang on mechanical forms, but will sacrifice them for the sake of the forms! On Wesley’s theory the eternal destiny of the child turned on its being baptized. Yet, even at that dreadful hazard, Wesley believed he ought to have refused to baptize it in the absence of a third sponsor!

But if Wesley’s standard was severe for others, it was nothing less than heroic for himself. Zeal for high ideals of conduct and service burnt in him like a flame. There were no austerities of self-denial from which he shrank. He visited his parishioners from house to house in order, taking for that business the hours betwixt twelve and three, when all work was suspended on account of the heat. He lived with the i)lainuess and simplicity of an anchorite. In one of the schools which he and Delamotte taught, some of the poorer scholars went barefoot, and the more comfortably dressed children looked down with contempt on their unshod companions. To cui*e that pride Wesley himself, for a while, went with naked feet. He lived practically on dry bread, and interspersed even that rudimentary diet with incessant fasts. The social impulse in Wesley reappears in Georgia. A wise and sure instinct warned him that solitary religion would perish, and, as at Oxford, he organised his flock into little societies which met once a week, or oftener, in order to improve, instruct, and exhort one another.

But Wesley’s ministry at Savannah failed, exactly as it did at W>oot, and with even more dramatic completeness. It was empty of true spiritual force. It failed to make men better. It bred strife. “How is it,” asked Oglethorpe, bewildered by the ecclesiastical quarrels that filled the air on every side — “how is it that there is no love, no meekness, no true religion amongst the people; but instead of this, mere formal prayers?” Wesley, in Southey’s words, instead of feeding his flock with milk, was “drenching them with the physic of an intolerant discipline”; and human nature rebelled against the bitter dose.

One angry parishioner — as Wesley faithfully records in his Journal — told him, “I like nothing you do. All your sermons are satires upon particular persons; therefore I will never hear you more, and all the people are of my mind.” His puzzled hearers, this plain-spoken critic went on to say, were unable to decide whether Wesley was a Protestant or a Roman Catholic. “They never heard of such a religion before. They do not know what to make of it. And then your private behaviour. All the quarrels that have been since you came have been along of you.... Aud so you may preach long enough, but nobody will come to hear you.”

If at Savannah his parishioners were quarrelling with John Wesley, at Frederica both the governor and the people were in angry feud with Charles Wesley. Charles was as austere as his brother John, and had, perhaps, even less tact. Within a month his parishioners were in open rebellion against him, and tried to ruin him with the governor by accusing him of a design to destroy the colony. The unfortunate governor found that his chaplains were mere human storm-centres. “What would an unbeliever say to your raising these disorders?” he demanded of Charles Wesley in bitter tones.

Oglethorpe was a man of impetuous temper and unrestrained speech; his underlings naturally exaggerated these qualities, and outvied him in the steps they took against the unfortunate chaplain. Charles Wesley was practically denied the ordinary necessaries of existence. A bed was provided out of the public stores to every one else in the settlement, but denied to the too zealous divine, who, while suffering from a low fever, had yet to sleep on the ground. “Thank God,” said poor Charles Wesley, “it is not yet made capital to give me a morsel of bread!” But his life, he seriously believed, was more than once attempted.

Oglethorpe a little later was starting out to meet a descent by the Spaniards upon the new settlement. The odds against him were desperate; he believed he would never return, and he took leave of his secretary and chaplain in very high-strung fashion.

“‘I am now going to death,’ he said. ‘You will see me no more.’

“‘If I am speaking to you for the last time,’ replied his secretary, ‘hear what you will quickly know to be the truth as soon as you are entered upon a separate state. ... I have renounced the world. Life is a bitterness to me. I came hither to lay it down. You have been deceived. I protest my innocence of the crimes I am charged with, and think myself now at liberty to tell you what I thought never to have uttered.’”

An explanation followed; Oglethorpe, the most generous, if the most impulsive of men, fell on his chaplain’s neck and kissed him, and so they parted.

“God is with you,” cried Charles Wesley as the boats moved off. “Go forth, CJiristo duce et auspice Christo.”

When Oglethorpe returned safe from his expedition, Charles told him he had longed to see him once more to give further explanations; “but then,” he added, “I considered that if you died you would know them all in a moment.”

“I know not,” said Oglethorpe, “whether separate spirits regard our little concerns. If they do, it is as men regard the follies of their childhood, or I my late passionateness.”

Oglethorpe could quarrel with his chaplains furiously, but he loved them; and, many years afterwards, when he himself was a white-haired and venerable figure — the finest figure, as Hannah More declares, she ever knew, and one which “perfectly realised her ideal of Nestor” — it is on record that, meeting John Wesley unexpectedly, he ran to him and kissed him with the simplicity and affection of a child.

Charles Wesley, with his comrade, Ingham, returned to England in July, 1736, but John Wesley clung resolutely to his post. The puzzle is that his High Church temper was so little influenced by the admiration he felt for Moravian teaching, and the type of piety it produced. The Moravians of Savannah taught him exactly what Peter Bohler taught him afterwards in Loudon, but the teaching at the moment left his life unaflfected. Wesley’s own explanation is, “I understand it not: I was too learned and too wise, so that it seemed foolishness unto me; and I continued preaching, and following after, and trusting in that righteousness whereby no flesh can be justified.”

The truth is that Peter Bohler himself, had he met Wesley in Savannah, would have taught him in vain. The stubborn Sacramentarian and High Churchman had to be scourged, by the sharp discipline of failure, out of that subtlest and deadliest form of pride, the pride that imagines that the secret of salvation lies, or can lie, within the circle of purely human effort. Wesley later describes Peter Bohler as “one whom God prepared for me.” But God, in the toilsome and humiliating experiences of Georgia, was preparing Wesley for Peter Bohler.

A love episode, as ill-managed and as barren as were all Wesley’s excursions into the realm of sentiment, l)rought his stay in Georgia to a hasty and inglorious end. Wesley, from his youth, both by temperament and by the manner of his training, was peculiarly susceptible — though in no ignoble fashion — to feminine influence. In the Epworth Rectory feminine influences — from the wise, serene, strong-brained mother, to the circle of bright-witted sisters — were supreme; and Wesley, at every stage of his life, sought — what had been the joy of his early years — the companionship of intelligent women. But where the sex was concerned, he suffered a curious paralysis of his native shrewdness, and he managed his love affairs worse than perhaps any other great man known to history.

The chief magistrate of Savannah, Mr. Causton, was a man of doubtful antecedents and violent temper. His niece, Miss Hopkey, a clever and attractive girl, fell in love with Wesley — or at least was anxious that the little, handsome, and clever Fellow of Lincoln College should fall in love with her, and she plainly endeavoured, by all the innocent arts known to the sex, to hasten that desirable consummation. She became pensively religious to suit Wesley’s mood; attended his services with pious diligence; dressed to suit his austere taste; nursed him through a sickness; took his advice on the interesting question of what she should eat for supper, and how soon she should go to bed.

Wesley accepted all this with exquisite simplicity, as signs of an angelic character. He was visibly and frankly — if somewhat pedantically — in love with her. In the beginning of December he records in his Journal, “1 advised Miss Sophie to sup earlier and not immediately before going to bed. She did so, and on this little circumstance depend what an inconceivable train of consequences! Not only all the colour of remaining life for her, but perhaps my happiness too.”

His companion, Delamotte, who contemplated Miss Hopkey through no nimbus of sentiment, and who had not been at Oxford for nothing, bluntly warned Wesley, and asked him if it was his intention to marry her. Wesley — at this stage of his life a chill-blooded ecclesiastic, even when in love — found he could not answer that inconveniently direct query. He determined to submit the question of whether he ought to marry Miss Hopkey to the Moravian Bishop — a .step which, to the feminine mind at least, will prove decisively that he was not in love with that young lady at all. The matter was finally referred, for decision, to the elders of the Moravian Church — strange assessors in the court of the affections! They solemnly considered the case. Wesley was called in to learn his fate.

“Will you abide by our decision?” Mtschman asked him.

After some hesitation, Wesley replied, “I will.”

“Then,” said the Moravian, “we advise you to proceed no further in the matter.”

“The will of the Lord be done,” answered Wesley.

It is a matter debated still with great keenness, whether or not Wesley had actually offered himself in marriage to Miss Hopkey. Moore, his biographer, says that Wesley told him expressly, “he never actually proposed marriage.” On the other hand, the young lady herself, in the proceedings against Wesley at the close of his stay in Savannah, deposed under oath that “Mr. Wesley had many times proposed marriage to her, all of which proposals she had rejected.” But no one who reads the whole story can doubt that Wesley’s real offence was that he failed to propose to Miss Hopkey, or, at least, to do it with sufficient defiuiteness.

That quick-witted young lady learned that her lover was submitting the direction of his affections to a court of venerable Moravian elders; she guessed the decision would be against her and promptly betook herself to another lover. On March 4 the Moravian elders gave their decision; on March 8, Wesley ruefully records in his Journal, “Miss Sophie engaged herself to Mr. Williamson, a person not remarkable for handsomeness, neither for genteelness, neither for wit, nor knowledge, nor sense, and least of all for religion.” And on Saturday, March 12, four days after, they were married. An expeditious young lady, this!

Wesley found in the lesson of the day for the succeeding Sunday the words, “Son of man, behold 1 take from thee the desire of thine eyes at a stroke”; and, he adds, “I was pierced through as with a sword.” Twelve years afterwards he was to write that same verse once more in his Journal, as the record of a yet more bitter defeat of his affections.^

‘Wesley, at this period even more than in later years, had the habit of recording with an almost incredible diligence, and for the purpose of self-scrutiny, every act of his life, and every play of his feelings. His Georgian journals, which still exist, are examples of the tireless industry with which he translated himself into written terms. In the Journal there is not only a page for every day, but a separate space for every hour of the day. He computed and registered the use of his time with the fidelity with which a careful business man writes down the investments of his capital. And an incident, such as the affair with Miss Hopkey, which moved him so deeply, would naturally be recorded with special care. This makes credible the somewhat doubtful authenticity of another version of this incident, apparently in Wesley naturally contemplated Miss Hopkey, when she became Mrs. Williamson, with new and changed eyes, and that ingenious young lady probably felt no longer under any obligations to consult in dress or conduct the tastes of her former, and quite too leisurely, lover. This was To Wesley only another painful surprise. “God,” he gravely records in his Journal, “has shown me yet more of the greatness of my deliverance by opening to me a new and unexpected scene of Miss Sophie’s dissimulation.” Later, Wesley felt called upon to mention to her “some things in her conduct which he thought reprehensible,” and was much astonished — simple man! — at finding “Miss Sophie” resenting with shrill vehemence his rebukes. Her husband was kindled by his wife’s anger, and forbade her 1o speak to Wesley, or to attend his services; but his self-willed bride seems to have disobeyed him. Wesley now contemplated debarring Mrs. Williamson from the Lord’s Supper, and he asked Mr. Causton, the magistrate, “Sir, what if I should think it the duty of my oflBce to repel one of your family from the Holy Communion?”

“If you repel me or my wife,” answered Mr. Causton,

Wesley’s own handwriting, known to exist. Miss Hopkey, according to this story, was only eighteen years of age; her affections had become entangled with some unworthy object, and her guardians had broken off all intercourse between the two. The girl was in much grief, and Wesley, as a clergyman, was asked to pay special attention to her. This drew the two into close relationship, and Wesley presently discovered that he had not only a high esteem for Miss Hopkey, but a tender affection for her, an affection which he persuaded himself was that for a sister. He, on his part, was convinced that a celibate life was better for all men, and for himself was almost imperative; while she, with the facile resolve of a grieved maiden, had also vowed to live for ever single. Intercourse betwixt the two was at its most perilous stage, when they took a trip by boat from Frederica to Savannah. Wesley’s tenderness at this period is confessed, but still, after his pedantic fashion, he tests his emotions by extracts from the Greek Fathers. Did he actually propose to Miss Hopkey is a question the narrative after all leaves unsettled. He tells how he sat by the camp fire and asked her whether she was engaged to the person for whom she was supposed to be mourning. She replied, “I am promised to that young man or none,” and straightway took refuge in tears. “Miss Sophie,” said Wesley, “I should count myself happy if I could spend my life with you.” These sudden words, he adds, “were not spoken of design”; the young lady replied with more tears, but the simple-minded fellow of Lincoln College was persuaded that if even he broke through his resolve for a single life Miss Hopkey would be heroically firm to her pledge of celibacy. This belief kept Wesley silent; yet, looking back on this incident, he calls it “a very narrow escape.” “I wonder to this hour,” he says, “I did not say, ‘Miss Sophie, will you marry me?’” Plainly he believed that in express terms he never did speak the decisive words.

A iKK/r fr’.i” -li’hn 1! V.>/. y,“v Jnnrn.il in G,;,r,jin, re Mist Uopkey “I shall require a legal reason; but I shall trouble myself about none else.”

In those days, when the Lord’s Supper was, in Cowper’s phrase, a “pick-lock of oflBce” for men, and a sign of social respectability for women, to be debarred from the table of the Lord was a serious injury. On August 7 — five months after her marriage — Wesley refused to allow Mrs. Williamson to join the Lord’s Supper. On the very next day a warrant was issued for the api)rehension of “John Wesley, clerk, to answer the complaint of William Williamson for defaming his wife, and refusing to administer to her the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper in a public congregation without cause.” The enraged husband assessed his damages at £1000.

Wesley was arrested, but discharged on pledge to appear at the next session of the court. He was asked to put in writing his reasons for refusing to admit Mrs. Williamson to the Lord’s Supper; he wrote to the lady: “If you offer yourself to the Lord’s table on Sunday, I will advertise you, as I have done more than once wherein you have done wrong, and when you have openly declared that you have truly repented, I will administer to you the mysteries of God.” But Mrs. Williamson would not formally “notify the curate of her intention to present herself at the communion”; till she did so Wesley would not “advertise her wherein she had done wrong”; and so the sad nature of Mrs. Williamson’s offence remains to this day unknown.

Meanwhile, a grand jury of forty-four persons — about one-fifth of the adult male population of the town — considered the case. There were twelve charges against Wesley, ranging from one of “inverting the order and method of the liturgy,” to “searching into and meddling with affairs of private families.” A majority of the grand jury found ten of the.se charges proved; a minority of twelve acquitted Wesley, and declared that the charges were “an artifice of Mr. Causton’s, designed to blacken Mr. Wesley’s character.” We.sley, when called upon to plead, took the ground that nine of the ten charges were of an ecclesiastical nature, as to which the court had no jurisdiction. The tenth, that of speaking and writing to Mrs. Williamson, was of a secular character, and he demanded to be heard upon it at once.

WESLEY AND HIS CENTUKY

His enemies, however, were in no haste to bring the issne to a trial. They wished to use the charges as a device for driving Wesley from the colony. The military chaplain at Frederica was appointed to conduct religious services in Savannah, and Wesley’s oflBce was thus practically taken from him.

The weeks crept on; Wesley found that he could neither secure a trial nor do his work as chaplain, and he determined to sail for England. He posted up a paper in the great square, with the announcement, “Whereas John AVesley designs shortly to set out for England,” &c. He was notified that he must not leave the settlement till he had answered the charges against him. Wesley answered that he had already attended seven sessions of the court for that purpose, and had been refused the opportunity of jjleading. He refused to sign any bond pledging himself to appear before the court, and an order was published requiring all loyal persons to prevent him leaving the settlement. He was, in substance, a prisoner at large. Wesley’s enemies, it is clear, wished not only to drive him from the settlement, but to make his departure wear the look of a flight from justice.

Wesley conducted evening prayers that day; and then, he says, “about 8 o’clock, the tide then serving, I shook off the dust from my feet and left Georgia, after having preached the Gospel there not as I ought, but as I was able, one year and nearly nine months.” A troublesome journey, partly by boat, and partly on foot, brought Wesley and his three companions to Charleston, and ten days later, on December 22, he set sail for England. A strangely troubled chapter in his life was closed.