Finally, near the middle of town, exhausted, John raised his voice and yelled, “Are you willing to hear me speak?”
“No, no!” many in the mob yelled back. “Knock his brains out. Down with him. Kill him.”
Despite the mob’s call for his death, John raised his voice once more and addressed the mob. “What evil have I done? Which of you all have I wronged in word or deed?” John continued speaking for fifteen minutes, urging the crowd to search their hearts and think about what they were doing. Then he ended with a prayer.
When he stepped down from the chair he had stood on to speak, one of the leaders of the mob was so moved by John’s words that he said, “Sir, I will spend my life for you. Follow me, and not one soul here shall touch a hair of your head.”
Three other men stepped forward and offered to help ferry John from danger. The four men stood in front and behind and on either side of John. As they all walked forward, the crowd parted in silence and let them through. The men guided John safely back to Francis Ward’s house in Wednesbury at well after midnight. John thanked the men for their effort on his behalf and invited them to attend one of his meetings the following day.
In the face of such persecution, John pressed on, encouraged by the growing number of followers who continued to join the Methodist societies.
Then in February 1744, religious intolerance in England reached a new level. The British feared that Catholic France was planning to launch an attack against them. In response to this fear, all English Catholics were ordered to leave London, because it was thought that they might aid the enemy. Knowing how the leaders within the Church of England viewed Methodists, John rushed to reassure King George that he and all of the Methodists were loyal to the English crown.
Later that same year, John decided it was time to call all of the Methodist leaders together to decide how to proceed with the societies. From June 25 to June 30, 1744, Methodist leaders gathered for the conference at the foundry chapel in London. The topics John hoped to cover during the conference were church discipline, organization, union with the Moravians, and rules for “assistants.” This last point proved to be the most controversial. Until this time, John and Charles Wesley had allowed unordained, or lay, preachers, but they had not actively promoted them within the societies. But this was about to change. John used his influence to make lay preaching a cornerstone of Methodism. Scoffers remarked that some of the men John promoted were “much fitter to make a pulpit than to preach in one,” but John shrugged off such criticism.
The duties and obligations of these lay preachers were spelled out in great detail. The preachers were to travel around preaching to the greatest crowds possible, and they were to form societies to encourage the ongoing spiritual development of their converts. They were to do whatever was needed to sustain themselves along the way. John instructed his preachers, in contrast to most Church of England clergymen, to “be ashamed of nothing,” willingly and cheerfully carrying wood, drawing water, or cleaning shoes. And these preachers, like John Wesley himself, were to eat simple meals, though John did not require them to become vegetarians, as he had in recent years.
When it was over, the conference at the foundry chapel was declared a great success, and another one was planned for the same dates the next year. Following the gathering John found himself invigorated by the possibilities that lay ahead, and he immediately set off on a long preaching tour.
On September 18, 1745, John arrived in Newcastle on one of his regular visits to the city. September 18 was also the day that Charles Stuart (known as Bonnie Prince Charlie, or the Young Pretender) and a band of fighters he had recruited from the Scottish Highlands overran and occupied Edinburgh. This was the first step in the prince’s campaign to return the Catholic Stuarts to the thrones of England and Scotland. From Edinburgh Charles intended to push south across the border into England and march on to London to depose King George II and install himself king, in turn bringing England back into the Catholic fold.
When news of the capture of Edinburgh reached Newcastle, fear gripped the town. After all, Edinburgh was only ninety miles north of Newcastle. Immediately the city sprang into action to defend itself against attack. Militias were established, cannons were set on the city wall, and several gates in that wall were bricked up. As well, the men in the city were called by the mayor to swear loyalty to King George, which John Wesley was happy to do.
Fearing the impending invasion, many people in and around Newcastle fled south. But John stayed put in the Methodist orphan house, which was located on a rise just outside the city wall. There he intended to pray for an English victory in the fighting and encourage the local Methodists. He had complete trust in God, knowing that he was in God’s will whether he lived or died.
Everyone in Newcastle breathed a sigh of relief when, after several weeks, the threatened attack did not come. Instead Charles Stuart and his Scottish fighters bypassed Newcastle as they pushed south into England.
Chapter 13
Partnerships
By the end of November 1745, John felt that things were safe enough in Newcastle for him to leave the Methodist work there in the hands of lay workers. One woman in particular, a young widow named Grace Murray, had greatly impressed John with her ability. John chose her to take charge of the orphan house.
With things settled in Newcastle, John climbed onto his horse for the ride south to London. The slow journey was interrupted almost hourly by watchmen who wanted to be sure that he was not a Scottish spy. The watchmen’s fears were justified. The Scottish army had begun to sweep down into the English Midlands. However, English forces had managed to beat them back. The Duke of Cumberland, with a nine-thousand-man army, then chased Charles Stuart and his army all the way back to Scotland, where on April 16, 1746, at Culloden Moor, one last pitched battle was fought. The battle ended badly for the Scots. While three hundred Englishmen were killed in the fighting, two thousand Scottish fighters perished. Charles Stuart managed to escape the battlefield alive and went into hiding in the Scottish Isles before finally escaping to France. Following the defeat of the Scots, an uneasy peace descended over the British Isles.
John was delighted when the fighting was finally over. He hoped and prayed that it would help to end the ongoing persecution and harassment of the Methodists.
In the meantime John had decided that it was time to wage his own inner battle with, of all things, drinking black tea. In eighteenth-century England, tea was an expensive beverage, costing sixty shillings for a pound of tea leaves. John felt that this price was just too high for him to justify continuing to drink tea. Besides, tea seemed to make his hands shaky. John decided to set a good example for his followers by not spending any more money on tea and by not drinking tea when it was offered to him.
“I considered what an advantage it would be to these poor enfeebled persons if I would leave off what so manifestly impairs their health and thereby hurts their business also. If they used English herbs instead of tea, they might hereby not only lessen their pain but in some degree their poverty,” John wrote of his decision.
Overcoming his desire to drink black tea spurred John on, and he decided to write a book about healthy living. He called it An Easy and Natural Method of Curing Most Diseases. In the book he described 243 diseases and listed over 700 cures for them. His emphasis was on healthy living and simple cures: cold baths, hot poultices, herb teas, and attention to personal hygiene and clean surroundings were his standard treatments.
John also opened the “People’s Dispensary” at the foundry. This was a clinic where poor people could visit a doctor and receive medicine. The clinic was popular from the start, with a steady stream of patients lining up to see the doctor each day. Such a successful ministry convinced John more than ever that God was interested in the health of all men and women. With this thought in mind, John gathered up his new book on health and again took to the road. He wanted every Methodist to read the book and follow his health advice. Rain, hail, sleet, or snow would not deter him in this effort. If he thought conditions were too harsh for his horse, he would leave the animal in the barn and set out on foot.
John also developed other ways to help the very poorest people. During a stop at Kingswood near Bristol, he agreed to take over the running of a school for the sons of miners. His decision to do so spurred him to open a school for the sons of Methodist preachers in the hope of educating a new generation of Methodists. Soon the two schools, a day school for miners’ sons and a boarding school for preachers’ sons, were running side by side at Kingwood.
During 1746 John started a fund to give loans to poor Methodists. The loans were for one pound per person and were to be paid back over a three-month period. Like the health clinic, the loan program was very popular, and in its first eighteen months of operation, 225 people were helped by these short-term loans.
John also encouraged everyone to reach out to and help the poor. In a revised set of rules for Methodist leaders, he wrote,
If you cannot relieve, do not grieve, the poor: Give them soft words, if nothing else: Abstain from either sour looks, or harsh words. Let them be glad to come, even though they should go empty away. Put yourself in the place of every poor man; and deal with him as you would God should deal with you.
By the summer of 1747 John was feeling a new call—Ireland. John traveled to Dublin, where he found that a Methodist work was already under way. The work had been started several years earlier when George Whitefield stopped off in Dublin on his way to the American colonies. The Dublin Methodist society already had 280 members, and John was impressed with their teachable attitudes.
When John returned to London from Ireland, he learned that Westley Hall had run off to the Caribbean and had left Martha and their children. John could do nothing about the situation but take in Martha and the children to live with him. Now he and Charles were together supporting their sisters Martha, Susanna, and Emilia. The Wesley women all embraced the Methodist movement and became strong helpers to their brothers.
In late 1747 Charles found an even better helper—a potential wife. Her name was Sally Gwynne, and although she was only twenty-three years old, Charles, who was now forty, felt that the two of them made an excellent couple. He even wrote her a love poem:
Two are far better than one
For counsel or for fight
How can one be warm alone
Or serve his God aright?
This question “How can one be warm alone, or serve his God aright?” was a strange question coming from a Wesley brother. Both John and Charles had sworn off marriage, and both brothers agreed that a man could serve God better as a single person than as a married man. In fact, they had made a pact together never to marry without the other brother’s permission, a pact that Charles stretched to the limits when he introduced Sally to John.
John was not impressed with his potential sister-in-law and promptly drew up a list of more suitable candidates for Charles if he insisted on marrying someone. Having drawn up the list, he gave it to Charles and then left for a trip north, not knowing that his opinion about marriage was about to change, as had Charles’s.
In July 1748 John was in Newcastle when he fell ill with a migraine headache. As the keeper of the orphan house there, Grace Murray, nursed him back to health, John began to take an interest in her. She was thirty-two years old, thirteen years younger than John, a pretty and pious widow, and one of the most respected Methodist women in the Newcastle area.
