While Charles was prepared to alter his priorities so that he could spend more time with his wife, John was not. His marriage to Molly had become more strained. Eventually Molly reached the point where she no longer wanted to live with John, and with money she had inherited from her first husband, she returned to an independent life. John continued his preaching and organizing.
The year 1763 found John writing what would be called the Large Minutes, a set of statements about Methodist beliefs and practices that would serve as the standard by which all decisions were to be made for many years to come. When the document was complete, a copy of it was given to each Methodist lay preacher as a guide for how he should conduct himself within the society.
John loaded copies of the Large Minutes into his saddlebags and set out once again to visit the Methodist societies throughout England. In 1764, at the age of sixty-one, he recorded in his journal the events of a typical day on the road.
I took a horse a little after four [in the morning] and about two [in the afternoon] preached in the market-place of Llanidloes [about 40] miles from Shrewsbury. At three we rode through the mountains to Fountainhead.… We mounted again about seven. [We got lost and] ended in the edge of a bog.… An honest man, instantly mounting his horse, galloped before us, up hill and down, till he brought us into a road, which he said led straight to Roes-fair. We rode on, till another met us, and said, “No, this is the way to Aberystwith.… You must turn back and ride to that yonder bridge. The master of the little house near the bridge directed us to the next village.… [Later, after nine o’clock at night,] having wandered an hour upon the mountain, through rocks, and bogs, and precipices, we…got back to the little house near the bridge. [It now] being full of drunken, roaring miners; and neither grass, nor hay nor corn.… We hired one of [the miners] to walk with us to Roes-fair, though he was miserably drunk, till falling all his length in a purling stream, he came tolerably to his senses. Between eleven and twelve we came to the inn.… [The next morning we discovered] the mule was cut in several places and my mare was bleeding like a pig, from a wound…made, it seems, by a pitchfork.
This strenuous trip was one of the many John took. In fact, at his advanced age he was still riding about three thousand miles per year, preaching over eight hundred sermons and encouraging the hundred preachers under his care. No matter the conditions, John was determined to preach the gospel to ordinary people and spur them on to live holy lives. He had come a long way from when, decades earlier, he had encountered the faith of the Moravians and had doubted his worth as a Christian. Now his worth could be counted in the lives of the many men, women, and children who, as a result of John’s efforts, had faith in Jesus Christ.
The years passed, each one as busy as the last. John finally sent two itinerant Methodist preachers to the American colonies to organize the Methodist societies springing up there. Until this point he had sidestepped the issue of expanding overseas. Some Methodists had emigrated to the Caribbean islands and established societies there, as had British soldiers posted to serve in Canada and the other colonies of North America. But the pressure to officially organize these societies had mounted until, at the annual conference in August 1769, Richard Boardman and Joseph Pilmoor were sent to North America with money in hand to establish a Methodist meetinghouse in New York.
At the same time, and much closer to home, John welcomed news of the establishment of the first Sunday school for children. Hannah Ball, one of his followers, started the school at High Wycombe, and along with spiritual subjects, the school taught reading, writing, and arithmetic. John thought that the school was a wonderful idea, because he believed that Christians should be able to read the Bible for themselves rather than rely on others to tell them what it said.
During the latter half of 1770, George Whitefield made his seventh preaching trip to North America. On September 29 he traveled from Portsmouth, New Hampshire, to Newburyport, Massachusetts. On the way he stopped to preach in the open air at Exeter, New Hampshire. Looking up, he prayed, “Lord Jesus, I am weary in thy work, but not of thy work. If I have not yet finished my course, let me go and speak for thee once more in the fields, seal thy truth, and come home and die.”
George Whitefield died the following morning, worn out at fifty-six years of age. John was devastated when he received the news in England two weeks later. He remembered George as a seventeen-year-old at Oxford, unsure of himself but willing to obey God with all his heart. From that time on, George’s life and John’s had been intertwined. Certainly the two men had locked swords over the years regarding thorny issues. Despite their differences the two men had managed to retain their respect for each other.
John was honored to preach in London at three memorial services for George. He remembered George as the man who had started the “Great Awakening” across the Atlantic Ocean in America. John’s text for the sermons was “Let me die the death of the righteous, and let my last end be like his!” (Numbers 23:10). John recorded in his journal his impressions of the first memorial service.
An immense multitude was gathered together from all corners of the town. I was at first afraid that a great part of the congregation would not be able to hear; but it pleased God to strengthen my voice that even those at the door heard distinctly. It was an awful season. All were still as night; most appeared to be deeply affected; and an impression was made on many which one would hope will not speedily be effaced. The time appointed for my beginning at the Tabernacle was half-hour after five, but it was quite filled at three; so I began at four. At first the noise was exceeding great; but it ceased when I began to speak; and my voice was again so strengthened that all who were within could hear, unless an accidental noise hindered here or there for a few moments. Oh that all may hear the voice of Him with whom are the issues of life and death; and who so loudly, by this unexpected stroke, calls all His children to love one another.
As John left the chapel on Tottenham Court Road where the memorial service was held, he thought about one of George’s favorite sayings: “We are immortal till our work is done.” Obviously George Whitefield’s work was done, and John Wesley wondered how much more time God would grant him.
Chapter 15
A Tireless Worker
While most men and women of the time did not live to such an age, on June 17, 1770, John Wesley turned sixty-seven years old. On his birthday he made the following entry in his journal:
I can hardly believe that I am this day entered into the sixty-eighth year of my age [meaning he turned sixty-seven]. How marvelous are the ways of God! How has He kept me even from a child! From ten to thirteen or fourteen, I had little but bread to eat, and not great plenty of that. I believe this was so far from hurting me, that it laid the foundation of lasting health. When I grew up, in consequence for reading Dr. Cheyne, I chose to eat sparingly, and drink water. This was another great means of continuing my health, till…I was afterward brought to the brink of death by a fever, but it left me healthier than before.… Years after, I was in the third stage of consumption;… it pleased God to remove this also. Since that time I have known neither pain nor sickness, am now healthier than I was forty years ago. This hath God wrought!
Charles Wesley was also still alive, as were three of John’s sisters, Emilia, Martha, and Anne, though the following year Emilia would die at seventy-nine years of age, severing one more of the ties to the days of living in the rectory at Epworth.
Despite his age, John continued on determinedly, gathering and preparing anything he had ever written to be published in a collective work. When it was finally done, the Collective Works filled thirty-two volumes. Over the years John had earned a handsome sum of money from his writing—up to fourteen hundred pounds a year. Yet even with this money, he had stayed true to his ideals of simple living. He kept thirty pounds for himself to live on, the same amount he had set for himself back in college, and gave the rest of it away to Methodist charities. When questioned as to why he did not keep a little more of the money for personal “comforts,” John always gave the same reply: “Money never stays with me, it would burn me if it did. I throw it out of my hands as soon as possible, lest it find a way into my heart.”
While he labored away in England, John kept a watchful eye on what was happening in the American colonies. In March 1770, five colonists had been killed when British troops opened fire on them in what came to be known as the Boston Massacre. As the possibility of a full-scale rebellion loomed in America, many people in the colonies turned to the Methodist societies for strength and stability. In response to this increase in the numbers of people joining the societies, John sent two more preachers to America from England. They were twenty-six-year-old Francis Asbury and twenty-four-year-old Thomas Coke. The two men were from very different backgrounds. Thomas was a graduate of Jesus College, Oxford, and an ordained clergyman in the Church of England, while Francis came from a lower-class family in Wednesbury, the site of some of the worst anti-Methodist rioting. Once they arrived in the colonies, Thomas and Francis took over running the Methodist societies in New York and Philadelphia, freeing Richard Boardman and Joseph Pilmoor to branch out to the colonies to the north and south.
Meanwhile, things were also changing in England. Methodist women were taking on a greater role in the societies. It was yet another practice that put the Methodists further at odds with the Church of England. John tried to soothe the situation by encouraging the women to use their preaching gifts while not actually crossing the line far enough to be accused of preaching, much like his mother had done back in Epworth fifty-eight years before. This was not an easy thing to do, and John wrote to one Methodist “preacher,” Sarah Crosby, outlining the way that she should proceed when groups of up to two hundred people begged her to preach to them.
When you meet again, tell them simply, “You lay me under a great difficulty. The Methodists do not allow of women preachers; neither do I take upon me any such character. But I will just nakedly tell you what is on my heart.”… I do not see that you have broken any law. Go on calmly and steadily.
The crowds who thronged to hear John preach continued to grow, and in August 1773, John preached to a gathering of 32,000 people, his largest single audience ever. “Perhaps the first time that a man of seventy had been heard by thirty thousand persons at once,” he noted of the occasion in his journal.
Following the Boston Massacre, tensions between the colonists in North America and the British settled down, but they began to grow again in 1773, when the British parliament passed an act that gave the East India Company a monopoly on selling tea in the colony. The act threatened the livelihood of many local tea merchants, and East India Company ships were prevented from docking and unloading their cargoes in New York and Philadelphia. In Boston a group of local citizens took matters into their own hands. On December 16, 1773, the group, disguised as Indians, boarded three East India Company ships and tossed hundreds of crates of tea into the harbor in an act that became known as the Boston Tea Party.
For the first time, open conflict between England and her American colonies began to loom on the horizon. In response to this threat, many American Methodists made their way north to Canada in the hope of avoiding war in the lower colonies.
