In April 1775, fighting between the British and the colonies finally broke out in Concord and Lexington, Massachusetts. At the start of the war, John found himself surprisingly sympathetic to the rebel cause. He even wrote a letter to the secretary of state for the colonies, Lord Dartmouth, in which he said,
And whether my writing do any good or no, it need do no harm. For it rests within your Lordship’s breast whether any eye but your own shall see it.
All my prejudices are against the Americans. For I am an High Churchman, the son of an High Churchman, bred up from my childhood in the highest notions of passive obedience and non-resistance. And yet, in spite of all my rooted prejudice, I cannot avoid thinking (if I think at all) that an oppressed people asked for nothing more than their legal rights, and that in the most modest and inoffensive manner which the nature of the thing would allow.
But waiving this, waiving all considerations of right and wrong, I ask, Is it common sense to use force toward the Americans?
A letter now before me says, “Four hundred of the Regulars and forty of the Militia were killed in the last skirmish.” What a disproportion! And this is the first essay of raw men against regular troops!
You see, my Lord, whatever has been affirmed, these men will not be frightened. And it seems they will not be conquered so easily as was at first imagined. They will probably dispute every inch of ground, and, if they die, die sword in hand.
Indeed, some of our valiant officers say, “Two thousand men will clear America of these rebels.” No, nor twenty thousand, nor perhaps treble [three times] that number, be they rebels or not. They are as strong men as you; they are as valiant as you, if not abundantly more valiant. For they are one and all enthusiasts—enthusiasts for liberty. They are calm, deliberate enthusiasts. And we know how this principle breathed into softest souls stem love of war, and thirst of vengeance, and contempt of death. We know men animated with this will leap into a fire or rush upon a cannon’s mouth.
“But they have no experience of war.” And how much more have our troops? How few of them ever saw a battle! “But they have no discipline.” That is an entire mistake. Already they have near as much as our army. And they will learn more of it every day. So that in a short time they will understand it as well as their assailants.
However, after many meetings with his friend, the writer Samuel Johnson, John changed his mind about the war in the colonies and became a defender of British policies in North America. He even took one of Johnson’s pamphlets titled Taxation No Tyranny and republished it under his own name with the title A Calm Address to the American Colonies. The pamphlet declared that the American colonists had no right to clamber for their own liberty when they held slaves in bondage.
Publication of the pamphlet caused a public outcry, not because of what the document said but because John had copied and published it without permission. In response to the criticism, John published another edition of the pamphlet, acknowledging that his friend Samuel Johnson had originally written it. The public outcry quickly died down.
John Wesley’s prediction to Lord Dartmouth that the American colonists would “probably dispute every inch of ground, and, if they die, die sword in hand,” however, proved accurate. In July 1776 the colonists declared their independence from Britain, and although things were not going well for them in the fight with the British, the colonists were proving to be tenacious and unpredictable fighters.
As the war in the American colonies raged on, John urged the Methodist leaders there not to take sides. But he made this all but impossible for them by continuing to print his anti-American pamphlets and then having the pamphlets distributed in the colonies.
Despite John’s anti-American stance, the number of people joining the Methodist societies in the colonies continued to grow, from 955 in 1775 to 4,379 in 1777. This was because the Methodists in America did not feel the same allegiance to the Church of England and as a result acted more or less as an independent church. Indeed, the status of Methodists in North America was a matter that John Wesley could not ignore indefinitely, though at the time other matters at home were proving more pressing.
One of these matters, which took up a lot of John’s time, was the building of a new Methodist chapel in London. By 1776, it was obvious to all that the foundry chapel was old and dilapidated and in need of replacing. John made an appeal to the Methodist societies throughout England to give money toward the building of a new chapel to serve as the headquarters of Methodism. The money began to roll in, and on April 21, 1777, in driving rain, John laid the foundation stone for the new structure, which was to be called Wesley’s Chapel. The new chapel was situated on an acre of land on Royal Row (City Road), where windmills had previously stood, and about fifty yards north of the foundry. Throughout the following months, John oversaw the construction of the new chapel until its official opening on November 1, 1778. The building was a large, plain chapel that could seat two thousand people. And next door to the chapel was a house for John to live in.
At the same time as Wesley’s Chapel was going up, another project occupied John—the publishing of a Methodist magazine that he named the Arminian Magazine. The publication was designed to advance Methodist ideas and refute Calvinist thinking. John wrote many of the articles in the magazine himself. One of the first articles he penned was about Old Jeffrey, the ghost who had haunted the Epworth rectory in his youth.
Two years later, in 1780, John published A Collection of Hymns for the Use of the People Called Methodists. The hymnal was a collection of 525 hymns: seven of them were written by Isaac Watts, one was by John’s brother Samuel, one was by his father, nineteen were German hymns John had translated, sixteen John had written himself, and the remainder were the works of his brother Charles. It was a great day for the brothers to see so many of their words in print, since they both believed that hymns had the power to implant themselves into the hearts of even the most illiterate hearers. Most of the hymns in the new hymnal had been published in some form before, but John, in his usual practical way, introduced the hymnal as “not so large as to be either cumbersome, or expensive: and…large enough to contain such a weight of hymns as will not soon be worn threadbare.”
A year later, in October 1781, John returned to London from a preaching trip to Bristol to learn of his wife’s death. The couple had lived apart for many years, and John was saddened by her passing.
By now John was an old man and anticipated his own death at any time, especially since he had already lived longer than either of his parents. But on his seventy-ninth birthday he was still going strong, and he noted in his journal,
I entered into my eightieth year [that is, turned seventy-nine], but, blessed be God, my time is not labor and sorrow. I find no more pain nor bodily infirmities than at five-and-twenty. This I still impute (1) to the power of God, fitting me for what he calls me to; (2) to my still traveling four or five thousand miles a year; (3) to my sleeping, night or day, whenever I want it; (4) to my rising at a set hour; and (5) to my constant preaching, particularly in the morning.…
Then John added,
Lastly, evenness of temper. I feel and grieve, but, by the grace of God, I fret at nothing. But still, “the help that is done upon earth he doeth it himself.” And this he doeth in answer to many prayers.
A fellow preacher, John Hampson, wrote a description of the aged John Wesley. He depicted John as a surprisingly strong, muscular man for his age with “a narrow, plaited stock, a coat with a small upright collar, no buckles at the knees, no silk or velvet in any part of his apparel, and a head as white as snow, gave the idea of something primitive and apostolical; while an air of neatness and cleanliness was diffused over his whole person.”
Even after his eightieth birthday, John did not stop his relentless preaching schedule. He did allow his friends to buy him a carriage, but more often than not he commandeered one of the horses pulling the carriage and rode on ahead. Nothing was more invigorating to him than a good horse ride of fifty miles or more.
As John toured England, Ireland, and Wales, the American colonies were never far from his mind. With help from the French, the American rebels in the colonies won their struggle for freedom, and Britain had begrudgingly recognized their independence. This outcome surprised John, who had come to believe that Britain was fighting for a just cause. However, he decided to focus on the future and what would happen to the Methodists in America, who were still officially part of the Church of England. Questions about the issue swirled in John’s mind. Should the Methodists in America still be bound by the laws of the English Church and subject to the rule of King George III, who was not only the English monarch but also the head of the Church of England? John knew that he was not the only one grappling with such questions and that answers would have to be found soon.
Chapter 16
Active Till the End
The 1780s finally brought an end to the persecution of Methodists by angry mobs. Now, wherever John went he was honored. During his final trip to Ireland the mayors of Dublin and Cork accorded John civic honors, and everywhere he went, John was a coveted guest. From Dublin John made a nine-week tour through sixty towns and villages, preaching a hundred sermons, six of them in the open air, and once in a place that he said was “large but not elegant, a cow house.”
Seventeen eighty-four was the year that John finally faced the fact that he would have to make plans for Methodism to survive after his death. He decided to write A Deed of Declaration, which he executed on February 28, 1784. The deed legally defined the “Conference of the people called Methodists” and declared “how the succession and identity thereof is to be continued.” The document listed the names of a hundred preachers who were to oversee the societies and trust property after his death. John had been carefully training up these preachers for this responsibility, and he continued to do so.
Four months later, in July, John was particularly touched when he visited Robert Raikes’s Sunday school. Raikes was a crusading editor of the Gloucester Journal who had become frustrated reporting on criminal activity and was convinced that much of what he reported on was the result of poverty and a lack of education. In response he started Sunday schools, much as Hannah Ball had done fifteen years before, to teach child factory workers how to read and write. Many of the children’s parents joined the children at the Sunday lessons. John recorded in his journal his thoughts on what he had seen.
I stepped into the Sunday school, which contains two hundred and forty children, taught every Sunday by several masters, and superintended by the curate. So, many children in one parish are restrained from open sin, and taught a little good manners at least, as well as to read the Bible. I find these schools springing up wherever I go. Perhaps God may have a deeper end therein than men are aware of. Who knows but some of these schools may become nurseries for Christians?
When asked what he found so touching about the Sunday school, John replied, “I reverence the young because they may be useful after I am dead. Take care of the rising generation.”
Thomas Coke, whom John had dispatched to North America to help organize the Methodist societies, returned to England. On September 1, 1784, a momentous step was taken at Bristol regarding the Methodists in the newly independent United States. At Mr. Castleman’s home on Dighton Street in Bristol, John laid his hands on Thomas and ordained him superintendent for the “Church of God under our care in North America.” Furthermore, John commissioned Thomas to return to North America and ordain Francis Asbury as his joint superintendent, though he cautioned that neither man should use the title bishop.
