As usual, John wrote home to his parents, seeking their approval for his making regular visits to Castle Prison. To John’s surprise, his father wrote back to say that he had also visited prisoners when a student at Oxford and that he thought it a fine and helpful activity for his sons to be involved in.
John was delighted by his father’s response, and in his well-ordered, methodical way, he set up a schedule for the members to regularly visit Castle Prison. John wrote his name on the schedule to visit the jail each Sunday afternoon. As well, the club members began pooling their money and using it to minister to the needs of those prisoners they found deserving.
During the summer of 1731, Samuel and Susanna Wesley and their daughter Martha, along with two servants, were riding in a wagon when the horse pulling it bolted. The wagon lurched forward, and Samuel, who was sitting on a chair at the back, was thrown from the wagon. He landed on his head with a thud, and by the time the others got to him, he had stopped breathing and was turning blue. One of the servants managed to tilt Samuel’s head back and get him breathing again, but the sixty-six-year-old man had suffered a serious injury.
When John heard about the accident, he was dismayed. Although he did not like to think about it, the accident reminded him that it was only a matter of time before his father would have to resign from his pulpit. What would happen then? John had the sinking feeling that his family would pressure him to take over the position and keep his mother and remaining single sisters on at the rectory in Epworth. This was not an appealing thought to John, and he tried to brush it aside.
Meanwhile John had problems of his own at Oxford. William Morgan was not well. No one could say exactly what was wrong with him, but he had rapidly begun to lose weight, and he slept little at night. Critics of the Methodists insisted that William had taken John’s teachings on prayer and fasting too far, but John argued that no one could be too holy. While this debate raged back and forth, William’s mental state deteriorated, until William was forced to return to Ireland in the hope that a change of air would do him some good. Unfortunately the change of air did little for him, and William died in August 1732.
John was deeply troubled by reports that William had suffered from religious hallucinations before he died and needed to be physically restrained for his own safety and the safety of those around him. John repeatedly prayed and asked God what had gone wrong, but he received no answer.
Things got worse for John when William’s father wrote a bitter letter accusing him and the Methodists of being responsible for his son’s death because of their extreme teachings and practices. When some at Oxford heard of the accusation that William’s father had made in his letter, they took up his cause. As a result, John often had to endure being jeered at when he left his rooms at Lincoln College.
The jeering eventually died down, and in the summer of 1733 John became a member of the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, traveling to London from time to time to attend society meetings. During 1733 John met George Whitefield. George was a servitor (an undergraduate who performed menial tasks in exchange for financial assistance) at Pembroke College in Oxford. He admired the Holy Club and its members. John invited him to breakfast at Lincoln College, and the two men quickly became friends. In fact, they would become two of the most influential men of their era, and their lives would be entwined in various ways until their deaths.
The following year, 1734, started off with a wedding in the Wesley family. In January, Mary Wesley, who at thirty-nine years of age had given up all hope of marriage, found love in the form of the Reverend John Whitelamb. John was the acting curate under Samuel Wesley of the parish at Wroot. Unfortunately, John Wesley was not able to get away from his duties at Oxford to attend the wedding, but he was relieved to think that at least one of his sisters was happily married. Unfortunately, his sister’s happiness was short-lived. Within a year of marriage Mary died in childbirth, along with the baby.
In January 1735, John received a sobering letter from his mother. “Your father is in a very bad state of health; he sleeps little and eats less. He seems not to have any appreciation of his approaching exit, but I fear he has but a short time to live,” the letter read. It was time to face the future. Since Charles was not yet ordained, the opportunity—though neither of them thought of it as an opportunity—to take over their father’s position as rector at Epworth fell either to John or his older brother Samuel.
By now Samuel had settled into the position of headmaster at the Tiverton Grammar School in Devon, and he did not want to move back to Epworth. He wrote to John and put pressure on him to help out the family by taking up the position. He suggested that since most students at Oxford considered John and the Methodists “strange,” John might be better off with a fresh start somewhere else. John was infuriated that his older brother would try to plan his life for him, and he wrote a letter back to Samuel explaining why he should stay on at Oxford. Always an excellent debater, John used this skill to write a twenty-six-point rebuttal of his brother’s argument for returning to Epworth and becoming rector. As to the matter of being strange and despised, he made the following points:
1. A Christian will be despised anywhere.
2. No one is a Christian until he is despised.
3. His being despised will not hinder his doing good, but much further it, by making him a better Christian.
4. Another can supply my place better at Epworth than at Oxford, and the good done here is of a far more diffusive nature, inasmuch as it is a more extensive benefit to sweeten the fountain than to do the same to particular streams.
In April 1735, Susanna sent out an urgent plea for her children to come home to Epworth to say good-bye to their father. John and Charles arrived at the rectory in time to gather at their father’s bedside for one last blessing. John dreaded the moment, assuming that his father would put pressure on him to take the position as rector. But to his surprise, his father never mentioned it. Instead he turned to his son, his eyes bright, and said in a clear but frail voice, “The inward witness, son, the inward witness, is the strongest proof of Christianity.” These were words that John would never forget. Nor would he forget the words his father imparted to Charles. “Be steady. The Christian faith shall surely revive in this kingdom, and you shall see it, though I shall not.”
The Reverend Samuel Wesley was buried in the graveyard at St. Andrews Church, Epworth, on April 26, 1735. He had served the people of Epworth and the fens for over forty years, and none of his sons would take his place there as rector.
Following the funeral, the Wesley family home was broken up. Susanna went to live with Emilia, who was running a girl’s boarding school in Gainsborough, while Kezziah, the only daughter still living at home, went to stay with Samuel and his wife, Ursula, in Tiverton. Meanwhile, John and Charles returned to Oxford via London to visit their sister Martha, who had gone to London to live with their uncle Matthew Wesley. Martha, however, had recently entered a hasty marriage to one of John and Charles’s friends, a staunch member of the Holy Club. The man’s name was Westley Hall, and everyone assumed that the marriage would be strong and lasting. Unfortunately, it deteriorated instead in a scandal that affected the Wesley family and the entire church movement.
At thirty-two years old, John was no longer sure that he wanted to stay on as a fellow at Lincoln College in Oxford. Now that his father was dead and he was under no obligation to take up the position of rector at Epworth, John found himself at loose ends. As he searched about for what to do next, he visited Dr. John Burton, a professor at Corpus Christi College, Oxford. John had gotten to know Dr. Burton through his association with the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. Dr. Burton was one of the society’s board members, and he was also a member of the board of trustees for the new colony recently established in Georgia in North America.
John explained to Dr. Burton what he was feeling. The doctor listened carefully to his words and then looked John in the eye and said, “I have just the man you should meet—James Oglethorpe.”
John knew of James Oglethorpe by reputation. Oglethorpe was a former army general and a member of Parliament. As a member of Parliament, he had become concerned about the plight of debtors thrown into prison for failing to repay their debts. He found the whole notion of locking up debtors to be absurd. Not only were they forced to live in deplorable conditions in prison, but also, since they were locked up, they were cut off from any way of working to make money to discharge their debts. Oglethorpe had pushed for reform and eventually came up with the idea of establishing a colony on the strip of land situated on the coast of North America between Carolina to the north and Spanish Florida to the south. In so doing he would establish not only a buffer zone between the British and the Spanish in America but also a colony that would be a haven for debtors and for those fleeing religious persecution in Europe.
James Oglethorpe had presented his plan to Parliament, who endorsed it, and King George II had granted the new colony a charter. The charter was given to a board of trustees for twenty-one years and covered the land between the Savannah and Altamaha rivers and westward to the “South Sea.” During this twenty-one-year proprietary period, the board of trustees (who were unofficially recognized as “governors”) would make the colony’s rules, though the liberties of Englishmen were guaranteed, as was the freedom of religion to all except Catholics. According to the charter, the purpose of the colony was threefold: (1) to afford an opportunity to the unfortunate poor to begin life over again, (2) to offer a refuge to the persecuted Protestants of Europe, and (3) to erect a military barrier between the Carolinas and Spanish Florida. At the end of the twenty-one-year proprietary period, control of the colony would pass to the British Crown.
The new colony was named Georgia, in honor of George II, and early in 1733 Governor James Oglethorpe and thirty-five families had set out for Georgia. They sailed up the Savannah River in the spring of 1733, and on a bluff overlooking the river they founded a city, which they named Savannah after the river.
Dr. Burton explained that after two years in Georgia, Oglethorpe had returned to England to raise more money for the colony and to recruit more colonists, among them clergymen. John was about to make a trip to London to arrange for the publishing of his father’s commentary on the book of Job, and Dr. Burton arranged for him to meet Oglethorpe while he was there.
James Oglethorpe was a strapping man with broad shoulders and a confident demeanor. He warmly greeted John and proceeded to tell him all about the Georgia colony. He explained how more and more people were arriving in the colony, including Pietists from Europe and Scottish Highlanders. As a result, the colony had an urgent need for qualified clergymen who could attend to the spiritual needs of the people. John, for his part, was intrigued by what he heard, but he was not sure whether colonial life was for him. Still, Oglethorpe seemed eager for him to come to Georgia and serve as vicar (a clergyman in charge of a chapel) in Savannah, and John promised to carefully consider the option.
Back in Oxford John could not settle down. The more he thought about it, the more he realized that it was time for a change, and the change James Oglethorpe seemed to be offering him became more appealing. While ministering to the spiritual needs of colonists in Savannah was what Oglethorpe had in mind for John, what really attracted him was the idea of converting the Indians, or “noble savages,” as he referred to them, who also inhabited the Georgia colony. That, John decided, would be challenge enough for him.
