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Updated: May 3, 2025
What, it is necessary to ask, did the Wesleys actually hear and see in the course of the two months that they had their ghost with them? The answer obviously must be sought through an analysis of the evidence for the haunting. This chronologically falls into three divisions.
Intimately associated in our thought with the latter, who has enriched our devotional poetry with one touching hymn, is Keble, the singer par excellence of the "Catholic revival," and the most widely successful religious poet of the age, though only very few of his hymns have reached the heart of the people like the far more direct and fervent work of the Wesleys and their compeers.
And so the Great Awakening began; other preachers followed the example of the Wesleys, and were preaching in the fields and by the roadside and were organizing "Methodist Societies." But John Wesley was their leader and exemplar. Neither of the Wesleys nor did Whitefield have any idea at this time of organizing a separate denomination or of running opposition to the Established Church.
With the exception of a short period in which he was assisting his father at Epworth, John Wesley continued at Oxford till the death of his father, in 1735, when the society was dispersed, and the two Wesleys soon after accepted the invitation of General Oglethorpe to accompany him to the new colony of Georgia.
The life of Oglethorpe reads like a novel by James Fenimore Cooper. He was of aristocratic birth, born of an Irish mother, with a small bar sinister on his scutcheon that pushed him out and set him apart. He was a graduate of Oxford, and it was on a visit to his Alma Mater that he heard some sarcastic remarks flung off about the Wesleys that seemed to commend them.
About 1728 he pub. his best known book, A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life, a work which has had a profound influence upon the religious life of England, largely owing to the impression which it produced upon such minds as those of Dr. Johnson, the Wesleys, and others.
The best interpreter of John Wesley is John Wesley himself. He has left us in his own writings a picture of himself, drawn by his own hand, which is far more faithful than that which has been drawn by any other. The whole family of the Wesleys, including the father, the mother, and all the brothers and sisters without exception, was a very interesting one.
But throughout the century, since 1740, "enthusiasm," "the return to nature," had gradually conquered till the rise of the Romantic school with Coleridge and Scott. In religion the enthusiastic movement of the Wesleys had altered the face of the Church in England, while in Scotland the "Moderates" had lost position, and "zeal" or enthusiasm pervaded the Kirk.
Fierce as they were, these fenmen read in the Wesleys a will to match their own and beat it; a scorn, too, which cowed, but at the same time turned them sullen. Parson Wesley they frankly hated. Thrice they had flooded his crops and twice burnt the roof over his head. If the six sisters were handsome, Hetty was glorious.
Even in this field Germany produces theological controversialists whom we have all studied, orthodox and destructive, but few pioneers, and practically no Augustines or Loyolas, Wesleys or Booths, Livingstones or Stanleys.
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