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Updated: June 3, 2025
It was only with great difficulty that Whitefield could persuade the Wesleys to join him in this new phase of missionary labor. Charles Wesley, on this as on most other occasions, was even more strongly conservative.
It was natural to expect, that coming from a district, memorable as the scene of many visits from the Wesleys, a bit of land consecrated with the tears and labors of John Nelson, the stalwart hero, and kept fresh with the hallowed memories of the saintly Hester Ann Rogers, there should be among the emigrants many who were loyal and devoted Methodists.
He loved his virtues to be practical, his heroes to be great eaters of beef; he loved the jovial Heracles, loved the astute Odysseus; not the Robespierres and Wesleys. A fine buoyant sense of life and of man's unequal character ran through all his thoughts.
"The Longfellows and he talked much of spiritualism, for he was greatly interested in that subject, but he suspended his judgment, and thought that, if in such manifestations there is anything, 'Pucks, not the spirits of dead men, reveal themselves." This was Southey's suggestion, as regards the celebrated disturbances in the house of the Wesleys.
Is it not plain why religion has such an unbreakable hold upon the human mind? The funeral of Christianity has been predicted many times but each time the deceased has proved too lively for the obsequies. In the middle of the eighteenth century they said that Christianity had one foot in the grave, but then came the amazing revival of religious life under the Wesleys.
Scratches were now produced, but the child herself said that they were not like the former sounds, and 'the concurrent opinion of the whole assembly was that the child had been frightened by threats into this attempt. . . . The master of the house and his friend both declared that the noises the girl had made this morning had not the least likeness to the former noises. In the same way the Wesleys at Epworth, in 1716, found that they could not imitate the perplexing sounds produced in the parsonage.
The whole array of Christian saints and heresiarchs, including the greatest, the Bernards, the Loyolas, the Luthers, the Foxes, the Wesleys, had their visions, voices, rapt conditions, guiding impressions, and 'openings. They had these things because they had exalted sensibility, and to such things persons of exalted sensibility are liable."
"What Geneva was to Calvin, Wittenberg to Luther, Edinburgh to Knox, and Epworth to the Wesleys," this beautiful nook of Bourbon County is to that great reformatory or restoratory movement inaugurated in 1803, whose plea was and still is the restoration of the simplicity, the freedom and the catholicity of apostolic Christianity; and whose dominant effort has ever been for the union of God's people upon the only efficient platform of Christian union, faith in Jesus the Christ, the Son of God.
Such is the story unfolded by the Wesleys themselves in a series of letters and memoranda, which, taken together, form, as was said, one of the best authenticated narratives of haunting extant. But before endeavoring to ascertain the source of the phenomena credited to the soi-disant Jeffrey, another and fully as important inquiry must be made.
The physician of Catherine de Medicis, Ambroise Pare, describes every one of the noises heard by the Wesleys, long after his day, as familiar, and as caused by devils. Recurrence and conformity of evidence cannot be found in greater force. The anthropological test of evidence for faith in the rejected phenomena is thus amply satisfied.
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