Samuel Wesley

“ Wesley also compiled for Dunton ‘The Young Student's Library,’ 1692, fol.; workmanlike synopses of eighty-nine works in divinity, history, and science.
Wesley's verse will not lift him high among poets (he was pilloried in the first edition of the ‘Dunciad,’ 1728, i. 115) , nor has his ‘Job’ given him his expected rank among scholars. He was an able, busy, and honest man, with much impulsive energy, easily misconstrued; his fame is that of being the father of John and Charles Wesley.
Samuel Wesley the younger (1691–1739) , poet, eldest child of the above, was born in Spitalfields on 10 Feb. ”

“ We raise no objection to this graphic description of the country clergy living about the time that Samuel Wesley was appointed to South Ormsby. We believe it to be strictly accurate; and yet to all general rules there are exceptions, and, in this instance, Samuel Wesley was one. It is true that he was poor and pinched. It is quite possible that he sometimes found it necessary to load his dungcart, plough his glebe, and feed his swine; but Samuel Wesley was not the man to waste his time at bowls and shovelboard ”

“ Samuel Wesley was present, and was an intensely interested spectator of the disreputable scene. “You have not dealt with me like gentlemen!” cried the weakly, arrogant, and furious king; “you have been unmannerly as well as undutiful. Is this your Church of England loyalty? I could not have believed that so many clergymen of the Church of England would have been concerned in such a business. Go home!—get you gone! I am king! I will be obeyed! Go to your chapel this instant, and admit the Bishop of Oxford. Let those who refuse look to it; they shall feel the whole weight of my hand ”

“ Her son Samuel knew all this; and yet, notwithstanding his having been trained for the Dissenting ministry, he entered the very Church which had inflicted so much misery upon his father, and which, to the day of her death, made Dr Thomas Fuller’s niece, Samuel Wesley’s mother, a needy object of charity and alms. Nothing but conscientious conviction of duty, could have induced such a man to attach himself to such a Church. ”

“ Such was the bitter commencement of Samuel Wesley’s collegiate life; and, at the most, he only had about two pounds, in his almost needless purse, to meet it.
“Necessity is the mother of invention.” It was this, probably, that induced Samuel Wesley to publish his first work in 1685. Whilst he was at Mr Veal’s and Mr Morton’s academies, he wrote a number of boyish rhymes, several of which were recited from the platforms of those academies, and gained applause from the tutors and pupils present. Other poetical pieces of a similar description were written after he went to Oxford ”

“ Samuel Wesley was the grandson of Bartholomew Wesley, rector of Catherston, in Dorsetshire. Bartholomew Wesley was born about the year 1600; but the place of his nativity is not known. He received a university education, a fact indicating, to some extent, the circumstances and the religious opinions of his parents. Calamy informs us, that, while at the university, Bartholomew Wesley applied himself to the study of physic, as well as of divinity; and the knowledge which he acquired was of great advantage to him in the dark days of his after life. ”

“ When Samuel Wesley set out for Oxford, all that he possessed was forty-five shillings. By leaving the Dissenters, he had forfeited the friendship of all the friends he had. His mother was a poor forlorn widow, utterly unable to afford him help; and yet, this well-nigh penniless young man resolves to obtain for himself a university education and university degrees. He was nearly five years at college; and yet, five shillings was all the assistance which, during that period, he received from his family and friends. To ride to college was a thing not to be thought about. ”

“ Mr Wesley then concludes his letter thus:—
“This is the evidence we have got. If we may ground a presentment on these proofs, in the taking which we have exactly followed the direction you were so kind to prescribe us, I believe I shall be able to induce my churchwardens to present both Aaron Man and Sarah Brumby, as soon as you will be so good as to teach us how we may proceed,—I am, honoured sir, your very obliged humble servant, Samuel Wesley.” ”

“ Before leaving the parentage of Samuel Wesley, a few words must be said concerning his mother. She was the daughter of one distinguished man and the niece of another. Her father was the Rev. John White, one of the three assessors of the Assembly of Divines, and long known as “the Patriarch of Dorchester;” a man whom Fuller describes as being grave without being morose, and who, in the course of his ministry, “expounded the Scriptures all over and half over again;” a man who had the command of his own passions and of the purses of his parishioners ”

“ His scanty income, and his increasing family, might be one of the inducements which led him to devote himself to literary labour; but had his income been even larger than his necessities required, it is almost certain that he would have pursued the same course of conduct; for, to a literary man, literary labour is not merely toil, but likewise luxury.
Samuel Wesley’s first publication was the “Maggots,” already noticed. His next undertaking was the Athenian Gazette, projected by his brother-in-law, John Dunton, just before Wesley removed from London to South Ormsby. ”

“ During the last few years of his life, Mr Wesley suffered most painfully from the gout and palsy, and hence found it necessary to employ an amanuensis. Two gentlemen who were employed in this capacity, in writing the “Dissertations on the Book of Job,” were John Romley and John Whitelamb.
We have no information of Romley’s origin, except that he studied divinity under Samuel Wesley; graduated at Lincoln College, Oxford; and was for a time Mr Wesley’s curate. He was a member of the Gentleman’s Society at Spalding ”

“ Timothy Rogers was a Nonconformist preacher; a good man, to whom Samuel Wesley, in a subsequent letter, acknowledges himself greatly indebted. Besides his voluminous funeral sermon for Mrs Dunton, he published a book, entitled, “Fall not out by the Way; or, A Persuasion to a Friendly Correspondence between the Conformists and Nonconformists.” Judging from the funeral sermon now before us, he was a man of great vivacity, wit, and mental vigour. ”

“ Let those that keep up the partition wall, take heed lest they are thereby excluded out of the bond of charity, which makes all of one mind, and partakers of the same privileges.” [66]
This is scarce the language of a High Churchman, consigning Dissenters to the uncovenanted mercies of Almighty God. Samuel Wesley was of a temperament too painstaking, too ardent, and too sincere, to be a latitudinarian; but, at the same time, he was too good and too great a man to be a bigot. ”

“ Henry Moore relates that Samuel Wesley was strongly solicited by the friends of King James II. to support the measures of the court in favour of Popery, with a promise of preferment, if he would comply with the king’s desire. But when the time came for reading 102the king’s declaration, he most firmly refused; and though surrounded by courtiers, soldiers, and informers, he preached a bold and pointed discourse against it from Daniel iii. 17, 18: “If it be so, our God whom we serve is able to deliver us from the burning fiery furnace, and he will deliver us out of thine hand, O king. ”

“ Such, then, was the ecclesiastical parliament of which Samuel Wesley was elected a member, by his brother clergymen, in the diocese of Lincoln, in 1701. The honour was distinguished, though, to a poor man like himself, seriously expensive. Some writers have not been sparing in the censures they have thought proper to pronounce on Wesley for spending so much money on convocation attendance, which, as is alleged, might have been much better spent in the payment of his debts, or in providing for the wants of his wife and children. ”

“ A few months before his death, Samuel Wesley replied to his brother’s accusations, in a long letter, twenty lines of which were written by himself, about one-half of it by Mrs Wesley, and the remainder by his son John, who acted as his amanuenses. The letter, which is without date, is written in a serio-jocose style, and is headed “John o’ Styles’ Apology against the imputation of his ill husbandry.” A friend is represented as reading Matthew Wesley’s letter to his brother, John o’ Styles, and as reporting the brother’s answer to the charges brought against him. ”

“ While resident beneath the roof of Samuel Wesley, Whitelamb acquired a sufficient knowledge of the Greek and Latin languages, to enter Lincoln College, Oxford, where he was principally maintained by the Epworth Rector, and had Wesley for his tutor.
Samuel Wesley was a large-hearted man, to whom it was always a happiness to have the power of showing kindness to a fellow-creature. ”

“ To a high-minded and sensitive man like Samuel Wesley, it could not be otherwise than disagreeable to have his domestic troubles and financial embarrassments paraded, first before Parliament, and afterwards in parish churches, for the purpose of obtaining collections to pay some £300 of debt, and perhaps to furnish a trifling surplus to repair Epworth parsonage, and to improve Epworth parish church. At the present day, such a mode of raising money for such purposes would be universally denounced ”

“ It is scarce credible that, with such bishops at the head of the English Church, there should not be hundreds of quiet, godly, earnest, useful ministers, acting under them, all of them of the 117same sterling character as Samuel Wesley. It is a great mistake to imagine that, up to the time of Samuel Wesley’s sons, John and Charles, the English clergy were, almost without exception, ignorant, indolent, heterodox, worldly, and wicked. Doubtless there were a large number of such men ”

“ After all, it was a perilous thing for a young, sprightly fellow, like Samuel Wesley, whose father and grandfather had, by the existing Government, been ejected from their livings, reduced to beggary, and hunted to a premature grave, and whose mother, in consequence of such tyranny, was even now pining in some obscure dwelling, crushed with the sorrows of a too early widowhood, and compelled to submit to the humiliation of being, to some extent, dependent upon the charity of her friends ”

“ Many a minister struggling with poverty would have readily made as great a sacrifice to have attained as high a dignity, especially if its attainment was likely to be the stepping-stone to yet higher ecclesiastical power and benefit. Samuel Wesley’s talents, learning, piety, and literary works were sufficient to justify him in aspiring after the higher, if not highest offices that the Church has to give ”

“ Such was the man whom Samuel Wesley helped in an emergency. We are sorry to register such a fact, but truth and honesty compel us. The only excuse which can be suggested is, that during the last few years, the rector of Epworth had been a serious sufferer from dissenting hatred, and that his old dissenting friends were now his bitterest enemies. ”

“ Samuel Wesley, like his son John, was a moderate Arminian. He fearlessly repudiates the doctrines of election and reprobation. “We cannot,” says he, “be satisfied by any of those scriptures which are brought for that purpose, that there is any such election of a determinate number as either puts a force on their natures, and irresistably saves them, or absolutely excludes all the rest of mankind from salvation. We think there is no one place in the Holy Scriptures which proves that so many men, and no more, were irresistably determined to everlasting salvation.” ”

“ He might, like hundreds of others, have spent his time in agricultural toils and village sports, but there was within him the stirring of a high-born genius, which, wherever it exists, invariably impels its possessor to rise above the mediocrity of the common herd, and to attempt something honourable to the man who does it, and of service to those on whose behalf he labours. Human humdrums have always been inconveniently numerous, but Samuel Wesley was not one of them. ”

“ He that believes and yet argues against reason, is half a Papist, or enthusiast. He that would make Revelation bend to his own shallow reason is either half a Deist or a heretic. O my dear! steer clear between this Scylla and Charybdis. God will bless you; and you shall ever be beloved, as you will ever be a comfort to, your affectionate father,
“Samuel Wesley.” “P.S.—If you have any scruples about any part of Revelation, or the Articles of the Church of England, which I think exactly agreeable to it, I can answer them.”
396 ”

“ Go with me to the Epworth rectory. The venerable Samuel Wesley is dying; no, not dying, but languishing into life. John and Charles have been summoned from Oxford, and they are at the bedside. The faithful wife is so overcome that she cannot be present to witness the dying scene.
John sympathetically inquires, "Do you suffer much, father?" The dying man responds, "Yes, but nothing is too much to suffer for heaven. The weaker I am in body the stronger and more sensible support I feel from God." ”

“ Education is general; and not merely country squires, but country peasants, study classical and scientific books. Work is plentiful; and, except in a few bucolic districts, wages are sufficient to make the poor man’s cottage a neat and a happy home. It was otherwise one hundred and seventy-seven years ago, when Samuel Wesley, a young man of twenty-six years of age, first entered upon the office and duties of a clergyman of the Church of England.
[This chapter is chiefly taken from Macaulay, from Knight, from the Encyclopædia Britannica, and from Baxter’s Life and Times.] ”