John Wesley

: For entries on other people named John Wesley, see John Wesley (disambiguation).

Personality and activities

Wesley travelled constantly, generally on horseback, preaching twice or thrice a day. He formed societies, opened chapels, examined and commissioned preachers, administered discipline, raised funds for schools, chapels, and charities, prescribed for the sick, helped to pioneer the use of electric shock for the treatment of illness, superintended schools and orphanages, wrote commentaries and other religious literature, replied to attacks on Methodism, conducted controversies, and carried on a prodigious correspondence. He is believed to have travelled more than 250,000 miles in the course of his ministry, and to have preached more than 40,000 times. He often woke up to preach at 5 every morning.

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The number of works he wrote, translated, or edited, exceeds 200, including sermons, commentaries, hymns, a Christian library of fifty volumes, grammars, dictionaries, and other textbooks, as well as political tracts. He is said to have received at least £20,000 for his publications, but used little of it for himself. His charities were limited only by his means. He died poor. He rose at four in the morning, lived simply and methodically, and was never idle if he could help it.

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In his Journal, Wesley bemoaned the decline of superstition, the advance of human thought and the more peaceable reign of Christ on the earth, in the following words: "It is true likewise, that the English in general, and, indeed, most of the men of learning in Europe, have given up all accounts of witches and apparitions as mere wives' fables. I am sorry for it. . . . The giving up of witchcraft is in effect giving up the Bible!"

Related Topics:
Superstition - Europe - Witch - Apparition - Witchcraft - Bible

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He is described as below medium height, well proportioned, strong, with a bright eye, a clear complexion, and a saintly, intellectual face. He married very unhappily, at the age of forty-eight, a widow, Mary Vazeille, and had no children; she left him fifteen years later. He died peacefully, after a short illness, leaving as the result of his life-work 135,000 members, and 541 itinerant preachers under the name "Methodist."

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Despite his achievements he never quite overcame profound self-doubt. At the age of 63, he could tell his brother, "I do not love God. I never did. Therefore I never believed, in the Christian sense of the word." (Quoted, Tomkins John Wesley: A Biography (Eerdmans, 2003) 168.)

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