John Wesley Biography, Books, and Sermons

John Wesley rode further, preached oftener, and slept less than almost any man of his century, and he did it for more than fifty years on roads that would break a modern traveller in a week. He founded no denomination on purpose. He died an Anglican priest, insisting to the end that he had never left the Church of England. Yet the movement he organised — Methodism — outlived him, crossed oceans, and reshaped the religious life of two nations. What makes his story worth telling is not the scale of it. It is that the man at the centre of all that motion spent his first thirty-five years desperately, methodically, and unsuccessfully trying to earn what he was finally given for nothing.

A brand plucked out of the burning

He was born at Epworth rectory in Lincolnshire on 17 June 1703, the fifteenth child of Samuel Wesley, a difficult and often debt-ridden parson, and his remarkable wife Susanna. Of the nineteen children Susanna bore, fewer than half lived to grow up. The parish resented Samuel; on more than one occasion its rougher members expressed the resentment with fire.

On the night of 9 February 1709, the rectory burned. The family scrambled out into the garden and counted heads, and one was missing. John, not yet six, had been left asleep in an upstairs room. He woke to find the roof alight, climbed onto a chest, and appeared at the window. There was no ladder and no time to fetch one. Neighbours made a ladder of themselves — one man standing on another’s shoulders — and pulled the boy through the window. Moments later the roof fell in.

Susanna never got over it, and never meant to. She took the rescue as a summons, and reached for Zechariah 3:2 to name it: her son was a brand plucked out of the burning. Two years later, on 17 May 1711, she wrote a private meditation that reads less like sentiment than like a contract.

The phrase stuck to Wesley for life. He adopted it himself in his mid-thirties, and in 1753, gravely ill and expecting to die, he drafted his own epitaph: Here lieth the body of John Wesley, a brand plucked out of the burning. He then lived another thirty-seven years.

The school of Susanna

The deepest formation of Wesley’s life happened in his mother’s kitchen. Susanna Wesley — whose own writings are held in this library — ran the rectory as a school, a monastery, and a small republic of the soul. School hours were inviolable, nine to twelve and two to five. Each child learned the alphabet in a single day, beginning the day after their fifth birthday. Each got one evening a week alone with their mother, and John’s was Thursday; he was still writing to her about those Thursdays as an Oxford don.

In 1732 the grown son asked his mother to write down her method. She did, on 24 July, and the letter is one of the founding documents of Methodism, though it never mentions the word. Its centre is a conviction that is bracing and, to modern ears, hard: “As self-will is the root of all sin and misery, so whatever cherishes this in children insures their after wretchedness and irreligion; whatever checks and mortifies it, promotes their future happiness and piety.”

Judge the doctrine as you will — here is what matters biographically. When John Wesley later built a movement out of small groups, fixed hours, searching questions, written rules, and relentless self-examination, he was not inventing a system. He was reproducing his mother’s house on a national scale. It is fair to say that Susanna organised Methodism before her son was old enough to name it.

Oxford and the Holy Club

From his mother’s kitchen Wesley went to Charterhouse School in London, and from Charterhouse up to Christ Church, Oxford, in 1720. He took his degree in 1724 and stayed. He was ordained deacon on 19 September 1725, elected a Fellow of Lincoln College on 17 March 1726 — a genuine distinction, and a living — and ordained priest on 22 September 1728. Returning to Oxford, he found that his younger brother Charles had gathered a handful of undergraduates for prayer, study, fasting, and visits to the town’s prisons and poor. John took it over, as he took most things over.

The university found them ridiculous. The nicknames came fast: Bible Moths, the Holy Club, and the one that lasted — Methodists, for their methodical, clockwork piety. By 1732 there was a pamphlet about them. George Whitefield, a servitor working his way through Pembroke, joined and was changed by it.

They fasted, they communed weekly, they parcelled out their hours, they examined their motives to the point of scruple. And by his own later verdict, John Wesley — ordained priest, Oxford Fellow, and the most disciplined man in the room — was not yet a Christian. The machinery was perfect. It was simply not connected to anything.

Georgia: the humbling

In October 1735 he sailed for the new colony of Georgia, to serve the settlers and, he hoped, to convert the Indians. The voyage taught him more than the mission did.

On 25 January 1736 the Simmonds ran into an Atlantic storm. A company of Moravians — German pietists, emigrating with their women and children — were in the middle of a psalm when, as Wesley recorded, the sea “broke over, split the mainsail in pieces, covered the ship, and poured in between the decks.” The English passengers panicked. Wesley panicked. And the Germans, he wrote in six words that clearly cost him something to set down, “calmly sang on.”

Afterwards he went and asked one of them the question that was eating him. “Were you not afraid?” The man answered, “I thank God, no.” Wesley pressed: “But were not your women and children afraid?” The reply came mildly. “No; our women and children are not afraid to die.”

Wesley was a priest of the Church of England, sailing to save souls, and he had just discovered that he was more frightened of drowning than the peasants in the hold. It is the hinge of his life. He never forgot it, and to his great credit he wrote it down rather than editing it out.

Georgia itself went badly and then worse. He was rigid where he needed tact, and his pastoral care of a young woman named Sophy Hopkey blurred into a courtship he could neither commit to nor relinquish. When she married another man, Wesley repelled her from Communion on a technicality. Her husband’s family had him indicted. In December 1737 he slipped out of the colony and sailed for home, a failure by any public measure. Sailing back, he set down the verdict himself: he had gone to America to convert others, and had never been converted himself.

Aldersgate

In London the Moravians pursued him. Peter Böhler, a young man ten years his junior, told Wesley what he had no wish to hear — that he lacked saving faith. Wesley, a priest, asked whether he should therefore stop preaching. Böhler’s answer is one of the great pieces of pastoral counsel: “Preach faith till you have it; and then, because you have it, you will preach faith.”

He preached it for eleven weeks without having it. Then, on the evening of 24 May 1738, he went to a society meeting in Aldersgate Street — unwillingly, he notes, which is the most Wesleyan detail in the whole account. Someone was reading aloud Luther’s preface to Romans.

“About a quarter before nine, while he was describing the change which God works in the heart through faith in Christ, I felt my heart strangely warmed. I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone, for salvation; and an assurance was given me that He had taken away my sins, even mine, and saved me from the law of sin and death.”

— John Wesley, Journal, 24 May 1738

Note what the moment gave him: not new doctrine, and not a new standard of holiness. He had those already, in punishing quantity. What he received was assurance — the thing the Moravian had in the storm. The disciplined man was finally told he could stop auditioning.

The fields

Whitefield, meanwhile, had begun doing something scandalous: preaching outdoors, to colliers, in the open air. He begged Wesley to come to Bristol and take it up. Wesley recoiled. He was, he admitted, “so tenacious of every point relating to decency and order that I should have thought the saving of souls almost a sin if it had not been done in a church.”

He submitted. On 2 April 1739, borrowing David’s words to Michal, he wrote: “At four in the afternoon, I submitted to be more vile and proclaimed in the highways the glad tidings of salvation, speaking from a little eminence in a ground adjoining to the city, to about three thousand people.” The fastidious Oxford Fellow had become a hedge-preacher, and the Church of England’s pulpits began closing against him. Challenged for trespassing on other men’s parishes, he replied with the sentence that became Methodism’s motto.

“I look upon all the world as my parish; thus far I mean, that, in whatever part of it I am, I judge it meet, right, and my bounden duty to declare unto all that are willing to hear, the glad tidings of salvation.”

— John Wesley, Journal, 11 June 1739

The long road

From that spring until he was too frail to mount a horse, Wesley was almost never still. He rose at four, preached at five to workers on their way to the pits and mills, and covered his miles with a book propped open in the saddle, having trained his horse to keep the road while he read. He was stoned, mobbed, bulled, and refused lodging; he was also, by the end, the most beloved man in England.

The famous figures — roughly 250,000 miles on horseback and some 40,000 sermons — deserve an honest caveat. Wesley never tallied them himself. They are traditional estimates, extrapolated by later biographers from the itineraries in his Journal, and the numbers wobble between sources: 225,000 miles or 250,000; 40,000 sermons or 42,000. Treat them as a fair order of magnitude rather than an audit. The Journal itself, kept for over fifty years, is the real evidence, and it is staggering enough without arithmetic.

The method

Wesley’s durable genius was not oratory — Whitefield outpreached him — but organisation. He gathered converts into societies, then broke the societies into classes of about a dozen, each with a leader who met them weekly and asked how their souls prospered. Nobody could hide. He commissioned lay preachers, ordinary tradesmen, when no clergy would help him, and gathered them into an annual Conference from 1744. In 1784 he secured the movement’s legal future with the Deed of Declaration, and — the step that finally made separation from the Church of England inevitable — ordained ministers for America himself, sending Thomas Coke, Richard Whatcoat, and Thomas Vasey to a new nation whose bishops would not serve it.

There was a doctrine to match the machinery. Wesley preached grace at every stage of the Christian life — grace that goes before conversion and awakens the sinner, grace that justifies through faith, grace that keeps working long after forgiveness — and he refused to let salvation stop at pardon. His most contested teaching, Christian perfection, or entire sanctification, has been misheard ever since: he never claimed that believers stop sinning, but that love for God and neighbour can grow until it governs a life, and that every Christian should pursue that maturity through the ordinary means of grace — prayer, Scripture, the Lord’s Supper, fasting, works of mercy. It was the Holy Club’s old programme, resurrected on the far side of Aldersgate: the same discipline, now running on assurance instead of anxiety.

The works of mercy were not a footnote. The societies were engines of practical compassion as much as of piety — Wesley visited prisoners all his life, established schools, and organised medical care for the poor who could never have afforded a physician, convinced that a Christianity which did not transform both the believer and the street the believer lived on was not the real article.

He was equally practical about money. His sermon The Use of Money gives three rules, and they are routinely misquoted — the first word is gain, not earn, and the order matters, because giving comes last for a reason.

“Gain all you can, without hurting either yourself or your neighbour, in soul or body — save all you can, by cutting off every expense which serves only to indulge foolish desire — and then, give all you can, or, in other words, give all you have to God.”

— John Wesley, The Use of Money, Sermon 50

He obeyed his own rule. As his book royalties grew, he held his living expenses flat and gave away the remainder, dying with almost nothing but a well-worn coat, a few coins, and the Methodist Church.

Whitefield: the friend he fought

The friendship that launched the revival nearly broke it. Whitefield was a convinced Calvinist; Wesley was not, and in 1739 he preached and then published Free Grace, an unsparing assault on predestination. It wounded Whitefield, who felt the harmony of the awakening — when all had been “like little children” — had been shattered by his friend’s pen. They divided, and the revival ran in two channels thereafter.

But they did not stay divided, and this is where both men grew. They reached what one of Wesley’s preachers called an agreement to differ, and the affection outlasted the argument. The proof came at the end. Asked repeatedly who should preach his funeral sermon should he die abroad, Whitefield kept naming the man who had attacked his theology in print: “He is the man.” Whitefield died in America in 1770, and on 18 November John Wesley stood up and preached his funeral sermon, generously.

Molly

The record must be honest here, and the honesty is not flattering. In February 1751 Wesley married Mary Vazeille — Molly — a well-to-do widow with four children. It went wrong quickly and stayed wrong for thirty years. He would not stop travelling; she would not accept a husband who was never home and whose correspondence with other women she read and resented. She left, returned, and left again.

On 23 January 1771 she set out for Newcastle intending never to come back, and Wesley recorded it in his Journal in three flat Latin clauses — Non eam reliqui: non dimisi: non revocabo — which his editors render: I did not desert her; I did not send her away; I will not recall her. The English version so often quoted is a translator’s, not Wesley’s. Either way it is a cold sentence, and it is his. She died on 8 October 1781; he was away preaching and learned of it only after she was buried. The man who could organise the spiritual lives of tens of thousands could not manage the one nearest to him. He knew it, and never really explained it.

The last battle

Wesley’s finest hour came last. He had loathed slavery since Georgia, but in February 1772 an anti-slavery tract by the Quaker Anthony Benezet lit the fuse. His Journal entry for the 12th is one of the great sentences in the literature of abolition: he had been reading, he wrote, “a very different book, published by an honest Quaker, on that execrable sum of all villanies, commonly called the slave trade.” In 1774 he published Thoughts upon Slavery, refusing every economic evasion of his age: “I absolutely deny all slave-holding to be consistent with any degree of even natural justice.”

He was still at it at eighty-seven. On the morning of 24 February 1791, six days before his death, having read a tract by a “poor African” — generally identified as Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative — he took up his pen for a young Member of Parliament who was losing, year after year, a bill to abolish the slave trade.

“Unless the divine power has raised you up to be as Athanasius contra mundum, I see not how you can go through your glorious enterprise in opposing that execrable villainy, which is the scandal of religion, of England, and of human nature. Unless God has raised you up for this very thing, you will be worn out by the opposition of men and devils. But if God be for you, who can be against you? … Go on, in the name of God and in the power of His might, till even American slavery (the vilest that ever saw the sun) shall vanish away before it.”

— John Wesley, letter to William Wilberforce, 24 Feb 1791

It is the last letter of his that survives. He closed it, as he closed his life, by praying for somebody else.

The best of all

He died at his house beside City Road Chapel on 2 March 1791, aged eighty-seven, after an illness of a few days, surrounded by friends. Near the end, with almost no breath left, he startled them by singing Isaac Watts: I’ll praise my Maker while I’ve breath. And at least twice, to the people gathered round the bed, he said the thing he had spent fifty-three years riding across England to tell strangers — that the whole of it, the fire and the fields and the failure and the mobs and the miles, came down to one fact:

“The best of all is, God is with us.”

He left behind a coat, a few silver spoons, and a movement. He would have thought only one of those worth mentioning — and he would have said, correctly, that it began with a woman praying over a boy she had nearly lost to a fire.