Wayward Youth.

A Father's Grief.

stranger to the spirit of Christianity, and Samuel was, in his religious character, wayward and intractable. He finally became a Roman Catholic. At this the aged father was most deeply grieved. On being informed of the fact, he gave expression to his feelings in the following lines:

"Farewell, my all of earthly hope,
My nature's stay, my age's prop,

Sarah, the

Irrevocably gone!

Submissive to the will divine,
I acquiesce, and make it mine;
I offer up my son."

daughter, was an amiable and good child. She became a woman of much eminence for literary talent, and distinguished for piety. She died in 1828. Neither Charles nor Sarah were ever married. Samuel left several children. His children, so far as I am informed, are the only representatives now remaining on earth of the honored name of Wesley.

Peculiar Temperament.

Prejudices.

CHAPTER V.

POETIC GENIUS OF CHARLES WESLEY.

HE temperament of Charles Wesley was

THE

very different from that of John. He was the creature of feeling. From his father and his mother he inherited an attachment, nearly approaching bigotry, to the Church of England, and a most cordial dislike to the Dissenters. To this attachment, as a matter of feeling rather than of judgment or reason, he adhered through life. Abused, persecuted, and insulted, as he was by the clergy of the Established Church, he yet remained the avowed enemy of all separation from her communion. In the latter part of his life he could not be reconciled to some of the proceedings of the Methodist preachers. He had readily acquiesced in fieldpreaching, lay-preaching, and forming Methodist societies; but he could not consent to allow Methodist preachers to administer the ordinances, nor the societies to assume any appearance of separation from the Church. Nor did he like the course of his brother in ordaining

Latter Years.

His Fears. ministers for America and Scotland. He feared that the Methodists, if they separated from the Church, and set up for themselves, would break up into innumerable fragments, and be lost amidst the Presbyterians, Independents, Baptists, and other dissenters. His ardent desire was to see the Methodist societies return to the bosom of the Church. The abler portion of the preachers might, he thought, be ordained as regular clergymen; the rest might remain as lay assistants; and the societies might be incorporated with the parishes in their neighborhood.

The signs of the times, during the latter years of his life, kept him in a constant panic. He was naturally mercurial in his temperament, rising and falling with the weather, and his mind was alternately highly excited and deeply depressed, by the relative affairs of Methodism and the Church. His comparative retirement from the itinerancy, during the latter years of his life, was probably both the consequence of these feelings and the cause of augmenting the difficulty. Finding he could not perfectly harmonize with his brother's measures, nor at all identify himself with the preachers and people, who repeatedly demanded pro

Removes to London.

Prejudice Against the Dissenters.

vision for administering the ordinances in their own chapels, he chose to retire from the itinerancy, confining his labors principally to London and Bristol. At last he removed to London, and devoted his time mostly to the societies and chapels in the cities. He, however, still considered himself a Methodist, in full connection with his brother, from whom he could not and would not separate. His retired life deprived him of the intimate and general acquaintance which itinerancy would have promoted with the preachers, and he imagined a thousand difficulties which never occurred. We shall cease to wonder at his fears and feelings, if we consider how strong was his prejudice against the Dissenters, and how destitute he must have been of any idea of Methodism, as we see it developed under the modern Wesleyan and the American Methodist Episcopal connections. He did not think it possible to keep the Methodist societies together in one body. The system of independence had not been tried, and he supposed it could not, under any circumstances, succeed. Had Charles Wesley seen, as we have, or could he have formed any notion of the practical workings of Methodism under a system of

Confidant of Fletcher.

A Wretched Prisoner.

independence, he would, with all his Church partialities, have dismissed his fears, and given up his objections.

In the doctrinal controversies, in which the Methodists were engaged in 1770, Charles Wesley took a deep interest. He was the confidant and adviser of Fletcher in the memorable contest with the Calvinists, fully sustaining, with all his heart and soul, the doctrines of the Wesleyan conference. He seldom, however, wrote on controversy, except in verse. Some of his hymns exhibit clear evidence of being written under the excitement of that Antinomian controversy.

He began his public ministry by preaching to the prisoner. Through his long life he never forgot nor neglected the unfortunate beings confined, no matter for what crime, in the dungeon cell. When, in the days of persecution, he was debarred from entering the prison, he would go into the yard, while the poor condemned and forsaken ones would crowd around the irongrated windows to hear him preach. He found one convict who resisted all his efforts to do him good. This was the noble Earl-Ferrenthe cousin of Lady Huntington. The unhappy man was tried, convicted, and executed in 1760,