THE MEMORY OF WESLEY.

Dunstan Times, Issue 3130, 14 August 1922, Page 8

THE MEMORY OF WESLEY.

(London Daily Telegraph.) * It is announced that the chapel inp which John Wesley ministered 1 for aw dozen years, the bouse in which he Lived, and the tomb in which be lies buried, are ire need of thorough restoration. We make no doubt that the members of the Church which he founded, “the people called Metbodiiste,” who are now to he counted by the million, will provide generously for the care of what is to them ai shrine and a place of pilgrimage. Many who stand outside their ranks will heartily honor the claim of that eighteenth century chapel to the reverence of mankind and § declare that the little burial-place where John Wesley lies is sacred ground. The chapel is, indeed, not the first lionise of Methodism. When Wesley, still a. young man, though with a large and strangely varied experience in religious work, first laid the founda-tion-stone of a; building for Methodists, it was in the Horse Fair at Bristol. That New Room was the earliest of his chapels. But in the same year, 1739, he was preaching in the tumble-down factory on Windmill Hill, just outside the City of London, which had been a Government foundry for brass guns. Ho bought the place for about a hundred pounds, and for a generation it was the headquarters of Methodism. The lease ran out, and he acquired from the Corporation a, site, in Moot-fields ai few hundred yards away, whereon are built the existing chapel and the house, in which he died. When he came to the foundry there was no City-road. That thoroughfare. which runs over the slopes of Windmill Hill, was not made till 1761. Later still Mom-fields remained an open space, a. pleasure-ground of the citizens, as it had been all down the ages of London’s existence. A period of a little more than a century has iseen the whole district covered with houses, and in turn almost abandoned by residents to industry and commerce. When Wesley, in 1777, laid the foundation stone of the chapel which now bears his name, such “great, multitudes assembled to see the ceremony that he could not without much difficulty get through the press.” Though not yet at the height of his power and influence, he had already triumphed over the mob violence and the prejudice in Church circles against innovation and “enthusiasm” which beset his early work. That high Tory and High Churchman Johnson had solmnly pronounced him “a worthy and religious man,” and few people in England worth consideration would have cavilled at the judgment. He laid the stone of the chapel, and “probably,” said he, “this stone will be seen no more by any human eye, but will remain there till the earth and the works thereof are burnt up.” ' A Fourteen years later, in 1791, he lay dying at the age of 88 in the house hard by. “Let me he buried in nothing but what is woollen,” he ordered, “and let my corpse be carried in my coffin into the chapel. For I particularly desire that there may be no hearse, no coach, no escutcheon, no pomp, except the tears of them that love me and are. following me to Abraham’s bosom.” So it was done. Six poor men carried his body away, and he lay in the chapel dressed in gown, cassock, and band, the old clerical cap on his head, a Bible in one hand, a white handkerchief in the other, till in the early morning, that fliere might be no crowd at his funeral, one who had been a preacher of his for thirty years laid him to rest. There was no doubt even then of the importance or the permanence of his work. Since Puritanism had lost its vigor a century before Wesley began to preach scarcely any religious impulse had stirred English life. Among the vivifying forces which quickened the thought and energy of the eighteenth century, Methodism was one of the greatest. It brought, back religion into the. daily life of the common people. It was a potent cause in that revival of the Church of England which, first in one manner and then in another, did great work in the next century. With all his missionary fervor, with, all bis intense concentration on evangelical faith—he called himself “a Bible bigot” —he was anything but a. narrow zealot. It li«b been well said that the aim which he set himself was “to bring all the world to solid, inward, vital religion.” Hut his brother was right when he pronounced that John was by nature and habit a tutor, and would 1 be to the end. lie “found more profit in sermons on either good tempers or good works than in what, are vulgarly called Gospel sermons.” Wo like to think that in his breadth of mind, in big love of order, and in his organising power, John WesIcy was characteristically English, though all the- world was bis parish, and all the world round his earnest and vitalising influence is at work to-dhy.