-man wherever he could find him. For a
long time he held back from the thought of open-air preaching, but now
he saw that it must be done. There was a period of his life, he says,
when he would have thought the saving of a soul "a sin almost if it had
not been done in a church." But from the first moment when he began to
preach to crowds in the open air he must have felt that he had found
his work at last. His friend and colleague Whitefield, who had more of
the genius of an orator than Wesley, had preceded him in this path.
One is a little surprised that such men as Wesley and Whitefield should
ever have found any difficulty about preaching to a crowd in the open
air. The Hill of Mars at Athens listened to an open-air sermon from an
apostle, and Whitefield himself observed at a later date that the
"Sermon on the Mount is a pretty remarkable precedent of field
preaching."

[Sidenote: 1738--Wesley's superstition]

Meanwhile, however, Wesley's father died, and Wesley received an
invitation to go out to Georgia with General Oglethorpe, the governor
of that settlement, to preach to the Indians and the colonists. He
sailed for the new colony on October 14, 1735. He was accompanied by
his brother Charles and two other missionaries, and on board the vessel
was a small band of men from "the meek Moravian Missions." The
Moravian sect was then in its earliest working order. It had been
founded--or perhaps it would be more fitting to say restored--not many
years before, by the enthusiastic and devoted Count Von Zinzendorf.
Wesley was greatly attracted by the ways and the spiritual life of the
Moravians. It is worthy of note that when Count Zinzendorf began the
formation or {135} restoration of Moravianism he had as little idea of
departing from the fold of the Confession of Augsburg as Wesley had of
leaving the Church of England. John Wesley did not, as we have said,
accomplish much among the colonists and the Indians. Perhaps his ways
were too dogmatic and dictatorial for the colonists. He departed
altogether from the Church discipline in some of his religious
exercises, while he clung to it pertinaciously in others. He offended
local magnates by preaching at them from the pulpit, giving them pretty
freely a piece of his mind as to their conduct and ways of life, and,
indeed, turning them to public ridicule with rough and rasping
sarcasms. With the Indians he could not do much, if only for the fact
that he had to