le to maintain his mother in her old home.

Wesley peremptorily refused to leave Oxford, and the reason he assigned
was very characteristic. "The question," he said, "is not whether I
could do more good to others there than here; but whether I could do
more good to myself, seeing wherever I can be most holy myself there I
can most promote holiness in others." "My chief motive," he wrote when
starting for Georgia, "is the hope of saving my own soul. I hope to
learn the true sense of the Gospel of Christ by preaching it to the
heathen." He was at this time a High-Churchman of a very narrow type,
full of exaggerated notions about church discipline, extremely anxious
to revive obsolete rubrics, and determined to force the strictest
ritualistic observances upon rude colonists, for whom of all men they
were least adapted. He insisted upon adopting baptism by immersion, and
refused to baptize a child whose parents objected to that form. He would
not permit any non-communicant to be a sponsor, repelled one of the
holiest men in the colony from the communion-table because he was a
Dissenter; refused for the same reason to read the burial-service over
another; made it a special object of his teaching to prevent ladies of
his congregation from wearing any gold ornament or any rich dress, and
succeeded in inducing Oglethorpe to issue an order forbidding any
colonist from throwing a line or firing a gun on Sunday. His sermons, it
was complained, were all satires on particular persons. He insisted upon
weekly communions, desired to rebaptize Dissenters who abandoned their
Nonconformity, and exercised his pastoral duties in such a manner that
he was accused of meddling in every quarrel and prying into every
family.

A more unpropitious commencement for a great career could hardly be
conceived. Wesley returned to England in bad health and low spirits. He
redoubled his austerities and his zeal in teaching, and he was tortured
by doubts about the reality of his faith. It was at this time and in
this state of mind that he came in contact with Peter Boehler, a
Moravian teacher, whose calm and concentrated enthusiasm, united with
unusual mental powers, gained a complete ascendency over his mind. From
him Wesley for the first time learned that form of the doctrine of
justification by faith which he afterward regarded as the fundamental
tenet of Christianity. He had long held that in order to be a real
Christian it was necessary to live a li