e to do their duty, a decidedness in forming
opinions, and a plainness, not to say bluntness, in expressing them,
belong to all alike. The picture given us of the family at Epworth
Rectory is an illustration of the remark made in another chapter that
the wholesale censure of the whole body of the parochial clergy in the
early part of the eighteenth century has been far too sweeping and
severe. Here is an instance--and it is not spoken of as a unique, or
even an exceptional, instance--of a worthy clergyman who was, with his
whole family, living an exemplary life, and adorning the profession to
which he belonged. The influence of his early training, and especially
that of his mother, is traceable throughout the whole of Wesley's
career; and it is not unreasonable to suppose that Wesley's unflinching
attachment to the Church, his reluctance to speak ill of her
ministers,[709] and the displeasure which he constantly showed when he
observed any tendency on the part of his followers to separate from her
communion, may have been intensified by his recollections of that good
and useful parson's family in Lincolnshire in which he passed his youth.

The year 1729 is the date which Wesley himself gives of the rise of that
revival of religion in which he himself took so prominent a part. It is
somewhat curious that he places the commencement of the revival at a
date nine years earlier than that of his own conversion; but it must be
remembered that in his later years he took a somewhat different view of
the latter event from that which he held in his hot youth. He believed
that before 1738 he had faith in God as a servant; after that, as a son.
At any rate, we shall not be far wrong in regarding that little meeting
at Oxford of a few young men, called in derision the Holy Club, the
Sacramentarian Club, and finally the _Methodists_, as the germ of that
great movement now to be described. No doubt the views of its members
materially changed in the course of years; but the object of the later
movement was precisely the same as that of the little band from the very
first--viz. to promote the love of God and the love of man for God's
sake, to stem the torrent of vice and irreligion, and to fill the land
with a godly and useful population.

This, it is verily believed, was from first to last the master key to a
right understanding of John Wesley's life. Everything must give way to
this one great object. In subservience to this he was read