"John Wesley" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... that parsons had to go forth beating up congregations. A pew was a privilege. And those who did not frequent the means of grace had at any rate the grace to be ashamed of not doing so. And, further, strolling players, in spite of John Wesley's exhortations, were not considered salvable. The notion of trying to rescue them from merited perdition was too fantastic to be seriously entertained by serious Christians. Finally, the suggested connection between Jesus Christ and a stage-play was really too appalling! ...
— The Matador of the Five Towns and Other Stories • Arnold Bennett
... in forming my Christian character, containing as it does so many precious experiences of trusting in God. I had the privilege also of reading the works of Mrs. Fletcher, Hester Ann Rodgers, and John Wesley. For the privilege of reading all these, I give God thanks. I put the experiences of which I read to a practical test, thus proving that what God had done for others, he would do for me also. After the test these ...
— Trials and Triumphs of Faith • Mary Cole
... in a hurry, especially in the later days, when he had done his work and was enjoying his fame. Mrs. Thrale says that conversation was all he {47} required to make him happy. He hated people who broke it up to go to bed or to keep an appointment. Much as he delighted in John Wesley's company, he complained that he was never at leisure, which, said Johnson, "is very disagreeable to a man who loves to fold his legs and have out his talk as I do." The world has perhaps grown a more industrious place since those days, though nobody yet has managed to put ...
— Dr. Johnson and His Circle • John Bailey
... of England when a great religious revival began, 1738. Its leader was John Wesley. A number of years earlier, while a tutor at Oxford, he and his brother Charles, with a few others, were accustomed to meet at certain hours for devotional exercises. The regularity of their meetings, and of their habits generally, got for them the name of "Methodists," ...
— The Leading Facts of English History • D.H. Montgomery
... of a Lincolnshire rector. His history covers practically the whole of the eighteenth century, of which he was one of the most typical personalities, as he was certainly the most strenuous figure. His career was absolutely without parallel, for John Wesley, as an itinerating clergyman, and as the propagator of that mission of Methodism which he founded, travelled on his preaching tours for forty years, mostly on horseback. He paid more turnpike fees than any man that ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol X • Various
... reported of him at an early age. His sister, Ebie Hawthorne, gave me a bust of John Wesley, in clerical white bib, and of a countenance much resembling Alcott's, even to the long, white, waving hair. Its very aspect cried out, though never so mercifully, "My ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... both amused and irritated by the attitude of Eastern men who obtained from Congress grants of National money to develop harbors and yet fought the use of the Nation's power to develop the irrigation work of the West. Major John Wesley Powell, the explorer of the Grand Canyon, and Director of the Geological Survey, was the first man who fought for irrigation, and he lived to see the Reclamation Act passed and construction actually begun. Mr. F. H. Newell, the present Director of the Reclamation Service, began his work ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... John Wesley, when fully acquainted with American slavery and the slave trade, pronounced the latter as "the execrable sum of all villanies," and he inveighed against the former as the wickedest ...
— Slavery and Four Years of War, Vol. 1-2 • Joseph Warren Keifer
... Camborne are important mining towns to which no one would go in search of the picturesque, and the bleak and barren surroundings may not inaptly be called the "Black Country" of Cornwall. Gwennap Pit, near Redruth, was the natural amphitheatre where John Wesley preached with marked success to thousands of Cornish miners. For the antiquary there are many interesting remains at Carn Brea, a rocky eminence overlooking the town, and capped with a monument, erected in 1836, to Francis, Baron de ...
— The Cornish Riviera • Sidney Heath
... ordinary toothache, even severe ones, chewing a small piece of really good pellitory will often give relief in a few minutes. Chewing a piece of strong, unbleached Jamaica ginger will often do the same in light cases. The celebrated John Wesley recommended a "few whiffs" at a pipe containing a little caraway seed mixed with tobacco as a simple and ready means of curing the toothache. I can bear testimony to the fact that in some cases ...
— The Ladies Book of Useful Information - Compiled from many sources • Anonymous
... other people' (smiling); that he believed he sincerely meant well, but had a mixture of politicks and ostentation: whereas Wesley thought of religion only. [Footnote: That cannot be said now, after the flagrant part which Mr John Wesley took against our American brethren, when, in his own name, he threw amongst his enthusiastic flock, the very individual combustibles of Dr Johnson's Taxation no Tyranny: and after the intolerant spirit ...
— The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. • James Boswell
... she was a heap smarter 'n Mary Patience, and she was; and in my opinion she railly had more sense 'n all the rest o' the childern put together, 'bout books and cipherin' and arethmetic, and the like; and John Wesley, the oldest of 'em, he got to teachin' at last, when he growed up,—but, la! he couldn't write his own name so 's you could read it. I allus thought ther was a good 'eal of old Ezry in John Wesley. Liked to romance 'round with the youngsters 'most too well.—Spiled him far teachin', I allus ...
— Pipes O'Pan at Zekesbury • James Whitcomb Riley
... for they incited the negroes to insurrection. Nor do I think that the question is affected by the fact that many of the abolitionists were upright, earnest, and devout. A good man is not necessarily a wise man, and I remember that Samuel Johnson and John Wesley supported King George against the ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... the most daring voyages in the history of American exploration was Major John Wesley Powell's descent through the Grand Canon of the Colorado River, in 1869. The river had been discovered three hundred years before his memorable journey, but Major Powell was 5 the first to explore the magnificent ...
— Story Hour Readings: Seventh Year • E.C. Hartwell
... Epworth, England, caught fire one night, and all the inmates were rescued except one son. The boy came to a window, and was brought safely to the ground by two farm-hands, one standing on the shoulder of the other. The boy was John Wesley. If you would realize the responsibility of that incident, if you would measure the consequences of that rescue, ask the millions of Methodists who look back to John Wesley as the founder of ...
— Sowing and Reaping • Dwight Moody
... sofa started up suddenly, checked himself ostentatiously, walked to the bird cage, and began to play with the canary. The wave carried the little spinster to the window. The circus had a homestead in human hearts before John Wesley staked his claim, and even so good a Methodist as Miss Morgan could not be deaf to the scream of the calliope ...
— The Court of Boyville • William Allen White
... was only five years old John Wesley preached to a large congregation in the Rev. Henry Venn's Church in the town. This man of God was a zealous Methodist Churchman, who made Huddersfield the headquarters of extensive labors in all the neighboring region, sympathizing with the great ...
— William Black - The Apostle of Methodism in the Maritime Provinces of Canada • John Maclean
... formed the connecting link between the parochial-charity-school movement of the eighteenth century and the philanthropic period of the educational reformers of the early nineteenth. This was the Sunday-School movement, first tried by John Wesley in Savannah, in 1737, but not introduced into England until 1763. The idea amounted to little, though, until practically worked out anew (1780) by Robert Raikes, a printer of Gloucester, and described by him (1783) in his Gloucester Journal (R. 293), after he had experimented ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... he had supplanted. But at this crisis the machinery of dissimulation slipped a cog. Where the ordinary deck-hand would have gone about his errand heedless of the presence of the two women passengers, the proxy John Wesley Gavitt must needs take off his cap and apologize for passing in ...
— The Price • Francis Lynde
... It is recorded in John Wesley's "Journal,"69 that when he paid his memorable visit to Herrnhut he was much impressed by the powerful sermons of a certain godly carpenter, who had preached in his day to the Eskimos in Greenland, and who showed a remarkable knowledge ...
— History of the Moravian Church • J. E. Hutton
... Nelson, making unfavourable comparison of John Wesley with a prominent religious teacher of the day; and Nelson replied, "He has not stayed in the upper room like John Wesley." We need our silent preparations for speech; to go forth, like Ezekiel, into the plain to find the glory of the Lord; or like Daniel to the river-side, where we may meet ...
— Memoranda Sacra • J. Rendel Harris
... John Wesley was once travelling in a stage-coach with a young officer who was exceedingly profane, and who swore curses upon himself in almost every sentence. Mr. Wesley asked him if he had read the Common Prayer Book; for if he had, ...
— Talkers - With Illustrations • John Bate
... Cleanliness is another of the cardinal virtues of Cookery. The very thought of anything else would be repulsive. By the way, that fine old saying, "Cleanliness is next to Godliness," does not come from the Scriptures, as many suppose, but from one of John Wesley's sermons. ...
— The Art of Living in Australia • Philip E. Muskett (?-1909)
... In John Wesley's house in the City Road, London, is a small room which was built expressly to be the prayer-chamber of the Founder of Methodism. When I entered the small sitting-room of one of Kate Lee's field quarters, I was conscious of feelings of reverence similar to those which possessed me in Wesley's ...
— The Angel Adjutant of "Twice Born Men" • Minnie L. Carpenter
... governess."—This governess was a Miss Wesley, niece to John Wesley, the founder of Methodism. And the mention of her recalls to me a fact, which was recently revived and misstated by the whole newspaper press of the island. It had been always known that some relationship existed between the Wellesleys and John ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... than one year before the Mayflower left the shores of England, was the foundation of popular government in America. Time would fail me to tell the story inwrought in the lives of men like Rev. William Clayton of Philadelphia, the Rev. Atkin Williamson of South Carolina, and the Rev. John Wesley and the Rev. George Whitefield, also sons of the Church ...
— Five Sermons • H.B. Whipple
... gave an extract without any credit to the author, and the man in the audience cried out: "That's Jeremy Taylor." The speaker went on and gave an extract from another author without credit for it, and the man in the audience said: "That is John Wesley." The minister gave an extract from another without credit for it, and the man in the audience said: "That is George Whitefield." When the minister lost his patience and cried out, "Shut up, you old fool!" the man in the audience replied: "That is ...
— Public Speaking • Irvah Lester Winter
... having Negro ministers to preside over Negro churches was proposed in 1849 and was a fruitful theme for several years.[4] In fact, it was due to this effort that the organization of Union Wesley A. M. E., the John Wesley, and Ebenezer Churches followed. John Brent, a member of Mt. Zion, led in the first named movement, and Clement Beckett, another reformer, espoused the organization of Ebenezer in 1856, as a church "for ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 7, 1922 • Various
... John Wesley's "sulphur and supplication," and so many other cases where ministers had meddled with medicine,—sometimes well and sometimes ill, but, as a general rule, with a tremendous lurch to quackery, owing to their ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... house, 1633 31st Street, was the home of a very interesting and eminent person, John Wesley Powell, American geologist and ethnologist. I now quote from the Encyclopaedia Britannica: "He was born at Mount Morris, N. Y., March 24, 1834. His parents were of English birth, but had moved to America in 1830, and he was educated ...
— A Portrait of Old George Town • Grace Dunlop Ecker
... I will be revenged of him. I have ordered him to be tied hand and foot, and to be carried to the man-of-war that sails with us. The rascal should have taken care how he used me, for I never forgive."—"Then I hope, sir," said John Wesley, looking calmly at him, "you never sin." The General was quite confounded at the reproof, and putting his hand into his pocket took out a bunch of keys, which he threw at Grimaldi, saying, "There, villain! Take my keys, and behave ...
— The Jest Book - The Choicest Anecdotes and Sayings • Mark Lemon
... 160, & 201.—It is a very remarkable fact, to which the attention of the writer was lately called, that Mrs Wesley, the mother of the Rev. John Wesley, founder of the Wesleyan Methodists, appears to have acted upon the principles here developed. In Southey's Life of that great man, there occurs the ...
— A Practical Enquiry into the Philosophy of Education • James Gall
... episcopacy west of the Atlantic was accompanied by the further separation of the Methodists as a distinct religious society. Although John Wesley regarded the notion of an apostolical succession as superstitious, he had made no attempt to separate his followers from the national church. He translated the titles of "bishop" and "priest" from Greek into Latin and English, calling them ...
— The Critical Period of American History • John Fiske
... 1860), and John Humpreys Johnston, are all artists of Scottish parentage or Scottish ancestry. John Robinson Tait (b. 1834), artist and author, son of a native of Edinburgh, has written much on art subjects. John Wesley Beatty (b. 1851), Art Director of the Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh, is of Scottish parentage. John Ward Dunsmore (b. 1856), Director of the Detroit Museum of Arts and Founder of the Detroit School of Arts; and John Ferguson Weir (b. 1841), ...
— Scotland's Mark on America • George Fraser Black
... That sagacious person John Wesley, is reported to have replied to some one who questioned the propriety of his adaptation of sacred words to extremely secular airs, that he did not see why the Devil should be left in possession of all the best ...
— Discourses - Biological and Geological Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... attentively the life of John Wesley, and not exclaim, if varied and exhausting labor, if perpetual excitement and constant drafts upon the brain, would ever wear a man out, he would have worn out? It was his creative energy that called into existence a denomination, his ardent piety ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865 • Various
... rebel's head upon a pole at Temple Bar. He had talked with a Thames boatman who remembered Pope; had seen Garrick in 'The Suspicious Husband'; had heard Sir Joshua Reynolds deliver his last lecture as President of the Royal Academy; had seen John Wesley "lying in state" in the City Road; had gone to call on Dr. Johnson, but, when his hand was on the knocker, found his courage fled. He lived to be offered the laureateship in 1850, on the death of Wordsworth, and to decline it ...
— The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, Volume 2. • Lord Byron
... among the survivors, is a grandson of John Wesley Harper, one of the founders of the Harper publishing business. H. Sleeper Harper was himself an incorporator of Harper & Brothers when the firm became a corporation in 1896. He had a desk in the offices of the publishers, ...
— Sinking of the Titanic - and Great Sea Disasters • Various
... can have read him, unless in the Methodist version of John Wesley Among those few, however, happens to be myself, which arose from the accident of having, when a boy of eleven, received a copy of the "De Imitatione Christi" as a bequest from a relation who died very young, from which cause, and from the external prettiness of the book— being a ...
— The English Mail-Coach and Joan of Arc • Thomas de Quincey
... Clairaut Survivals of the superstition—Joseph de Maistre, Forster Arago's statistics The theories of Whiston and Burnet, and their influence in Germany The superstition ended in America by the lectures of Winthrop Helpful influence of John Wesley Effects of the victory ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... in the equity and efficacy of gradualism. But after that day, and some time before his departure for Baltimore, he began to think on this subject. The more he thought the less did gradualism seem defensible on moral grounds. John Wesley had said that slavery was the "sum of all villainies"; it was indeed the sin of sins, and as such ought to be abandoned not gradually but immediately. Slave-holding was sin and slaveholders were sinners. ...
— William Lloyd Garrison - The Abolitionist • Archibald H. Grimke
... his wife and elder boy, to their relations at Aldeburgh, Parham, and Beccles, from which latter town, according to Crabbe's son, they visited Lowestoft, and were so fortunate as to hear the aged John Wesley preach, on a memorable occasion ...
— Crabbe, (George) - English Men of Letters Series • Alfred Ainger
... of persecution, though he was a man of courtesy and excellent character. His school-house was finally set on fire and consumed, with all its books and furniture; but the school took, as its asylum, the basement of the John Wesley Church. The churches which they had been forced to build in the days of the mobs, when they were driven from the white churches which they had aided in building, proved of immense service to them in their ...
— History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880. Vol. 2 (of 2) - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George Washington Williams
... speaker of rousing parables to the multitude, who had no bank account, was silenced forever. Likewise, it was a foregone conclusion that every disciple of Christ whose spirit was to be set aflame by His—like St. Francis, and Savonarola, Wycliffe, Luther (at the first), and John Wesley—should turn in pity to the living foundations and in horror of ...
— Is civilization a disease? • Stanton Coit
... thee for this thy deed.' 2 Henry VI, act iv. sc. 10. John Wesley's mother, writing of the way she had brought up her children, boys and girls alike, says:—'When turned a year old (and some before) they were taught to fear the rod, and to cry softly; by which means they escaped abundance of correction they might otherwise have had.' ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... returned with a brain full of strange discords, in a huddled mixture of 'Endymion' and the Book of Revelation, John Wesley's hymns and 'Midsummer Night's Dream'. Few boys of my age, I suppose, carried about with them such a confused throng of immature impressions and contradictory hopes. I was at one moment devoutly pious, at the next ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse
... notion that Frederick was Antichrist and Torquemada and Ignatius Loyola men after the very heart of Jesus. Neither they nor their exploits had anything to do with him. It is probable that Archbishop Laud and John Wesley died equally persuaded that he in whose name they had made themselves famous on earth would receive them in Heaven with open arms. Poor Fox the Quaker would have had ten times their chance; and yet Fox made rather a ...
— Preface to Androcles and the Lion - On the Prospects of Christianity • George Bernard Shaw
... the cause of human freedom they did not stop at some acts which, though they were righteous enough, were unlawful. It was unlawful to harbor runaway slaves, but they did it gladly, and they appealed to the passions as well as the consciences of men in their hate of the sum of all villainies, as John Wesley called slavery. They not only met their foes half way, they carried the war into the hearts and homes of the enemy. From time to time wicked and sorrowful things happened to fret their fanaticism and keep ...
— Stories Of Ohio - 1897 • William Dean Howells
... who, with the perverse ingenuity of patrons of Wax-works, has been endeavouring to identify the Rev. JOHN WESLEY among the Cabinet in Downing Street). Oh, never mind all that lot, BETSY; they're only the Gover'ment! Here's dear Mr. and Mrs. GLADSTONE in this next! See, he's lookin' for something in a drawer of his side-board—ain't ...
— Punch, or The London Charivari, Vol. 100., Jan. 17, 1891 • Various
... neighborhood of Tandragee, and went to a field- meeting at a place called Balnabeck—I wonder if I spell it right? This gathering in a church-yard for preaching is held yearly as a commemoration service because John Wesley preached in this same graveyard when he made an evangelistic tour in Ireland. Although this is only a yearly service, and a commemoration service of one whom the people delight to honor, they made it pretty much a penitential service. There were no seats ...
— The Letters of "Norah" on her Tour Through Ireland • Margaret Dixon McDougall
... Not long after, it so happened that she went to a small church in the city one Sunday afternoon. The preacher was such as we have often heard; but not so this poor woman, in her day of sapless theology, ere John Wesley waked the snoring church. Instead of sending a dry clatter of morality about their ears, or evaporating the Bible in the thin generalities of the pulpit, this man drove God's truths home to the hearts of men and women. In his hands the divine virtues were thunderbolts, ...
— Peg Woffington • Charles Reade
... being an indefinite term from a standpoint in Berkes County. John was a tory during the Revolution. The existence of Stephens depends upon the testimony of Joshua Bowen Stephens of Hardin, Ohio, in a conversation with me there in 1886. To these three brothers Dr. John Wesley Stephens of State Line, Indiana, added a sister, in a ...
— The Stephens Family - A Genealogy of the Descendants of Joshua Stevens • Bascom Asbury Cecil Stephens |
