The father of John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, was the second son of John Wesley, of Whitchurch, and was born at Winterborn Whitchurch, according to Dr. Adam Clarke, in 1666…. He was interested, in 1698 and 1699, in a Society for the Reformation of Manners, which resembled in many respects the societies formed by his son at Oxford, and published a letter in defense of such societies. He expressed the warmest sympathy with the efforts of John and Charles Wesley at Oxford, and wrote, in 1730, that if his son John was the father of a Holy Club, he must be the grandfather of it, and that he would rather any of his sons had such distinction than to be himself styled his Holiness. He was a prolific writer, having relied upon his pen as a source of income from the time he entered college. His first volume of poems, a volume of trifles and conceits, called “Maggots,” was published when he was nineteen years of age. Among his other principal works, besides the “Life of Christ,” already mentioned, were “Dissertations on the Book of Job,” in Latin, “The History of the Old and New Testament,” in verse, with illustrations, “Eupolis’ Hymn to the Creator,” and the poem of “Marlborough, or the Fate of Europe.” He was intimately connected with the Athenian Gazette, published by John Dunton, and was its principal contributor. His best-known hymns are “Behold the Saviour of Mankind” and “O, Thou who when I did Complain.” He died at Epworth, April 22, 1735.

Personal

  No man was ever more suitably mated than the elder Wesley. The wife whom he chose was, like himself, the child of a man eminent among the Non-conformists, and, like himself, in early youth she had chosen her own path: she had examined the controversy between the Dissenters and the Church of England with conscientious diligence, and satisfied herself that the schismatics were in the wrong. The dispute, it must be remembered, related wholly to discipline; but her inquiries had not stopt there, and she had reasoned herself into Socinianism, from which she was reclaimed by her husband. She was an admirable woman, of highly-improved mind, and of a strong and masculine understanding, an obedient wife, an exemplary mother, a fervent Christian. The marriage was blest in all its circumstances: it was contracted in the prime of their youth: it was fruitful; and death did not divide them till they were both full of days. They had no less than nineteen children; but only three sons and three daughters seem to have grown up; and it is probably to the loss of the others that the father refers in one of his letters, where he says, that he had suffered things more grievous than death.

  Wesley’s verse will not lift him high among poets (he was pilloried in the first edition of the “Dunciad,” 1728, i. 115), nor has his “Job” given him his expected rank among scholars. He was an able, busy, and honest man, with much impulsive energy, easily misconstrued; his fame is that of being the father of John and Charles Wesley.

General

  The author possessed considerable learning, and some poetical talent; but neither his conjectures [“Dissertations on Job”] nor his illustrations throw much light on this ancient poem.

  He held the living of Epworth upwards of forty years, and was distinguished for the zeal and fidelity with which he discharged his parish duties. Of his talents and learning, his remaining works afford honourable evidence.

  He was a writer of no inconsiderable merit, though he has not won a place among the immortals, and perhaps did not deserve to do so. There is a sort of perverted ingenuity about most of his literary work. What, for example, could be expected from poems published under the unpromising, not to say repulsive, title of “Maggots,” his first juvenile, work? Who could answer satisfactorily such profound questions as “What became of the Ark after the Flood?” “How high was Babel’s Tower?” “What language was spoken by Balaam’s ass?” “Did Peter and Paul use notes when they preached?” which are really not abnormal specimens of the sort of questions which were asked, and laboriously answered, by Mr. Wesley in the Athenian Gazette, a kind of seventeenth-century Notes and Queries. His poem on Blenheim suggests invidious comparisons with Addison’s “Campaign;” and though few will now endorse the estimate which contemporaries formed of the “Campaign,” fewer will deny that Addison had a far more elegant and delicate touch than Wesley. His poem on “The Life of Christ” and his “History of the New Testament in Verse” are wonderful tours de force; but it required a Milton to do justice to such lofty themes, and Mr. Wesley was no Milton. The extravagant laudations with which the first of these poems was greeted naturally provoked a reaction. The author was put on a pedestal from which a fall was inevitable. His poetry, instead of being admired, began to be laughed at. And yet it was certainly not without merit. His translation of the Great Hallel proved that at any rate one thing the great Laureate Nahum Tate said of him was true; it is far superior to the version Nahum himself has given us; and his last work, the “Dissertations on the Book of Job,” shows that the writer, if not a poet, was at any rate a learned divine and an excellent Latin scholar.

  That this speech [“Sacheverell’s”] was the composition of the Rector of Epworth seems to have been universally recognised in Lincolnshire, and, in after years, John Wesley declared positively that his father was its author. Probably he was paid, in some shape or form, for preparing it, although, perhaps, like an old war horse, he scented the battle from afar and did his share of the fighting gratuitously.