gether, between 1729 and 1735, for the
purpose of mutual improvement. They were accustomed to communicate every
week, to fast regularly on Wednesdays and Fridays and on most days
during Lent; to read and discuss the Bible in common, to abstain from
most forms of amusement and luxury, and to visit sick persons, and
prisoners in the jail.

John Wesley, the master spirit of this society, and the future leader of
the religious revival of the eighteenth century, was born in 1703, and
was the second surviving son of Samuel Wesley, the rector of Epworth, in
Lincolnshire. His father, who had early abandoned Nonconformity, and
acquired some reputation by many works both in prose and verse, had
obtained his living from the government of William, and had led for many
years a useful and studious life, maintaining a far higher standard of
clerical duty than was common in his time. His mother was the daughter
of an eminent Nonconformist minister, who had been ejected in 1662, and
was a woman of rare mental endowments, of intense piety, and of a
strong, original, and somewhat stern character.

Their home was not a happy one. Discordant dispositions and many
troubles darkened it. The family was very large. Many children died
early. The father sank slowly into debt. His parishioners were fierce,
profligate, and recalcitrant. When John Wesley was only six years old
the rectory was burned to the ground, and the child was forgotten among
the flames, and only saved at the last moment by what he afterward
deemed an extraordinary providence.

All these circumstances doubtless deepened the natural and inherited
piety for which he was so remarkable; and some strange and unexplained
noises which during a long period were heard in the rectory, and which
its inmates concluded to be supernatural, contributed to that vein of
credulity which ran through his character. He was sent to the
Charterhouse, and from thence to Oxford, where at the age of
twenty-three he was elected fellow of Lincoln. He had some years before
acquired from his brother a certain knowledge of Hebrew, and he was
speedily distinguished by his extraordinary logical powers, by the
untiring industry with which he threw himself into the studies of the
place, and above all by the force and energy of his character.

His religious impressions, which had been for a time somewhat obscured,
revived in their full intensity while he was preparing for ordination in
1725. He was troubled w