e sufferings
aroused the universal indignation of Protestant Europe, were mingled
with the unfortunates from English prisons in successive ship-loads of
emigrants. One such ship's company, among the earliest to be added to
the new colony, included some mighty factors in the future church
history of America and of the world. In February, 1736, a company of
three hundred colonists, with Oglethorpe at their head, landed at
Savannah. Among them was a reinforcement of twenty colonists for the
Moravian settlement, with Bishop David Nitschmann, and young Charles
Wesley, secretary to the governor, and his elder brother, John, now
thirty-three years old, eager for the work of evangelizing the heathen
Indians--an intensely narrow, ascetic, High-church ritualist and
sacramentarian. The voyage was a memorable one in history. Amid the
terrors of a perilous storm, Wesley, so liable to be lifted up with the
pride that apes humility, was humbled as he contrasted the agitations of
his own people with the cheerful faith and composure of his German
shipmates; and soon after the landing he was touched with the primitive
simplicity and beauty of the ordination service with which a pastor was
set over the Moravian settlement by Bishop Nitschmann. During the
twenty-two months of his service in Georgia, through the ascetic toils
and privations which he inflicted on himself and tried to inflict on
others, he seems as one whom the law has taken severely in hand to lead
him to Christ. It was after his return from America, among the
Moravians, first at London and afterward on a visit to Herrnhut, that he
was "taught the way of the Lord more perfectly."[125:1]

The three shipmates, the Wesleys and Bishop Nitschmann, did not remain
long together. Nitschmann soon returned to Germany to lead a new colony
of his brethren to Pennsylvania; Charles Wesley remained for four months
at Frederica, and then recrossed the ocean, weary of the hardness of the
people's hearts; and, except for the painful and humiliating discipline
which was preparing him to "take the whole world to be his parish," it
had been well for John Wesley if he had returned with his brother. Never
did a really great and good man act more like a fool than he did in his
Georgia mission. The priestly arrogance with which he attempted to
enforce his crotchets of churchmanship on a mixed community in the edge
of the wilderness culminated at last in his hurling the thunderbolts of
excommunicatio