DID YOU KNOW?
This week Did You Know is excerpted from a South Bend History professor’s latest book, Changed by Grace: In 1735, when he was in his early thirties, John Wesley, a priest of the Church of England who had been teaching at Oxford University, sailed over to the newly founded colony of Georgia to do missionary work among the Native Americans.
He was an intense young man who had read deeply in the French Catholic spiritual writers of his time (he was later to read the Spanish Catholics as well).
When he was not teaching students or studying, he spent his time in continual prayer and meditation, daily Bible reading (he read through a section of the New Testament in the original Greek every morning when he got up), and doing work among the poor in the city of Oxford. He visited the city jail on a regular basis to teach illiterate prisoners how to read and write, so they could read the Bible, and also so they would have a better chance of obtaining honest jobs after their release. He also (like more fanatical French and Spanish Catholics of that time), devoted himself to frequent fasting and other acts of uncomfortable self-denial.
The first European settlers had arrived in Georgia and had begun building a small town on the coast, which they called Savannah. The local Native American tribal chief had no interest in Christian missionaries and refused to let Wesley enter their village, so John was forced to serve simply as the parish priest for the English colony, among Europeans who likewise had little interest in spirituality.
Savannah was a primitive military bastion whose purpose was to serve as the first line of defense against any Spanish in Florida to advance along the coast and attack the prosperous English colonies further north.
It is difficult to imagine a sensible person wanting to settle in what was likely to become a death trap if the Spanish did decide to march northwards.
By 1737, Wesley had to leave Savannah in a hurry after the leader of the colony filed a number of trumped up legal charges against him. A young colonial maiden named Sophie Hopkey had set her eye on John, and had been angered when he refused to marry her. Her uncle was the chief magistrate of the colony, one thing led to another, and Sophie and her aunt finally leagued up with the uncle to make John pay, both for spurning her and for his behavior afterwards, when he created enormous public embarrassment for her by his treatment of her and her new husband when she married another man.
Wesley took a small sailboat along the coast to Charleston (he was very good at handling small sailboats), where he took the next ship back to England.
He felt like a total failure in every way and he began suffering from periodic bouts of what today would probably be diagnosed as acute depression?
The resentment at the way he had been treated in Georgia ate continually at his soul. He knew that a good Christian should not feel this kind of anger, resentment, bitterness, and that a truly spiritual person should not be overcome by this kind of feeling of complete futility and failure, but he could not shake it off. He fell into doubt, over and over again, as to whether he was genuinely a Christian at all, and worried continually about being eternally condemned by God for his lack of faith and his inability to control his un-Christian thoughts. He tried to preach at a long series of churches in the area of London and Oxford, but each time, at the end of the service, he was invited to never again preach there.
He did eventually however obtain a copy of Jonathan Edwards’ A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God, where he found out about a new way of preaching based on the new Lockean psychology, along with Edwards’ own discoveries in behavioral psychology. To be continued…
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