John Wesley, English evangelist who founded the Methodist societies was born on this date in 1703. Here are some things you might not know about him:
His mother, Susannah, was the youngest of 25 children. She went on to have 19 children of her own, of which John was the 15th. The propensity to have incredibly large families wasn’t inherited by John, however, who didn’t have any children at all.
While he favoured celibacy for the clergy, he did fall in love with a woman called Sophy while on a missionary journey to America but she married someone else. Wesley felt she wasn’t as devout as a result and even refused to allow her to take communion. He did finally marry at the age of 48. His wife was a widow called Mary Vazeille who had four children. She and John had no children together, and she eventually left him because he spent too much time on the growing Methodist movement.
John Wesley believed that everyone should have access to God’s word and although a loyal Anglican was sometimes banned from preaching in the Church of England because of his views. He began to preach to ordinary people out in the open.
In the course of his lifetime, Wesley is said to have travelled 250,000 miles on horseback, which is ten times the circumference of the Earth. He is said to have preached 40,000 sermons.
Contemporary descriptions say that he was "rather under the medium height, well proportioned, strong, with a bright eye, a clear complexion, and a saintly, intellectual face".
At the age of six, he almost died when the family home, The Old Rectory in Epworth, caught Fire. This might have been arson by opponents of John’s father Samuel, also a clergyman. John thankfully escaped through a first floor Window and his mother sad that he was "a brand plucked from the burning". The house was rebuilt and remained the family home until 1735. The family believed that the house was haunted by a ghost called 'Old Jeffery'.
Wesley did at times question his faith and his fitness to be a preacher. Another preacher named Peter Boehler advised Wesley to "preach faith until you have it".
Wesley wrote about 400 books and pamphlets. As you’d expect, many of them were about theology, but not all of them. He also wrote about Music, marriage, abolitionism, politics and medicine. Believing that God cared as much about a person’s physical life as their spiritual one, he wrote a medical text for ordinary people called Primitive Physick. It included a number of home remedies and was widely read. His advice included powdered toad pills for asthma and the remedy for a stomach ache was to hold a puppy against the stomach. Though arguably cuddling puppies is bound to make people feel better!
The phrase “agree to disagree” is attributed to John Wesley. He and another clergyman called George Whitefield had very different theological opinions. In a memorial sermon for Whitfield, Wesley said, “There are many doctrines of a less essential nature. ... In these, we may think and let think; we may agree to disagree.”
Wesley was a vegetarian and didn’t drink Wine for health reasons.
The six richest people in Britain decide to hold a contest to settle the question of which of them is most successful. It will be a gladiator style contest with each entrant fielding a team of ten super-powered combatants. Entrepreneur Llew Powell sets out to put together his team, which includes his former lover, an employee of his company with a fascinating hobby, two refugees from another dimension (a lonely giant and a drunken sailor), two sisters bound together by a promise, a diminutive doctor, a former Tibetan monk initiate and two androids with a history. As the team train together, alliances form, friendships and more develop, while others find the past is not easy to leave behind.
Meanwhile, a ruthless race of aliens has its eyes on the Earth. Already abducting and enslaving humans, they work towards the final invasion which would destroy life on Earth as we know it. Powell’s group, Combat Team Alpha, stumble upon one of the wormholes the aliens use to travel to Earth and witness for themselves the horrors in store if the aliens aren’t stopped. Barely escaping with their lives, they realise there are more important things to worry about than a fighting competition.
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