A WESLEYAN BICENTENARY.

Motueka Star, Volume III, Issue 106, 19 August 1902, Page 3

A WESLEYAN BICENTENARY.

o Next year 30,QQ0,0p0 Methodists throughout the world will be keeping the 200th birthday of John Wesley. It is a striking fact to l'eflect upon that the clergyman's son, born at Epworth on this day in 1703, founded a brotherhood which is to-day as big in numbers as the whole of England and Wales. Nowhere else, perhaps, can We point to such a mighty organisation and sav of it that it is one man’s work. John Wesley, in the truest sense, was one of the world’s workers, and his noblest epitaph is not that he founded a church or that he died without a shilling, but that he wore himself out. For half a century he rose every morning at 4 o’clock, and his 5 o’clock sermon he used to call “the healthiest exercise in the world.* In the days when travelling was neither rapid nor easy John Wesley travelled 4000 or 5000 miles a year to preach to the biggest congregations in England. He never lost a night’s sleep m his life ; not even his unhappy home life robbed* him of his great source of physical strength. He was his own printer and bookseller, and managed his business so well that, living on <£2B a year, he was able to give away £30,000, and he travelled during his life a quarter of a million miles, and preached over 40,000 sermons.—Melbourne Age.