Saints and Others remembered in March
March 03 John & Charles Wesley
John Wesley was an early leader in the Methodist
movement. Under him, Methodists became
leaders in many areas of social justice, including
prison reform and the abolition of the Slave Trade.
In 1736-7, Wesley visited North America including
Georgia, which was then a British colony,
and there he came into contact with enslaved
people. This experience left him with a loathing of
slavery but at first he felt unable to act on this.
From 1739 onwards, Wesley and the Methodists
were persecuted by clergymen and magistrates. They were attacked in
sermons and in print and at times attacked by mobs.
The focus that Wesley needed came when Granville Sharp contested the
case of a runaway slave (James Somerset) in the courts. Wesley was
moved to study a text by the Philadelphia Quaker, Anthony Benezet.
Wesley's journal shows that Benezet's work, and Lord Mansfield's
deliberations in the case of Somerset, caused him much disquiet.
In 1774, he wrote "Thoughts on Slavery. In it, he attacked the Slave
Trade and the slave-trader with considerable passion and proposed a
boycott of slave-produced sugar and rum. In August 1787, he wrote to the
Abolition Committee to express his support. In 1788, when the abolition
campaign was at its height, he preached a sermon in Bristol, one of the
foremost slave trading ports. An anti-slavery sermon could not be preached
without considerable personal risk to the preacher and a riot followed.
Wesley famously said: "Give liberty to whom liberty is due, that is, to every
child of man, to every partaker of human nature. Let none serve you but by
his own act and deed, by his own voluntary action. Away with all whips, all
chains, all compulsion. Be gentle toward all men; and see that you invariably
do with everyone as you would he should do unto you."
Charles Wesley experienced a conversion on 21 May
1738, his brother John had had a similar experience
in Aldersgate Street just three days later. A City of
London blue plaque at 13, Little Britain, near the church
of St Botolph's-without-Alders, off St. Martin's Le Grand,
marks the site of the former house of John Bray, reputed
to be the scene of Charles' evangelical conversion on 21
May 1738. It reads, "Adjoining this site stood the house
of John Bray. Scene of Charles Wesley's conversion by
faith in Christ on May 21st 1738". [5]
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