Much earnest and deeply discriminative advice is given to John on occasion of his entering the holy ministry.  The letter then written to him abounds with traces of the fact that he had been in the habit of confiding much of his mind to his mother through those years.  In 1727 she writes to him a profound and beautiful epistle, in terms which indicate that he had made her his confidante at the time, in his love for a young lady whom he had lately met in Worcestershire.

“What then is love?  Oh, how shall we describe its strange, mysterious essence?  It is—­I do not know what!  A powerful something; source of our joy and grief, felt and experienced by every one, and yet unknown to all!  Nor shall we ever comprehend what it is till we are united to our first principle, and there read its wondrous nature in the clear mirror of uncreated love:” 

Another letter belonging to the same year is solemnly prospective the topic being evidently the “cares of the world.”

     “’Believe me, youth (for I am read in cares,
      And bend beneath the weight of more than fifty years).’

“Believe me, old age is the worst time we can choose to mend either our lives or our fortunes.  Ah! my dear son, did you with me stand on the verge of life, and saw before your eyes a vast expanse, an unlimited duration of being, which you might shortly enter upon, you can’t conceive how all the inadvertencies, mistakes, and sins of youth would rise to your view; and how different the, sentiments of sensitive pleasures, the desire of sexes and pernicious friendships of the world would be then from what they are now while health is entire and seems to promise many years of life.”

X

WIDOWHOOD.

The Rector of Epworth had been slowly mastering his difficulties with the world.  The circumstances of the family seem to have taken a favourable turn from the year 1724, when the small living of Wroote, four miles distant, and valued at L50 a year, was added to that of Epworth.  The family removed to Wroote, and many of Mrs. Wesley’s most interesting letters are dated from the parsonage there.  Her husband continued to toil for some years at what he meant to be his great work—­his commentary on the Book of Job—­but the outer man was visibly perishing.  His now palsied hand required the services of an amanuensis.  “My eyes and my heart,” he said, “are now almost all I have left; and bless God for them!” He died on the 25th of April, 1735, in the 72nd year of his age.

His death was marked by many utterances of faith and of joy in God, and by his memorable saying to his sons—­“Be steady!  The Christian faith will surely revive in this kingdom.  You shall see it, though I shall not.”