The best interpreter of John Wesley is John Wesley himself.  He has left us in his own writings a picture of himself, drawn by his own hand, which is far more faithful than that which has been drawn by any other.

The whole family of the Wesleys, including the father, the mother, and all the brothers and sisters without exception, was a very interesting one.  There are certain traits of character which seem to have been common to them all.  Strong, vigorous good sense, an earnest, straightforward desire to do their duty, a decidedness in forming opinions, and a plainness, not to say bluntness, in expressing them, belong to all alike.  The picture given us of the family at Epworth Rectory is an illustration of the remark made in another chapter that the wholesale censure of the whole body of the parochial clergy in the early part of the eighteenth century has been far too sweeping and severe.  Here is an instance—­and it is not spoken of as a unique, or even an exceptional, instance—­of a worthy clergyman who was, with his whole family, living an exemplary life, and adorning the profession to which he belonged.  The influence of his early training, and especially that of his mother, is traceable throughout the whole of Wesley’s career; and it is not unreasonable to suppose that Wesley’s unflinching attachment to the Church, his reluctance to speak ill of her ministers,[709] and the displeasure which he constantly showed when he observed any tendency on the part of his followers to separate from her communion, may have been intensified by his recollections of that good and useful parson’s family in Lincolnshire in which he passed his youth.

The year 1729 is the date which Wesley himself gives of the rise of that revival of religion in which he himself took so prominent a part.  It is somewhat curious that he places the commencement of the revival at a date nine years earlier than that of his own conversion; but it must be remembered that in his later years he took a somewhat different view of the latter event from that which he held in his hot youth.  He believed that before 1738 he had faith in God as a servant; after that, as a son.  At any rate, we shall not be far wrong in regarding that little meeting at Oxford of a few young men, called in derision the Holy Club, the Sacramentarian Club, and finally the Methodists, as the germ of that great movement now to be described.  No doubt the views of its members materially changed in the course of years; but the object of the later movement was precisely the same as that of the little band from the very first—­viz. to promote the love of God and the love of man for God’s sake, to stem the torrent of vice and irreligion, and to fill the land with a godly and useful population.

This, it is verily believed, was from first to last the master key to a right understanding of John Wesley’s life.  Everything must give way to this one great object.  In subservience to this he was ready to sacrifice many predilections, and thereby to lay himself open to the charge of changeableness and inconsistency.