03. THE GEORGIA MISSION

THE GEORGIA MISSION

Further information about the Georgia Mission may be found in the Earl of Egmont’s Diary, published by the Historical Manuscripts Commission in 192o. On Tuesday, October 14, 1735, he says: ’ I went to Gravesend to meet Mr. Oglethorpe there and assist in mustering the people that go with him to Georgia.’ On board the Simmonds go Mr. Oglethorpe, Mr. Johnson, [Mr. Johnson is referred to in Journal, i. 250d. His brother had been on board the Simmonds, and complained that he was inconvenienced by the public prayers in the great cabin. Fortunately he left the ship at Cowes (ibid. i. 114, 124). The father had been Governor of South Carolina.] son of the late Governor of Carolina, and the two Wesleys, brothers, both clergymen. ’A third clergyman was to have gone, but has failed us and we knew nothing of it till a few days ago. His name is Hall; he was ordained for the very purpose to go a few weeks ago, in order to succeed Mr. Quineey.’ Having after his ordination married, his wife and her relatives persuaded him not to go. He had laid out 100 on clothes and furniture for the house in Savannah. On October 20, 1736, Samuel Quincey appeared before the Georgia Trustees, when Mr. Vernon told him that his abandoning the colony to go to New York ’for six months together and leaving a wheelwright to read public prayers, comfort the dying, and bury the dead, was a behavior that the Trustees could not excuse.’ Quincey said this was clue to sickness. On March 15, 1737, Mrs. Stanley, ’the public midwife of Savannah, to whom we allow a crown for every woman whom she lays,’ gave the Trustees ’ an extraordinary account of the people’s industry and attendance on divine worship, greatly commending Mr. John Wesley, our minister at Savannah, who goes from house to house exhorting the inhabitants to virtue and religion.’ On February 8, 1738, Wesley attended the Board, and on the 22nd explained why he had come to England. ‘Mr. Vernon took him home to dinner, and in company of Mr. Hales examined him most particularly as to Causton’s bad behavior as a magistrate, which they took down in writing in order to be discussed of at the Board.’ The Earl sent Wesley, on April 5, 1736, ‘a collection of tracts relating to Carolina interleaved, with the desire that he would remark upon what he found curious therein and return it me in two years.’ On January 22, 1737, he says: ‘I passed the evening at home, and received a letter from Mr. John Wesley, our minister at Savannah, acknowledging the receipt of my collection of tracts concerning Carolina, and acquainting me that the people of Savannah are too numerous for his care, that he could wish they were better Christians, though for their number he finds more willing and desirous to be good than in any other town he knows of.’ The mission to Georgia had many painful experiences, but it played an important part in the training of Wesley. He had to face prejudice and opposition in its last stage which was humbling and disheartening, and he must have learned something of his own weakness in the case of Miss Hopkey; but he was never more zealous for the good of others, never more ready to sacrifice himself for their highest interest. He came into contact with men and women whose faith and courage made him conscious of his own spiritual need and prepared the way for his emancipation from doubt and fear. George Whitefield, who was on the ground within five months, wrote in his Journal: ‘The good Mr. John Wesley has done in America, under God, is inexpressible. His name is very precious among the people, and he has laid such a foundation that I hope neither men nor devils will ever be able to shake. Oh that I may follow him, as he has Christ!’ See also P. 365. THE RETURN FROM GEORGIA THE RETURN FROM GEORGIA

Some further details from the Earl of Egmont’s Diary, referred to on pp. 229-30, may here be added. Mr. Quincey attended a meeting of the Georgia Trustees on July 20, 1736, ‘and made application that we would give him an attestation of his good behavior while he served in Georgia, that we would make him a consideration for his expenses and loss of three months’ time after the arrival of Mr. John Wesley to succeed him before his return to England, and that we would let him know what charges had been laid against him and by whom in Georgia that he might wipe off the aspersions.’ On February 17, 1737, the Earl had a conversation with Dr. Bear-croft, of the S.P.G., who said that they had received a letter from Mr. Oglethorpe, from which it appeared that John Wesley ‘renounced any salary, as thinking Ministers ought to preach the Gospel without hire, and had desired the 50 to be paid him on the foot of his distributing the same in charity, which the Society could not do.’ On April 26 the Earl writes: ‘Mr. John Wesley, our Minister at Savannah, left with us his license for performing ecclesiastical Service at Savannah, which we took for a resignation, and therefore resolved to revoke his commission. In truth the Board did it with great pleasure, he appearing to us to be a very odd mixture of a man, an enthusiast, and at the same time a hypocrite, wholly distasteful to the greater part of the inhabitants, and an incendiary of the people against the magistrates.’ That judgment has to be read in the light of a later entry, where John Doble, who had been over five years schoolmaster at Highgate in Georgia, and returned in March 1740, reported ‘that people of Savannah are a wretched crew, most of them, and Mr. Whitefield told them in his farewell sermon they were the scum of the earth, and God had only sent them to prepare the way for a better sort of men.’ In Mr. Quincey’s time there were on some Sundays not ten persons in Church and three at the Communion where Wesley had forty every Sunday.