WESLEY CHANGES ENGLISH COUNTRYSIDE

John Wesley rode up and down through the English countryside during the last half of the eighteenth century, his soul touched by the poverty, the drabness, and the ugliness of the village life. One day he hit upon the scheme of distributing flower seeds to the housewives, and offering prizes for the most beautiful gardens, with the result that the English countryside developed the reputation of being the most colorful in the world. One man, almost single-handedly, changed the complexion of the rural districts of an entire nation.

—Glenn Stewart

[Reproduced with permission from Encylopedia of 15,000 Illustrations, by Paul Lee Tan,
Communications, Inc., Dallas, TX, 1998, #2921]

[Editor’s note: John Wesley (1703-1791), one of the great religious leaders in Christian church history, successfully took Christianity to the masses. Arising at 4 am he worked tirelessly: he traveled by horseback and carriage about 5,000 miles each year; preached on average three sermons a day for fifty-four years, often in the open, attracting great crowds and bringing many to conversion; and formed new believers into small religious societies, which eventually became the Methodist Church. As long as he lived, Wesley remained a member of the Church of England, believing he was encouraging revival from within, but officials thought he was establishing a separate movement and forbid him to speak in the state churches. In addition to preaching and forming congregations, Wesley was a prolific writer. His published words include a four-volume commentary on the whole Bible, a dictionary of the English language, a five-volume work on natural philosophy, a four-volume work on church history; histories of England and Rome; grammars on the Hebrew, Latin, Greek, French and English languages; three works on medicine, six volumes of church music; seven volumes of sermons and controversial papers. He also edited a library of fifty volumes known as “The Christian Library.” Historians credit Wesley with key influence in reversing morality in a seriously decaying England.]

This material is published by the Faith Committee of the Character Council of Greater Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky. Reproduction and Adaptation is encouraged.