Those moral reforms which have shaken the nations and in some cases revolutionized governments were scarcely known in the days of Wesley. He saw the coming storm and blew a trumpet-blast which gave no uncertain sound. In some of these reforms he was a hundred years in advance of his time.

Slavery, in Wesley's time, was strongly supported by the English government. She had enriched herself from the African slave trade. Her great maritime cities were built on the bones, sinews, and flesh, cemented by the blood, of oppressed bondmen. To oppose slavery was to oppose the government. Wesley met this gigantic evil with Christian courage. What was true of England was also true of her colonies. He united with Sharp, Clarkson, Wilberforce, and others to oppose the evil. He represented the slave trade as "that execrable sum of all villainies, commonly called the slave trade." American slavery he declared was "the vilest that ever saw the sun." No addresses delivered on the subject, during the days of the greatest antislavery excitement, exceeded in severity those which fell from the lips and were produced by the pen of John Wesley. His Thoughts on Slavery was the keynote of the movement.

Wesley's last letter, written only four days before his death, was addressed to Wilberforce, urging him to persevere in the work. It is as follows:

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He represents the slave trade as exceeding in barbarity whatever Christian slaves suffered in Mohammedan countries.

Whitefield's letter to Wesley, in 1751, is a clear defense of slavery in the colonies. He quotes Abraham, who had slaves "bought with his money" and "born in his house." The same argument was employed in later years. Whitefield added to his approval of the slave trade the fact that he became himself a slaveholder. At the time of his death, in 1770, he was the owner of seventy-five slaves, who were connected with his Orphan House plantation, near Savannah, Ga. It is not surprising that God should have swept the whole concern, by fire and flood, from the face of the earth.

"Let it be noted," says Mr. Tyerman, "that besides all his other honors John Wesley, the poor, persecuted Methodist, was one of the first advocates on behalf of the enthralled African that England had, and that, sixty years before slavery was abolished in the dominions of Great Britain, he denounced the thing in the strongest terms it was possible to employ." Mr. Wesley's Thoughts on Slavery, an octavo of fifty-three pages, issued in 1774, did more to awaken England to the horrors of the African slave trade than any other work on the subject. The writer says, "No more severe arraignment of slavery than this was ever written." This American scourge, through the influence of Wesley's early American preachers, who caught their inspiration from his Thoughts, felt the force of his burning words until that form of slavery, which he declared to be "the vilest that ever saw the sun," was a thing of the past. For two hundred and more years it drifted down, gradually, like other forms of barbarism, into the clear light of a better civilization, to be finally put to death by the Gospel of Methodism. It is true that Uncle Tom's Cabin did much, but Wesley's Thoughts prepared the way for this wonderful book. Mr. Wesley must ever be known as the man through whose influence slavery found a grave, from which Heaven forbid it should ever have a resurrection!

In regard to the temperance reform Mr. Wesley was as fully pronounced as on the subject of slavery. Liquor drinking was practiced by all classes, from the archbishop to the meanest street scavenger. Ministers by the hundred drank to intoxication, and in their drunken sprees would head mobs in their assaults on Wesley and his helpers. Wesley thundered away at liquor selling and drinking like a modern prohibitionist. Take the following from one of his sermons as an example:

Neither may we gain by hurting our neighbor in his body. Therefore we may not sell anything which tends to impair his health. Such is eminently all that liquid fire called drams of spirituous liquors. It is true they may have a place in medicine—may be used in some bodily disorders—although there would rarely be occasion for them were it not for the unskillfulness of the practitioner. Therefore such as prepare and sell them only for this end may keep their conscience clean. But who are they who prepare and sell them only for this end? Do you know ten distillers in England? Then excuse these. But all who sell them in the common way, to any that will buy, are poisoners in general. They murder his majesty's subjects by wholesale; neither do their eyes pity or spare. They drive them to hell like sheep. And what is their gain? Is it not the blood of these men? Who, then, would enjoy their large estate and sumptuous palaces? A curse is in the midst of them. A curse cleaves to the stones, the timbers, the furniture of them. The curse of God is in their gardens, their walks, their groves; a fire that burns to the nethermost hell! Blood, blood, is there! The foundation, the walls, the roof, are stained with blood! And canst thou hope, O man of blood, though thou art "clothed in scarlet and fine linen, and farest sumptuously every day"—canst thou hope to deliver thy fields of blood to the third generation? Not so! There is a God in heaven; therefore thy name shall be blotted out. Like as those whom thou hast destroyed, body and soul, thy memory shall perish with thee.[C]

He introduced into his Discipline a rule prohibiting the "buying or selling of spirituous liquors, or drinking them, unless in cases of extreme necessity." He went for "prohibiting forever, making a full end of that bane of health, that destroyer of strength, of life, and virtue—distilling." These are his own words. He was a prohibitionist in principle, and in this respect was in advance of many would-be temperance men of these times. To one of his preachers he says: "Touch no dram. It is a liquid fire. It is a sure, though slow, poison. It saps the very spring of life."

Mr. Wesley sought a reformation on the tobacco question. He believed that the use of the weed was unchristian. He exhorts his people: "Use no tobacco. It is an uncleanly and unwholesome self-indulgence; and the more customary it is the more resolutely should you break off from every degree of that evil custom. Let Christians be in this bondage no longer. Assert your liberty, and that all at once; nothing will be done by degrees."[G]

Such were the teachings of John Wesley on these subjects—teachings which we regard as very remarkable for those times, and fully up to the present.

In 1787 Mr. Wesley met John Howard, the father of prison reform. He says: "I had the pleasure of a conversation with Mr. Howard, I think one of the greatest men in Europe. Nothing but the almighty power of God can enable him to go through his difficult and dangerous employment. But what can harm us if God be on our side?" He says again: "God has raised him up to be a blessing to mankind."

It is true that Wesley did not believe that female preaching was authorized by the New Testament, except under extraordinary circumstances. He tells Sarah Crosby that he thinks her case rests on her having an "extraordinary call." He was persuaded, also, that every local preacher had a similar call. If it were not so, he could not countenance their preaching at all. "Therefore I do not wonder if several things occur therein which do not fall under ordinary rules of discipline. St. Paul's ordinary rule was, 'I permit not a woman to speak in the congregation;' yet in extraordinary cases he makes a few exceptions, at Corinth in particular."

Mrs. Crosby said: "My soul was much comforted in speaking to the people, as the Lord has removed all my scruples respecting the propriety of my acting thus publicly."

"I think you have not gone too far," said Wesley, though she had preached to hundreds. "You could not well do less. All you can do more is, when you meet again tell them simply: 'You lay me under a great difficulty. The Methodists do not allow of women preachers; neither do I take upon me any such character. But I will just nakedly tell you what is in my heart.' I do not see that you have broken any law. Go on, calmly and steadily." She obeyed, and went on till death. Others followed in the footsteps of Sarah Crosby. Mrs. Fletcher preached, and Hester Ann Rogers really did the same.

It is true that female preaching was never sanctioned by the Wesleyan Conference, but it was substantially practiced to the end of Wesley's life. He broke the bands which had bound women, and which in many Churches bind them still, and allowed her to be a public advocate of spiritual religion—to tell what great things God had done for the soul.

Speaking of Susannah Wesley, a recent writer of the Congregational Church says: "The Methodist Church owes its system of doctrine quite as much, I think, to Susannah Wesley as to her illustrious son. To the instruction of a woman she added the logic of a gownsman and the love of a saint. Finer letters were never written. It is not to be wondered at that Methodists have been pioneers in the enfranchisement of female speech, that they have believed in it and practiced it from the first. They would have disgraced their origin otherwise."

It will be seen that Methodism has inaugurated, really, all the great moral reforms of the last hundred and fifty years. The great missionary movement, which has sent evangelistic agencies into all the earth, had little or no life when Methodism was born. Since that time, what hath God wrought!