OF THE

WESLEY FAMILY;

COLLECTED PRINCIPALLY

From Original Bocuments.

BY ADAM CLARKE, LL.D., F.A.S.

LONDON:

Printed by J. & T. Clarke, St. John-Square,

AND SOLD BY J. KERSHAW, 14, CITY-ROAD, AND

66, PATERNOSTER-ROW.

INTRODUCTION.

DURING the time in which men, eminent for their literary, diplomatic, or military talents flourish, the Public is rarely led to examine by what slow gradations their powers became matured; or what evidence their infancy and youth afforded of that high celebrity which they afterwards attained.

The great utility of their literary labours, or the splendour of their public services, occupies and dazzles the mind, so that all minor considerations become absorbed; and it is only when the Public is deprived by death of such illustrious characters, that posterity feel disposed to trace them up to their earliest period; and enquire by what means these luminaries, so small at their rising, attained to such a meridian of usefulness and glory, and appeared so broad and resplendent at their setting.

This is equally the case both with states and men hence the Historian as well as the Biographer, influenced by the maxim,—Felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas, endeavours to investigate those philosophic and intellectual principles which gave birth and being to such physical, political, and mental energies.

THAT Divine Providence, which arranges and conducts the whole, and under whose especial guidance and control the course of the present state is ordered, so that all operations in the natural, civil, and moral world issue in manifesting the glory, justice, and mercy, of the Supreme Being, lies farther out of the view of men, and by most is little regarded hence a multitude of events appear to have either no intelligent cause, or none adequate to their production; and because the operations of the Divine hand are not regarded, Historians and Biographers often disquiet themselves in vain to find out the causes and reasons of the circumstances and transactions which they record.

In the dispensations of mercy to the world, and the effects produced by them, the principles from which all originated, the agencies employed, and the mode of working, are still more difficult of apprehension, particularly