CORRESPONDENCE.
JOHN WESLEY'S JOURNAL.
[To TRY EDTTOR Or ras SPECTATOIL."] SIR,—Towards the close of the year 1721 John Wesley, a Charterhouse student at Christ Church, Oxford, resolved henceforth to order his life by rule and plan. He had not then read Jeremy Taylor's "Rules of Holy Living," or, as far as we know, any other work of Christian devotion. But his father and mother in the new rectory at Epworth cherished for their children lofty ideals, and especially for "Jack," who had been plucked as by miracle from the burning. There is reason to believe that this first impulse towards a life by method came from Epworth. At all events, the fact is recorded in a little notebook that once belonged to Samuel Wesley, rector of Epworth and Wroot, and, more remotely, to the grandfather, John Westley, the dispossessed rector of Winter- Lourne-Whitchurch. The names of the three generations are written inside the cover. And on the same page are written, in abbreviated words, a plan of studies, a time-table, and a curious arrangement for the conduct of family correspondence. Beginning with the year 1722, the young student, not yet twenty years of age, resolves to live and learn, and even play the flute, by method. Pages in notebooks ten or fifteen years later show that this first methodical ordering of life created a habit that played its part in the intellectual and spiritual development of the man,—its part also in the making of the age in which the man lived.
In the Eastertide of 1725 there came to the young student other and much stronger waves of influence. His father and mother discussed with him the question of ordination, and in a West Country rectory he found his "first religious friend," read the "Imitation of Christ" and the "Holy Living," and began seriously to order his religions life after what he then believed to be the " pattern in the mount." Part of the ordering was the keeping of a diary, which he commenced on April 5th, 1725, and continued until Thursday, February 24th, 1791, within one week of his death. Out of the diary, ten years later, the first section of his Journal slowly grew. In its earliest form the diary consisted of morning and afternoon records of study, recrea- tion, friendship, and religion. His grandfather's little note- book received these records. It also served as an account- book. On its yellow pages are lists of pupils, class registers, the names of Oxford subscribers to Samuel Wesley's " Dis- sertations on Job," the receipts and outgoings of the Holy Club, the wines and cyders supplied to the table of the common-room at Lincoln College, lists of texts on which sermons are to be written, and records of sport in Oxford and sundry country polishes. Many of the pages, with the exception of lines here and there, may be read without diffi- culty by an intelligent student who will patiently wrestle with ordinary longhand abbreviations. But all that concerns the inner religious experience of the diarist and the intimacies of his friendships is imprisoned in a highly complex cipher. The consonants and vowels of this cryptic writing are treated diversely. The former have alternative signs, the value of which is determined by a numeral working in two opposite ways. The vowel sounds are expressed in six different forms. Often it is only by careful study that one can be sure whether letters are used in a natural or unnatural sense. In one instance, where a word unveils secret self-upbraiding, the first letter is natural ; all the rest are cryptic. This greatly increases the difficulty of decipherment, as also does the writer's device of adding to the intricacies of disguise from time to time. If, as is probable, John Wesley himself invented this cipher, it illustrates somewhat strikingly the complex character of his mind. In later diaries he made a less pronounced use of the cipher, but it was never wholly discarded. Its influence may be traced in all the diaries, even in those written in Byrom's shorthand. But persistently its use is limited to the more sacred occasions and affairs of life. How the cipher writing was interpreted, and with what results, is explained in the first volume of the annotated Journal now about to be published.
In the autumn of 1735 John and Charles Wesley accom- panied Colonel Oglethorpe on his second expedition to Georgia. Charles held an official appointment under the Georgia Trustees as " Secretary for Colonial Affairs." It was intended that he should serve on Oglethorpe's staff, acting in the double capacity of private secretary and curate or chaplain. His brother John volunteered to join the expedition at his own charges as missionary to the Indians. A sudden vacancy in the parish church at Savannah led the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, acting in concert with the Trustees, to appoint him, against his will, to the vacant curacy. Charles Wesley's secretarial appointment utterly failed : John's projeoted mission to the Indians was hopelessly barred by intertribal and intercolonial wars, the result being that John Wesley, to his own great surprise, found himself acting as parish minister for the whole Colony of Georgia,—a parish stretching a hundred miles from the Savannah River to Fort St. Andrews, with an unexplored hinterland and a thousand islands. At the same time be served as unofficial private secretary and confidential adviser to Oglethorpe, writing for him on every available occasion letters not only in English, but probably also in French, German, and Spanish. Early in the year 1738 he returned to London and Oxford.
During the whole of this period Wesley kept a diary in which he noted his doings from hour to hour each day. At first he wrote, as he had latterly done in Oxford, a very much abbreviated longhand, the secrecy of which he strengthened by occasional relapses into cipher. In December, 1736, he began Byrom's shorthand, the script in which all the later diaries are written.* The diaries written on board the emigrant-ship and in Georgia have been deciphered, and all the information they contain has been utilised in annotations on the Journal text. Wherever they were likely to interest readers whole pages and numberless quotations have been given either in facsimile or in transliterations. Nothing material has been suppressed. It is intended to place photographio prints of the actual diaries in the library of the new Methodist Church-house at Westminster, where they will be as accessible to students as are the manuscripts in the British Museum. There is nothing in the diaries that needs to be concealed. They reveal the man Wesley as he was,--student and tutor at Oxford, curate at Wroot, parish priest and mission evangelist in Georgia, the friend of scholars and illustrious women, a leader in religious reform, a Churchman who drew all his ecclesiastical inspira- tion from early Church history ; the annotator of Horace, Shakespeare, Spenser, and Milton ; the compiler of the first hymn-book ever used in the Church of England; and the astute organiser of a new Order within the Anglican Church, the purpose of which was the cultivation of a meditative and moderately mystical type of personal religion, of inward and outward holiness, and the moral, religious, and social over- sight of every parishioner, young or old, rich or poor. All this, and much else, is now made clear by Wesley himself.
The first Journal—or "Extract," as Wesley calls it—we have hitherto known only in its printed form. Originally, as written by Wesley, it was much fuller, and therefore less obscure. The first draft may still be hi existence, but if so it will be in a mutilated condition. A considerable fragment, violently torn from one of the little calf-bound notebooks, is now in the Colman Collection. It is obviously part of the original Journal, and, as such, recovers its place in the new edition, adding in no small degree to the tragic interest of the story. A few years ago the Wesleyan Conference acquired several Wesley manuscripts which proved to be variants of a
large section of the Journal written in Georgia. Some of
these sheets differ but slightly from a manuscript Journal in the possession of the Wesleyan Conference, and now about to be published in the new edition. Others, however, are rich in hitherto unknown facts. These documents show the
• In the same shorthand Charles Wesley wrote letters to his brother, and all the more private episodes of his Journal. A new edition of the latter, with transliterations of the hitherto unpublished shorthand paragraphs, Is now in course of preparation.
importance Wesley himself attached to those events in Georgia which eventually drove him back to England. To us who stand afar off they are still more valuable because of the light they throw on Georgia as a school of moral and intellectual discipline, and on Wesley during the time when he was being girded for his mission as evangelist, teacher, and organiser.
The reason for the existence of so many versions of the Georgia Journal is found in Wesley's habit of taking absent friends—his mother, brothers, sisters, members of the Holy Club, and friends in London, Manchester, and elsewhere— into his confidence. Copies of his Journal were read in Palace Yard, where the Trustees met, in Great College Street, Westminster, in Blundell's School, in country rectories, and in the religious societies of Oxford and London. The marvel is not that so many Wesley manuscripts have survived, but that more have not come to light. The task entrusted to the editor of the new edition, if interesting, has also been extremely difficult. He has attempted—with what success others must judge—the restoration of Wesley's Journal to its original and complete form. Into the text no words but Wesley's have been inserted. By the help of square brackets, interwoven new material is distinguished from the old. Interludes left by Wesley in the Journal are filled from the diaries in notes across the page. Additional light is thrown upon the text by footnotes in double columns, and some indication is given of the points in Wesley's story at which the Colonial Office documents, now in the Record Office, may be expected to supply still further information.—I am, Sir, &c.,
NEHEMIAH CURNOCK.
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