In the face of this stirring appeal from an aged father what did Wesley reply? He refused absolutely to entertain the matter. His self-centredness, the while he directed the religious beliefs and operations of the small body of disciples at Oxford, made him forget all considerations of filial duty and love and of God’s commands to obedience. His parents had been the reason of his entering the Church. He would make no further sacrifice for them now that he saw his way clear. His father, mother, the thousands of poor people--nobody and nothing mattered except that he should make himself more holy! The petty duties, worries, and cares, the continual small demands of trifling points entailed by such a curacy were too small for this striving, all-conquering spirit. What mattered it that he should send his father’s grey hairs down in sorrow to the grave? All this while, he was most certainly turning over the saying of the “serious man”--to _make_ followers. On his father’s death it was proposed that he should go to America. Here was his great chance. Oxford had taught him that to expect to make English people, in their then blind and vicious state, see the truth of the gospel of Christ, was futile and childish. He was a prophet in his own country. But America, with all its unsophisticated, raw children, its ripeness for a strong man to come with the gift of oratory and sweep the country from end to end--there was his chance! And afterwards, on the crest of his fame and success, then would he convert England. His glory would have preceded him, and he would return as one already great, to whom they would lend a more willing ear. But with the astuteness of a really clever man, he peremptorily refused the offer to send him out there. As a natural result the proposers of the scheme argued. By degrees he allowed his willingness to be seen, though he piously pointed out that as he was his mother’s support, the staff of her age, he could not go without her consent. This she immediately gave, as he well knew she would. Accordingly, filled with exultation, buoyed up by a feeling of certainty as to his ultimate success, John Wesley left Oxford and England for the new country on which he intended to stamp his personality, and by whose conquest he was determined to hand down his name to posterity in the profession to which he had reconciled himself at the age of some nineteen years while still an Undergraduate of Christ Church. Had Wesley not gone up to Oxford, his name might never have been added to the list of England’s famous men. It was Oxford which first showed him the narrowness of a small curacy, Oxford which set him contemplating greatness, Oxford which actually started him in command of disciples. Therefore it is to Oxford that must be attributed the foundation, growth, and fame of Methodism, the means by which John Wesley attained his ends, power, and celebrity. CHAPTER XIX CELEBRITIES AS OXFORD MEN--(_continued_)