Samuel Wesley, whose mother was a niece of Thomas Fuller, the church historian, was in his earliest years thrown by family circumstances among the party of the dissenters; but he abandoned them in disgust, and entered at Exeter College, Oxford, in 1684. He afterwards obtained the livings of Epworth and Wroote, in Lincolnshire; and at the former of those places, June 17, 1703, was born his second son John. Six years afterwards, the house was set on fire by some refractory parishioners, and the boy was forgotten in the first confusion. He was presently discovered at a window, and by great exertion rescued at the very moment which promised to be his last. John Wesley saw the hand of Providence in this preservation, and made it in after life a subject of reflection and gratitude. At the age of seventeen he was removed from the Charterhouse School, where he had made some proficiency, to Christchurch, Oxford; and the reputation by which he was then distinguished was that of a skilful logician and acute disputant. He was destined for the Church; and when the time for ordination arrived, after some faint scruples which he professed respecting the damnatory clauses of the Athanasian Creed and the supposed Calvinistic tendency discoverable in the Articles had been removed, he entered into orders; and, as the book which had especially excited him on the most serious meditation to undertake that office was Jeremy Taylor’s ‘Rules of Holy Living and Dying,’ so was it with the deepest earnestness that his resolution was taken, and with a fixed determination to dedicate his life and his death, his whole thoughts, feelings and energies, to the service of God. Accordingly, in the selection of his acquaintance, he avoided all who did not embrace his principles; and having now obtained a fellowship at Lincoln College, he had the means of assembling round him a little society of religious friends or disciples, over whom his superior talents and piety gave him a natural influence. These, through their strict and methodical manner of living, acquired from their fellow-students the appellation of Methodists,—a name derived from the schools of ancient science, and thus destined, through its capricious application by a few thoughtless boys, to designate a large and vital portion of the Christian world. About this time Wesley entered upon his parochial duties as his father’s curate at Epworth[4], and presently afterwards, on the approaching death of that respectable person, he was strongly urged by his family to obtain, as he probably might have done, the next presentation for himself. Had he yielded to their solicitations, he might have passed his days in humble and peaceful obscurity; but his mind was too large for the limits of a country parish, and he already felt that he was intended to serve his Maker in a larger field. So, evading the arguments and withstanding the entreaties of his friends, he went back to reside for a while upon his fellowship at Oxford.