This was not a solution of Wesley’s difficulty. It was rather making mystery more mysterious. The young student was full of anxious inquiry. Isaac Taylor thinks that the strange Epworth episode so laid open Wesley’s faculty of belief, that ever after a right of way for the supernatural was opened through his mind; and, to the end of life, there was nothing so marvellous that it could not freely pass where “Old Jeffrey” had passed before it. Taylor adds: “Wesley’s most prominent infirmity was his wonder-loving credulity; from the beginning to the end of his course this weakness ruled him.” Other opportunities will occur of testing the truthfulness of Taylor’s statement; but here it may be observed, that for young Wesley to have regarded the noises at Epworth with indifference would have been irreligious and irrational. A metaphysician, vain of his philosophic powers, like Isaac Taylor, may “deal with occult folk, such as Jeffrey, huffingly and disrespectfully;” and may pretend to “catch in the Epworth ghost a glimpse of an idiotic creature” belonging to some order of invisible beings “not more intelligent than apes or pigs,” and which, by some “mischance, was thrown over its boundary, and obtained leave to disport itself among things palpable, and went to the extent of its tether in freaks of bootless mischief;” but, in broaching such a theory, Isaac Taylor, wishing to be witty, makes himself ridiculous. John Wesley believed the noises to be supernatural; and Southey, as great an authority as Taylor, defends his belief; and argues that such occurrences have a tendency to explode the fine-spun theories of men who deny another state of being, and to bring them to the conclusion that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in their philosophy. We have little doubt that the Epworth noises deepened and most powerfully increased Wesley’s convictions of the existence of an unseen world; and, in this way, exercised an important influence on the whole of his future life. His notion,[18] that the disturbance was occasioned by a messenger of Satan, sent to buffet his father for a rash vow alleged to have been made fifteen years before, has been shown to be utterly unfounded;[19] but the impressions it produced, or rather strengthened, respecting invisible realities, were of the utmost consequence in moulding his character, and in making him one of the most earnest preachers of the Christian’s creed that ever lived. During Wesley’s residence at the Charterhouse, his brother Samuel was the head usher of Westminster School; and in 1719, Wesley seems, for a time, to have become his brother’s guest. Charles was now a pupil under Samuel’s tuition; and the latter, writing to his father, says: “My brother Jack, I can faithfully assure you, gives you no manner of discouragement from breeding your third son a scholar. Jack is a brave boy, learning Hebrew as fast as he can.”[20]