The health of Wesley’s father was now extremely feeble; and it became an anxiously discussed family question whether Wesley should be his father’s successor. Samuel was first urged to use means to obtain the next presentation of the Epworth rectory; but he positively declined doing so, and directed his father’s attention to John. The correspondence on this subject extends over the whole of the year 1734. The Epworth living was valuable, as may be judged by the fact that, though then worth only £200 per annum, it is now, through the relative changes that have taken place in the value of money and the price of food, worth near £1000.[118] The dying rector had been at great expense in improving the parsonage and its premises. Here he had diligently and faithfully laboured as an earnest parish minister for nearly forty successive years. Here most of his nineteen children had been born. Here he was about to die himself; and here he was anxious that his wife should die. John was pressed to secure the living, and thereby secure a continuance of the old homestead for his mother and his unmarried sisters. His brother Samuel allowed that at Oxford he would have “more friends, more freedom from care, and more Divine ordinances than he could have elsewhere;” but then at Oxford he was “despised,” and therefore could “do no good there.” To this John answered: “1. A Christian will be despised anywhere. 2. No one is a Christian till he is despised. 3. His being despised will not hinder his doing good, but much further it, by making him a better Christian. 4. Another can supply my place at Epworth better than at Oxford, and the good done here is of a far more diffusive nature; inasmuch as it is a more extensive benefit to sweeten the fountain than to do the same to particular streams.”[119] In writing to his father, he put the case thus: “The question is not whether I could do more good to others there or here; but whether I could do more good to myself: seeing wherever I can be most holy myself, there I can most promote holiness in others. But I can improve myself more at Oxford than at any other place,” etc. To this his father properly replied that our main consideration in choosing a course of life “is not dear self, but the glory of God, and the different degrees of promoting it.”[120]