It would not be difficult to multiply such facts as these; but enough has been said to show that when Samuel Wesley began his ministry, England and the English people were very different from what they are at present. The Christian minister even now has difficulties and discouragements; but, as a rule, he is almost a stranger to the trials encountered by young Wesley. For a penny he has his newspaper every morning; and for a trifle more he has his monthly review and magazine. He lives in an age when even the poorest of his parishioners will hardly deign to ride in the stage-waggon, but all aspire to be conveyed by the swift railway train. Books are published by millions; and circulating libraries, in one shape or in another, may be found in almost every hamlet of the land. Education is general; and not merely country squires, but country peasants, study classical and scientific books. Work is plentiful; and, except in a few bucolic districts, wages are sufficient to make the poor man’s cottage a neat and a happy home. It was otherwise one hundred and seventy-seven years ago, when Samuel Wesley, a young man of twenty-six years of age, first entered upon the office and duties of a clergyman of the Church of England. [This chapter is chiefly taken from Macaulay, from Knight, from the _Encyclopædia Britannica_, and from Baxter’s _Life and Times_.] CHAPTER VI. ORDINATION AND MARRIAGE—1688–1689. Mr Wesley took his degree of Bachelor of Arts at Oxford on the 19th of June 1688. Exactly seven weeks afterwards, he was ordained a deacon of the Church of England. He writes: “I tarried in Exeter College, though I met with some hardships I had before been unacquainted with, till I was of standing sufficient to take my Bachelor’s degree; and not being able to subsist there afterwards, I came to London during the time of my Lord Bishop of London’s suspension by the High Commission, and was instituted into deacon’s orders by my Lord Bishop of Rochester, at his palace at Bromley, August 7, 1688.” It is an incident worth remembering, that Mr Wesley left Oxford during the trial of the seven bishops, and was ordained amid the intense excitement which arose out of that event. In the above quotation he makes mention of his “hardships” in Exeter College. We are left to guess what the hardships were; but remembering that, when he entered, all the money he had was only about forty shillings—remembering that he remained in the college for nearly five years,—and remembering that, for that, length of time, he had to support himself by serving others; and that the only assistance he received from his friends was a five shillings piece, there can be no difficulty in perceiving that his collegiate life must have been no ordinary struggle.