He thinks that if the East India Company were made acquainted with his scheme they might deem it worthy of encouragement; and he also hopes that Queen Anne might be prevailed upon to grant it her royal favour; but even should the Queen and the East India Company give him no encouragement, he was still prepared to go on two conditions—1. That he be allowed £140 a year; £100 of which he would devote to his own expenses, and the remaining £40 to a curate employed to take his place at Epworth. And 2. That, in case of his decease while upon his mission, provision might be made for the subsistence of his family, they, of course, being supported while he lived by the income of his rectory. Such was Samuel Wesley’s noble plan to go as a missionary, for £100 a year, to St Helena, Abyssinia, India, and China. Perhaps communications from his wife’s brother, Samuel Annesley, jun., now resident in India, might have excited within him some amount of interest in the welfare of the inhabitants of that country; but, over and above all that, he was animated with a zeal for God and a love for the souls of men which made him willing not only to encounter hardship and danger, but even death in his great missionary project. His father, John Wesley of Whitchurch, was inspired with the same spirit; and, when forbid to preach in England, longed to go to Surinam, in Guiana, or to Maryland, in America, as a missionary among the English settlers there. The father’s heroic spirit was the spirit of the son, and also of the grandsons, John and Charles, who, full of zeal for the Most High, tore themselves from their friends at Oxford, and, almost without scrip or purse, crossed the Atlantic to preach the glorious gospel of the blessed God to the different tribes of American Indians. Samuel Wesley’s proposal was not adopted; but it was not on that account the less honourable to his head and heart. On the 5th of April 1705, Queen Anne dissolved by proclamation the high Tory House of Commons, and, of course, this was followed by a general election. Whigs and Tories now exerted themselves to the uttermost. Party struggles throughout the kingdom were most vehement. The clergy generally were in favour of the Tories, and took great pains to infuse into the people tragical apprehensions, that, if the Whigs obtained a majority, the Church would be in danger. The universities took the same side of the question, and “the Church in danger” was the election cry of the Tory party.