"As for reputation," he says, "though it be a glorious instrument of advancing our Master's service, yet there is a better than that--a clean heart, a single eye, a soul full of God." What words are these for a minister of the Lord Jesus! It implies heroic, unselfish devotion to a glorious object. He had discovered the secret of success. What golden words are these: "I once desired to make a fair show in language and philosophy. But that is past. There is a more excellent way; and if I cannot attain to any progress in one without throwing up all thoughts of the other, why, fare it well." This gives the reader an idea of the motive which governed him to the end of life. In the midst of these scenes of persecution Wesley addressed a letter to his venerable father, still living at Epworth, asking his advice. The old man urged him to go on and not be weary in well-doing; "to bear no more sail than necessary, but to steer steady. As they had called his son the father of the Holy Club, they might call him the grandfather, and he would glory in that name rather than in the title of His Holiness." These were noble words from sire to son at such a time and in such a conflict. In years after, when looking back upon the scenes of Oxford and that mustard-seed beginning, Wesley said: "Two young men, without name, without friends, without either power or fortune, set out from college with principles totally different from those of the common people, to oppose all the world, learned and unlearned, to combat popular prejudices of every kind. Their first principle directly attacked all wickedness; their second, all the bigotry in the world. Thus they attempted a reformation not of opinions (feathers, trifles not worth naming), but of men's tempers and lives; of vice of every kind; of everything contrary to justice, mercy, or truth. And for this it was that they carried their lives in their hands, and that both the great vulgar and the small looked upon them as mad dogs, and treated them as such." Such was the beginning of the religious career of this wonderful man. Wesley refers to three distinct periods of the rise of Methodism. He says: "The first rise of Methodism was in November, 1729, when four of us met at Oxford. The second was at Savannah, in April, 1736, when twenty or thirty persons met at my house. The last was at London, May 1, 1738, when forty or fifty of us agreed to meet together every Wednesday evening, in order to free conversation, begun and ended with singing and prayer. God then thrust us out to raise a holy people."