increasing family, without any corresponding increase of stipend, the exemplary rector laboured for ten years ere the birth of his son John, "contending with low wants and lofty will," with the dislike and opposition of his unruly parishioners, with his own chafed tempers and disappointed expectations, with serious inroads upon his income by fire and flood, and with the drag-chain of a poverty that pressed upon the means of subsistence, and which his literary labours availed little to lighten. Our sympathies gather round the "busy bee" whose active industry and zeal could not shield his hive from spoliation and misfortune, while many a contemporary drone surfeited in abundance, and wore out a useless life in luxury, self-indulgence, and criminal ease. Ere his son John, the future father of Methodism, had completed his third year, the rector of Epworth was in jail for debt. The exasperation of party, which he took no means to allay, but rather chafed and provoked, for he gloried in his "Church and State politics," being "sufficiently elevated," brought down upon him the unmanly vengeance of his creditors, and they spited their political opponent by throwing him into prison. This affliction brought him friends, who succeeded in procuring his release after an incarceration of some months, but neither enlarged his resources nor increased his prudence. He seems to have been a stern if a faithful pastor, and when called to encounter prejudices, to have met them with prejudices as virulent of his own. Into such a home as all this bespeaks, needy but not sordid, poverty-stricken yet garnished by high principle and dogged resolution, full of anxieties for temporal provision, yet free from the discontent that dishonours God, |