I found myself much out of order, and apprehended that my end was near. I had no fear of death, but I was concerned for the cause of God, which I apprehended would suffer by my removal.
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"I have no time to be little."
"Holy tempers are the very essence of religion."
"I am not afraid that the people called Methodists should ever cease to exist either in Europe or America. But I am afraid lest they should only exist as a dead sect, having the form of religion withou…"
"I have often wondered that the generality of Christians should be so cold and indifferent in their religion."
"I have often thought that the greatest proof of the goodness of God to man, is that he has given him a wife."
English Anglican cleric and founder of Methodism, whose open-air preaching and class-meeting structure created the largest 18th-century evangelical revival. Closely associated with Charles Wesley (his hymn-writing brother) and George Whitefield (early co-revivalist, later doctrinal opponent). For an intellectual contrast, see George Whitefield, Calvinist evangelical revivalist — Whitefield's predestinarian Calvinism vs Wesley's free-grace Arminian theology split the early Methodist movement permanently in the 1739-41 break. The founding evangelical Calvinist-Arminian schism — the two parallel evangelical traditions American Christianity descends from.
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A man facing what he believes is his deathbed confesses two things: he is personally unafraid of dying, and yet deeply anxious. His anxiety isn't about himself — it's about the movement he leads. He fears that without him, God's work will stall or collapse. The quote captures the tension between personal peace with mortality and the weight of feeling responsible for something larger than oneself.
Wesley traveled over 250,000 miles on horseback, preached 40,000 sermons, and personally organized thousands of Methodist societies across Britain and America. He was genuinely irreplaceable in the movement's early decades — its networks, theology, and discipline flowed through him. Drawn from his journals, which he kept for 66 years, this reflects the paradox he lived: radical personal humility coexisting with clear-eyed awareness that he was the linchpin of a historic spiritual awakening.
The 18th-century Church of England had grown distant from ordinary people. Wesley's revival emerged as industrialization uprooted rural England, creating urban poor with no spiritual home. His movement was actively suppressed — mobs attacked his meetings, bishops barred him from pulpits. Every leader in such a fragile, persecuted movement was genuinely irreplaceable. Wesley's fear that his death would harm the cause was not vanity but a realistic assessment of how dependent early Methodism was on his singular organizing energy.
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