John Wesley — "What a work has God wrought in our day!"
What a work has God wrought in our day!
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More from John Wesley
"I had rather have a thousand common people to hear me, than a thousand fine gentlemen."
"The more I see of the working of the present government, the more I am convinced that they are ripe for destruction."
"It is not enough to be zealous; we must be zealous for God."
"I have often thought, that if I were to choose a place to preach in, it should be in the open air."
"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."
About John Wesley (1703-1791)
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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Understanding this quote
What it means
God has accomplished something remarkable and unprecedented in our lifetime. This expresses awe and gratitude at witnessing spiritual transformation on a massive scale—movements, revivals, changed lives—that feel divinely orchestrated rather than humanly engineered. It's a declaration that history itself is bending toward something significant, and the speaker recognizes themselves as a witness to extraordinary divine activity unfolding in real time.
Relevance to John Wesley
Wesley spent decades riding 250,000 miles on horseback across Britain, preaching to coal miners, prisoners, and the poor whom established churches ignored. He personally witnessed tens of thousands converted through open-air revivals. His Methodist movement grew from a small Oxford study group to over 100,000 members by his death in 1791, making this exclamation deeply personal—he literally watched the transformation happen.
The era
The 18th century saw Britain's Industrial Revolution uprooting rural communities into squalid urban slums, while the Church of England largely served the comfortable gentry. Simultaneously, the Great Awakening swept Britain and America. Wesley's Methodist revival emerged as a direct response to mass spiritual neglect, offering working-class people dignity, literacy, and community—a genuine social and religious earthquake amid profound economic upheaval.
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