Untitled - the Digital Library of Georgia

GEORGIA AND GEORGIANS 125
nizanees, and a warrant for his arrest was accordingly issued. To avoid
further trouble, he determined to fly, like Paul from Damascus. He left
the place secretly by night, in the company of a bankrupt constable, a
ne'er-do-well wife-beater named Gough, .and a defaulting' barber. They
rowed up the river in a boat to the Swiss settlement at Purysburg, and
proceeded thence on foot to Beaufort; but, misdirected by an old man,
they lost the way, wandered about in a swamp, and, for a whole day, had
no food but a piece of gingerbread. Finally they arrived at Beaufort,
where Delamotte joined them, and thence they took boat to Charleston.
Here Wesley preached again 'to this careless people,' and four days later
took leave of America, embarking on board the 'Samuel,' Captain Percy.
'' On the voyage, which was a stormy and unpleasant one, he devoted
himself to ministering to the spiritual wants of those on board. In the
solitude of his cabin he gave himself up to deep heart-searching. He
felt that the want of success which attended his work in America was
due to some lack of real devotion in himself. As he expressed it very
tersely in a note to one of the entries in his journal: ' I had even then
the faith of a servant, though not of a son.'
"Meanwhile, George Whitefield, to whom he had sent a pressing invi
tation to join him in Georgia, had embarked on his journey; and, the
two vessels, as it happened, the one outward bound, bearing Whitefield,
all aglow with missionary enthusiasm, the other about to enter port, car
rying the disappointed Wesley, met at the mouth of the Thames. The
question whether Whitefield should proceed or return weighed heavily on
the mind of the older man, who seems to have thought that the decision
rested with him. At length, having cast lots—a Biblical practice shared
by him with the Moravians—he sent word to W'hitefield that he had better
return. But Whitefield did not highly esteem this method of coming
to a practical decision, resolved to continue on his voyage; and, in due
time, he landed at Savannah."*'
"Bishop E. E. liendrix had the good fortune, while on a visit to
England in 1900 as the fraternal delegate of the Methodist Episcopal
Church, South, to the British Wesleyan Conferences, to come into pos
session of the original diary kept by John Wesley during his stay in
Georgia. This rare manuscript journal has been in the hands of only
two families since it was given, in 1817, by the Rev. Henry Moore to
Miss Elizabeth Taylor, of Caermarthcn. She left it by will, in 1847,
to the Rev. John Gould Avery, a Wesleyan preacher, who valued it so
highly that it was retained in the possession of himself and his only
daughter, Mrs. Norton Bell, the wife of a London architect, until bought,
in 1897, by Mr. R. Thursfield Smith, J. P., of Whitechurch, Shrop
shire, a retired engineer and iron manufacturer.
"The book is a small duodecimo, bound in leather, and contains one
hundred and eighty-six pages, all but eleven of which are numbered,
and are filled with Wesley's handwriting. Each of the numbered pages
is devoted to the doings of a single day, and each line to the work of a
single hour, except on one or two occasions when the writer was travel-
* E'ev. James W. Leo, D. D., in Illustrated History of Methodism.