A Female Leading A Meeting.
Many good Christians have scruples about the propriety of females taking part in the social services of the church. The mother of the Wesleys, though a genuine church-woman, and a firm lover of good order, ventured to trespass on the regulations of the church of England, and to offend her husband, who was shocked at her violation of church proprieties. Mr. Stevens gives the following account of her proceedings. "During the absence of her husband, she opened her doors for a sort of public worship, which was conducted by herself. She read sermons, prayed and conversed directly with the rustic assembly. Her husband, learning the fact by her letters, revolted, as a churchman, at its novelty. Her self-defence is characteristically earnest, but submissive to his authority. 'I chose,' she says, 'the best and most awakening sermons we had. Last Sunday, I believe we had about two hundred hearers, and yet many went away for want of room. We banish all temporal concerns from our society; none is suffered to mingle any discourse about them with our reading or singing. We keep close to the business of the day, and as soon as it is all over, they all go home. "And where is the harm of all this? As for your proposals of letting some person read, alas! you do not consider what a people these are. I do not think one man among them could read a sermon without spelling a good part of it, and how would that edify the rest? Nor has any of our family a voice strong enough to be heard by such a number of people." Her husband equally hesitated to approve or disapprove the extraordinary proceeding. Very soon she assembled around her a larger audience than had usually met at the church itself. Some of the leading parishioners and Wesley's curate wrote to him against the assembly as a 'conventicle.' Her reply is full of good sense and womanly feeling. She states that the measure was reclaiming many of the common people from immorality; that it was filling up the parish church; that some who had not attended the latter for years were now seen there. She prays him to relieve her from the responsibility of ending these useful services by assuming it himself, as her husband and pastor."