John Wesley urged the medical profession (and his fellow clergy) to remember that drugs are not the answer to every sickness.
On Saturday May 12th, 1759, John Wesley was in Whitehaven, on the coast of Cumbria. That evening, he left himself a reminder in his daily Journal never to try to get there via the coast road: the inland trip by Kendal and Keswick was longer but quicker. He then fell to musing on a lady he had spoken to recently, who suffered from a persistent stomach ailment.
John Wesley called for a world in which no one was forced to go against his conscience or to serve against his will.
In Thoughts on Slavery (1774), Church of England clergyman John Wesley made an impassioned appeal for liberty. Of course his primary goal was to secure the release of those held in captivity as slaves; but his vision went beyond that, to a world in which no one forced others to do anything against their conscience and their will.
John Wesley wondered how those involved in the slave trade would feel if the tables were ever turned on them.
In 1774, Church of England clergyman John Wesley published Thoughts on Slavery, in which he joined the chorus (or choir, since it was overwhelmingly a Christian fellowship) of those demanding an end to the trade in slaves between Africa and Great Britain’s American colonies. His song was a simple one: Do as you would be done by; and he recalled an occasion when it had touched one heart in Liverpool.
John Wesley wrote to a young William Wilberforce to encourage him in his campaign against the slave trade.
A few days before he died on on March 2nd, 1791, at the age of 87, John Wesley wrote to a young MP, fellow ‘methodist’ William Wilberforce. While these were not Wesley’s last recorded words (which were ‘The best of all is, God is with us’) his letter has the air of a departing Elijah wishing upon Elisha a double share of his spirit.