Charles Wesley

Charles Wesley sailed to Georgia with his brother John, failed there about as badly as John did, and came home sick and discouraged. Three days before John's heart was strangely warmed in May 1738, Charles found the same assurance in a sickroom in London — and reached for a pen. He wrote hymns for the rest of his life, something like six thousand of them. Where John organized the revival, Charles taught it what to sing, and the singing carried the doctrine into people who could not read a page of it. He rode the preaching circuits too, standing in fields and sitting with condemned men in Newgate prison, until his health gave out. Unlike John, he never wanted Methodism to leave the Church of England, and the break between the brothers over it was real. He died an Anglican priest in 1788, dictating one last verse to his wife from his bed.