Fleeing From The Wrath

THE LORD'S HORSEMAN--A Book About John Wesley--Umphrey Lee--Century ($2.50).

JOHN WESLEY--A Portrait--Abram Lipsky--Simon & Schuster ($3).

If John Wesley, man of God, has suffered neglect in an irreligious age, modern popular biography has come abundantly, desperately, to his rescue. Author Lee, spirited Texan Methodist clergyman, enriches a sound, engrossing history with cogent anecdote and incident. Author Lipsky, Jewish student of psychology, makes a shrewd analysis of the itinerant preacher who founded, in spite of himself, the largest extant Protestant denomination.

John Wesley, staunch Tory supporter of Church and King, had not intended that his Methodist societies conflict with the established religion. But established religion had lost its virility to an "age of reason," and Wesley hoped to counter this "deathly decorum" with a revival of mysticism and emotionalism. Throughout England, therefore, he organized societies with the sole condition of membership "a desire to flee from the wrath to come."

His life spanned the 18th century (1703-1791), thus antedating Darwin, but he seems nevertheless to have left a suggestion to his posthumous flock in Tennessee: "The whole progress of nature is so gradual, that the entire chasm from a plant to a man, is filled up with divers kinds of creatures, rising one above another, by so gentle an ascent, that the transitions from one species to another are almost insensible. . . . The ape is this rough draught of man: this rude sketch. . . ." Indeed Wesley had written A Survey of the Wisdom of God in the Creation: or, A Compendium of Natural Philosophy. But he did not altogether desert superstition for science: among the 725 prescriptions for 243 diseases listed in his Primitive Physick: or, An Easy and Natural Method of Curing Most Diseases is the remedy for "a consumption"--"take a cow-heel from the Tripe-house ready drest . . . two ounces of Isinglass . . . Sugar-candy ... set them in the oven after the bread is drawn . . . let the Patient live on this."