This expression seems to have been offensive ; the
Bishop exclaimed impatiently, ' You have more new-
coined phrases than ever we have heard of! You
mean your conscience.' ' Spirit is no new phrase,'
replied Wesley. 'We read of being sanctified in
body, soul, and spirit ; but if your lordship like it
not so, then I say I am not satisfied in my conscience
touching the ordination you speak of.' And in reply
to further urgency from the Bishop, who does not
seem to have been a very formidable antagonist, he
asserts himself to be called to the work, though not
to the office, of the ministry. To any one who reads
the account of the conversation with the Methodist
history in his mind, it has the air of an anachron-
ism, and is one of many indications afforded us by
Wesley's life how numerous and far-reaching are the
fibres by which the life of the present draws nourish-
ment from the life of the past.
His son Samuel was educated among the Dis-
senters, and seems to have attracted sonje attention
among them, for in 1683, at the age of only twenty-
one, he was chosen to answer some severe invectives
against the body of Nonconformists ; the course of
reading thus originated producing the effect exactly



8 JOHN WESLEY. [chap.
