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WERNER, JOANNES. 



WESLEY, JOHN. 



cio 



in 1817-18 in six volumes, containing all but the 'Mother of the 

 Maccabees.' In 1836 his posthumous sermons were published, and 

 in 1839-41 a complete edition of his collected works in fourteen 

 volumes. 



WERNER, JOANNES, a German mathematician and astronomer, 

 was born at Niirnberg on the 14th of February 1468. Nothing appa- 

 rently is known of his life, except that, when he was twenty-five years 

 of age, he went to Italy, where he made some astronomical observa- 

 tions ; and he is said to have made a aeries of observations on the 

 comet which appeared in the month of April 1500. From observations 

 which he made on the positions of Regulus, o Virginia, and a Libras, 

 compared with those which had been assigned to the same stars by 

 Ptolemy and Alphonso, he determined the precession of the equinoxes 

 to be 70 minutes of a degree in 100 years, a quantity much too small ; 

 and he found the obliquity of the ecliptic to be 23 28'. 



In 1514 he published 'Annotations on the First Book of Ptolemy's 

 Geography,' in which he endeavoured to explain au obscure passage 

 concerning the projection of the celestial sphere on a plane surface ; 

 and it deserves to be remarked that in this work we find the first 

 notice of the method of determining geographical longitudes by the 

 angular distance of the moon from some star : he recommends, for 

 making the observation, the ' cross-staff/ or ' fore-staff,' a rude instru- 

 ment which has long since been disused by mariners. In 1522 he 

 published at Niirnberg, in 4to, his ' Opera Mathematical in which is 

 contained a tract on conies : he also published a work on trigonometry, 

 in five books, containing a great number of astronomical and geogra- 

 phical problems. 



Werner wrote explanations of the construction and uses of meteoro- 

 logical instruments ; and it is said that he collected a number of 

 observations with a view of discovering from them rules for deter- 

 mining the changes which take place in the atmosphere. He executed 

 a machine in which the movements of the sun, moon, and planets 

 were represented conformably to the Ptolemaic system ; and he wrote 

 a work on ' The Movement of the Eighth Sphere.' He died in the year 

 1528. 



WESLEY, JOHN, was the most distinguished member of a family, 

 several of the other members of which however also claim to be shortly 

 noticed, either on their own account or in consequence of their connec- 

 tion with him. It will be most convenient to comprise all the Wesleys 

 under one head, and to take them in chronological order. 



The Wesleys, or Westleys, as they formerly spelled their name, are 

 said by Dr. Adam Clarke, in bis ' Memoirs of the Wesley Family/ to 

 have believed their progenitors to have come to England from Saxony ; 

 and it has been suggested that they might possibly have been of the 

 same stock with the once famous reformer, John Wesselus, otherwise 

 Do Wesalia, or Basilius, of Groningen, who died in 1489. (See 'Bio- 

 graphical Notices of the Rev. Bartholomew Westley,' &c., by William 

 Beal, 8vo, London, 1839 ; and WESSEL.) Supposing the name to be 

 English, or Anglo-Saxon, a doubt has been entertained as to whether 

 it is properly Westleigh or Wellesleigh. There is reason to believe 

 that the family name of Wellesleigh (probably taken from the village 

 so called near the city of Wells) has generally passed into Wesley : 

 Wood, in the ' Athenao Oxonienses,' has a notice of a bishop of Kildare, 

 of the early part of the 16th century, whom he describes as ' Walter 

 Wellesley, commonly called Wesley ; ' and it is known that, when 

 John Wesley's younger brother Charles was at Westminster School, an 

 Irish gentleman, Garret Wellesley, Esq., of Dungannon, M.P. for the 

 county of Meath, considering the boy to be of his own family, offered 

 to make him bis heir if he would have relinquished the intention of 

 proceeding to Oxford, and gone over and settled in Ireland. This 

 was before 1727, in which year Mr. Wellesley died, leaving his estates 

 and also his name to his cousin, Richard Colley, Esq., who was created 

 Baron Mornington (in the Irish peerage) in 1746, and was the father of 

 the first Earl of Mornington, and the grandfather of the Marquis Wel- 

 lesley and the Duke of Wellington. 



THE REV. BARTHOLOMEW WESTLEY. is the first of John Wesley's 

 ancestors of whom there is any distinct record. He was born about 

 1600 ; was educated at one of the universities, where he studied both 

 divinity and medicine ; became, in the time of the Commonwealth, 

 minister of Charmouth and Catherston (two adjoining villages near 

 Lyme in Dorsetshire) ; and was ejected from the first of these livings 

 immediately after the Restoration, and from the second on the passing 

 of the Act of Uniformity in 1662. He continued to reside at Cbar- 

 moutb, practising physic, till the passing of the Five-Mile Act in 1665 

 drove him, with other nonconformists, to a secluded spot at Pinney, 

 now known by the name of Whitechapel Rocks; and there he is 

 believed to have spent the remainder of his days, which appear not to 

 have been many, though we do not find the date of his decease stated. 

 "He lived several years," iJr. Calamy tells us, "after he was legally 

 silenced ; but the death of his son made a vei'y sensible alteration in 

 the father, so that he afterwards declined apace, and did not long 

 survive him." 



THE REV. JOHN WESTLEY, M.A., son of this Bartholomew, waa born 

 about 1636, and studied at New Inn Hall, Oxford, where he applied 

 himself particularly to the Oriental languages, and adopted the 

 opinions as to church government and other subjects of the vice- 

 chancellor of the university, the celebrated Dr. Owen, who is said to 

 have shown great kindness for him. After preaching for some time to 



what was called " the gathered church," at Weymouth, and at the 

 neighbouring village of Radipole, he was appointed in May 1658 to 

 the vicarage of Winterborne-Whitchurch, in the same county of 

 Dorset. He married a daughter of Mr. John White, one of the lay 

 assessors of the Westminster Assembly of Divines, and commonly 

 called ' the Patriarch of Dorchester,' in which town he was rector of 

 Trinity Church for about forty years. Mrs. Westley is also stated to 

 have been a niece of Dr. Thomas Fuller, the celebrated historian : it 

 is probable that she was his wife's niece. Westley appears to have 

 been thrown into prison for something be had uttered in the pulpit 

 very soon after the Restoration : he lay in confinement till he was 

 discharged by an order of the privy council, dated July 24, 1661, on 

 his taking the oaths of supremacy and allegiance. He was seized a 

 second time in the beginning of 1662 as he was leaving the church, 

 and carried to prison at Blandford, where he lay for some time ; and 

 soon after he got out the Act of Uniformity deprived him of his 

 living, and left him for several months a wanderer and an outcast. At 

 length, in May 1663, a pious and charitable person gave him a house 

 rent-free at the village of Preston, a few miles from Weymouth. At 

 one time he thought of emigrating to Surinam or Maryland ; but he 

 finally resolved that it was his duty to remain at home. He continued 

 to preach when he could find a safe opportunity, both at Preston and 

 Weymouth ; and he eventually united himself as pastor to a small 

 congregation at Poole, though without going to reside among them. 

 He was often apprehended while thus engaged, and, besides being 

 several times fined, was subjected to four imprisonments at Poole and 

 Dorchester. Yet this elder John Westley does not appear to have 

 been a person of extreme opinions, or one who habitually allowed his 

 zeal to hurry him into disregard of danger or other indiscretions. 

 His principle and his practice was to joiu on ordinary occasions in 

 public worship with the members of the Established Church ; and we 

 are told that, while some of his nonconformist brethren in Dorset 

 preached and administered the ordinances of religion to the small 

 congregations who acknowledged them as their pastors openly and at 

 all hazards, he " thought it his duty to beware of men that pru- 

 dently he should preserve his liberty and his opportunity to minister 

 in holy things as long as he could, and not by the openness of one 

 meeting to hazard the liberty of all meetings." (Beal, p. 27.) The 

 Five-Mile- Act however, which drove his father from Charmouth, 

 drove him also from Preston, and forced him to retire to some place 

 of concealment which does not appear to be known. Venturing forth 

 again some time after to visit his family and to preach to his congre- 

 gation, he was apprehended and suffered another imprisonment. Many 

 more hardships incident to his situation he also underwent, and it 

 seems to be intimated that his spirits at last sunk under the public 

 and personal afflictions with which he was tried. If he was only 

 three or four and thirty, as Southey states (' Life of Wesley,' i. 5), 

 when he died, that event must have been before or in the year 1670. 

 His death, as already mentioned, was speedily followed by that of his 

 father, at about double the age. 



THE REV. SAMUEL WESTLEY, or WESLEY, was a younger son of this 

 John Westley, and was born at Preston, according to one account in 

 1668, by another in 1666, by a third "about the year 1662, or perhaps 

 a littlo earlier." (Compare Beal, p. 31, and Southey, i. 7, where it is 

 remarked that the earliest date is established by certain extracts from 

 the Registers of Exeter College, which are given, but which do not 

 appear to us to prove any thing on the subject.) He is said to have 

 been designed by his father for the ministry among the Dissenters, 

 and to have been sent with that view, after leaving the free grammar- 

 school of Dorchester, first to the academy at Stepney, kept by Edward 

 Veal, B.D., and next to that kept by Charles Morton, M.A., at Newing- 

 ton Green. Wesley however soon left the Dissenters. When he 

 joined the Established Church he was abandoned by his relations ; 

 but making his way to Oxford, with only 21. 16s. iu his pocket, he 

 entered himself at Exeter College as a poor scholar ; and, although 

 all he ever after received from any of his friends was a matter of five 

 shillings, he managed to take his Bachelor's degree, and by acting as a 

 private tutor bad accumulated the sum of 10Z. 15*., when he pro- 

 ceeded to London and got ordained. In all the accounts that we have 

 examined it is asserted that the year in which he went to college was 

 1684, and one of the extracts which Southey prints certainly seems to 

 imply that he made a deposit of caution-money as a poor scholar on 

 the 26th of September in that year; but it will be found that this 

 date will not agree with the rest of his history as commonly related. 

 At all events it is clearly impossible that if he only became a member 

 of the university in 16'84, he could, as we are told, have taken his 

 degree of B.A., been ordained, served a curacy in London for a year, 

 been for another year on board a man-of-war as chaplain, and then 

 served another London curacy for two years, during which he married, 

 had a son, became known as a writer for the press, and got a small 

 living in the country (supposed to be that of South Ormsby, in Lin- 

 colnshire), all before James II. published the order in council com- 

 manding his Declaration for Liberty of Conscience to be read in the 

 churches, iu May 1688. At this time Wesley is represented as having 

 been a person of such importance that urgent solicitations and pro- 

 mises of preferment were addressed to him to induce him to support 

 the measures of the court, which however he resolutely refused to 

 do ; not only omitting to read the king's declaration, but preaching a 



