50 History of Methodism 



stancy and steadiness, was inconsistent with any re- 

 ceived maxims or rules of life among the members." 

 The opposition which began thus to manifest itself in 

 raillery grew much more serious in process of time, 

 and culminated at length, in 1767, in the expulsion 

 from the university of six students of St. Edmund's 

 Hall, " for holding Methodistic tenets, and taking upon 

 them to pray, read, and expound the Scriptures, and 

 sing lrymns in a private house." The principal of 

 the college to which they belonged (Dr. Dixon), when 

 the motion for their discharge was overruled by the 

 authorities, at the close of an able defense — in which 

 it was clearly set forth that their piety was unques- 

 tionable, their lives exemplary, and their doctrines in 

 full accord with the Thirty-nine Articles of the Estab- 

 lished Church — indicated his judgment of- the real 

 grounds of the proceedings against them, as well as 

 his sense of the deep wrong done to them, by suggest- 

 ing that as these young men were now expelled from 

 the university for having too much religion, it would 

 be eminently proper to proceed at once to inquire into 

 the conduct of some of those who had too little. Eour 

 members of the Holy Club, viz., John Yfesley and 

 his brother Charles (who founded it), Benjamin In- 

 gham (who joined it in 1732), and George Whitefield 

 (who was admitted to membership in 1735), became 

 missionaries to America, and in person made known 

 from the beginning the principles and mode of life of 

 the Oxford Methodists in the infant colony of South 

 Carolina. 



At the time the two Wesleys and their associates 

 were enduring, persecutions in part for visiting men 

 imprisoned for debt in Oxford' Castle, and ministering 

 to their spiritual wants, James Oglethorpe, a man of 



