Wesley was a fellow of
Lincoln for nine years, from 1726 to 1735. During the most
impressionable years of a man's life--he was only twenty-three when
he was elected fellow--he was developing his mental powers by an
elaborate course of studies, and his spiritual life by the careful
use of every form of religious discipline which the Church
prescribed. A college, with its daily services and its life apart
from the world, rendered the practice of such discipline possible. It
was because Wesley and his followers, his brother Charles, George
Whitefield and others, observed this discipline so carefully that
they obtained their nickname. It is with good reason that Lincoln
Chapel is visited by his disciples from all parts of the world; it
has been little altered since his time, his pulpit is still here, and
the glass and the carving which make it very interesting, if not
beautiful, are those which he saw daily.
The chapel is the memorial of the devotion to Lincoln of another
churchman, more successful than Wesley from a worldly point of view,
but now forgotten by all except professed students of history. John
Williams, Bishop of Lincoln from 1621 to 1641, was the last
ecclesiastic who "kept" the Great Seal of England.
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