The praise of his critics is enough to lend John Wesley enduring fame. Leslie Stephen called him "the greatest captain of men of his century." Macaulay ridiculed the historians of his day who failed to see that "the greatest event of the era was the work of Wesley." To Macaulay's statement that Wesley had a genius for government, equal to that of Richelieu, Matthew Arnold added, "He had a genius for godliness." Buckle called him the first of ecclesiastical statesmen, while Lecky said, "Wesley's sermons were of greater historic importance to England than all the victories by land and sea under Pitt."
"No other man," writes Augustine Birrell, "did such a life-work for England. He helped to save England from the horrors of the French Revolution." This is not a careless pronouncement, nor an instance of biographical exaggeration. Born in 1703, belonging to the era just preceding the French Revolution, John Wesley, with his fifty years among the working people of Great Britain, changed the thinking of his time. The eighteenth century was a coarse age; Carlyle summarized it in a single biting phrase: "soul extinct; stomach well alive." The pictures of Hogarth, the journals of Wesley, and the _History of Great Criminals_ prove that there was at least a basis for Carlyle's bitterness. Dr. Johnson, in his _Dictionary_, defines a pension as "pay given to a street hireling for treason to his country." Burke describes the British Secretary of State as "the greatest drunkard and most unlucky gambler of his age." Walpole portrays cabinet ministers and statesmen reeling into the ferry-boat of Charon at forty-five, worn out with drunkenness and gout. In his pictures of Beer Street and Gin Lane, Hogarth sketches the drunkenness and filth of the London that he calls "the city of gallows," with a street that was a lane of gibbets, where the corpses of felons hung. Hume and Walpole both prophesied an inevitable revolution, with corpses that would be piled up as barricades "in front of human beasts who fought with the ferocity of tigers." But at the very moment when France was seething with revolt, across in England, in Newcastle and Moorfields, thousands of grimy miners were assembled, now weeping in penitence, now singing hymns of praise to God. When the spirit of destruction swept over Europe, Wesley's revival had done its work, and its influence held the people of England back from the horrors of the guillotine in Paris. It is for this reason that historians rank John Wesley in terms of abiding influence, above Pitt, Wellington and Nelson.