The colony of Georgia makes its appearance among the thirteen British colonies in America, in 1733, as one born out of due time. But no colony of all the thirteen had a more distinctly Christian origin than this. The foundations of other American commonwealths had been laid in faith and hope, but the ruling motive of the founding of Georgia was charity, and that is the greatest of these three. The spirit which dominated in the measures taken for the beginning of the enterprise was embodied in one of the most interesting personages of the dreary eighteenth century--General James Oglethorpe. His eventful life covered the greater part of the eighteenth century, but in some of the leading traits of his character and incidents of his career he was rather a man of the nineteenth. At the age of twenty-one he was already a veteran of the army of Prince Eugene, having served with honorable distinction on the staff of that great commander. Returning to England, in 1722 he entered Parliament, and soon attained what in that age was the almost solitary distinction of a social reformer. He procured the appointment of a special committee to investigate the condition of the debtors' prisons; and the shocking revelations that ensued led to a beginning of reformation of the cruel and barbarous laws of England concerning imprisonment for debt. But being of the higher type of reformers, he was not content with such negative work. He cherished and elaborated a scheme that should open a new career for those whose ill success in life had subjected them to the pains and the ignominy due to criminals. It was primarily for such as these that he projected the colony of Georgia. But to a mind like his the victims of injustice in every land were objects of practical sympathy. His colony should be an asylum for sufferers from religious persecution from whatever quarter. The enterprise was organized avowedly as a work of charity. The territory was vested in trustees, who should receive no pay or emolument for their services. Oglethorpe himself gave his unpaid labor as military and civil head of the colony, declining to receive in return so much as a settler's allotment of land. An appropriation of ten thousand pounds was made by Parliament for the promotion of the work--the only government subsidy ever granted to an American colony. With eager and unselfish hopes of a noble service to be rendered to humanity, the generous soldier embarked with a picked company of one hundred and twenty emigrants, and on the 12th of February, 1733, landed at the foot of the bluff on which now stands the city of Savannah. The attractions of the genial climate and fertile soil, the liberal terms of invitation, and the splendid schemes of profitable industry were diligently advertised, and came to the knowledge of that noble young enthusiast, Zinzendorf, count and Moravian bishop, whose estate of Herrnhut in Lusatia had become an asylum for persecuted Christians; and missionary colonists of that Moravian church of which every member was a missionary, and companies of the exiled Salzburgers, the cruelty of whose sufferings aroused the universal indignation of Protestant Europe, were mingled with the unfortunates from English prisons in successive ship-loads of emigrants. One such ship's company, among the earliest to be added to the new colony, included some mighty factors in the future church history of America and of the world. In February, 1736, a company of three hundred colonists, with Oglethorpe at their head, landed at Savannah. Among them was a reinforcement of twenty colonists for the Moravian settlement, with Bishop David Nitschmann, and young Charles Wesley, secretary to the governor, and his elder brother, John, now thirty-three years old, eager for the work of evangelizing the heathen Indians--an intensely narrow, ascetic, High-church ritualist and sacramentarian. The voyage was a memorable one in history. Amid the terrors of a perilous storm, Wesley, so liable to be lifted up with the pride that apes humility, was humbled as he contrasted the agitations of his own people with the cheerful faith and composure of his German shipmates; and soon after the landing he was touched with the primitive simplicity and beauty of the ordination service with which a pastor was set over the Moravian settlement by Bishop Nitschmann. During the twenty-two months of his service in Georgia, through the ascetic toils and privations which he inflicted on himself and tried to inflict on others, he seems as one whom the law has taken severely in hand to lead him to Christ. It was after his return from America, among the Moravians, first at London and afterward on a visit to Herrnhut, that he was "taught the way of the Lord more perfectly."[125:1]