Religion: The Other Wesley

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Thirty-nine years before the gleam of lanterns from the steeple of Boston's Old North Church warned Paul Revere of approaching redcoats, a short, stocky Anglican divine, clad in near-rags and wasted by dysentery, tottered ashore at Boston Harbor. After convincing one rector that he was indeed a clergyman ("my ship-clothes not being the best credentials"), Charles Wesley, prolific composer (6,500 hymns) and restless younger brother of Methodism's Founder John Wesley, preached a sermon in Christ Church, better known as the Old North Church.

Wesley arrived in Boston by happenstance. Ailing and discouraged at the failure of a tour of duty in Governor Oglethorpe's Georgia colony, he sailed for England, had to stop off at the Massachusetts Bay Colony because of stormy seas. When Wesley continued his journey a month later, he was still weak but in fine spirits. For the rest of his tumultuous life (before his death in 1788 he came to an uneasy rest halfway between Anglicanism, which he never renounced, and his brother's Methodism) Charles Wesley remembered the warm reception of his preaching in Boston. He praised the "prospect entirely new and beautiful" of the New England port, spoke highly of the congeniality and "the civility of the fellows" at Harvard College.

Last week, on the 221st anniversary of Wesley's Christ Church sermon and the 250th anniversary of the year of his birth, some 50 Methodist and Episcopal clergymen marched into the Old North Church to the chimed tunes of Wesley's hymns (two of the best-known: Jesus, Lover of my soul, Hark ! the herald angels sing), to take part in a memorial service. The sermon bore the same title (''One Needful Thing") as Charles Wesley's, and its substance was the stern kind of moralizing that the 18th century preacher would have approved. Methodist Bishop John Wesley Lord cited the Little Rock crisis (''The moral sense of the nation has been outraged''), continued: "We must seek and find the courage to do the true thing. Today God is troubling the waters. No man has the right or the power to thwart his holy will. We must find out where God is going and then get things out of his way, lest we perish. Our prayer to Almighty God ... is that we will enlarge the boundaries of our hearts to embrace in one great fellowship all his children . . . This is the one thing needful in this moment of history."