Methodism and Society 9781847600219

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History Insights

General Editor: Alan Cousins

Methodism and Society Stuart Andrews ‘This was the theme of Wesley’s preaching – not hell-fire but free grace’

Publication Data © Stuart Andrews, 2007 The Author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Published by Humanities-Ebooks.co.uk Tirril Hall, Tirril, Penrith CA10 2JE

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ISBN 978-1-84760-021-9

Methodism and Society Stuart Andrews

Bibliographical Entry: Andrews, Stuart. Methodism and Society. History Insights. Tirril: Humanities-Ebooks, 2007

A Note on the Author Stuart Andrews, a former scholar of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, was a UK headmaster for 23 years (Norwich School and Clifton College), and editor of the Headmsters’ Conference journal for eleven years. He is now librarian of the Wells & Mendip Museum. He has written six other books on eighteenth-century history, the three latest on counter-revolutionary rhetoric in the decades following the American and French revolutions. His Irish Rebellion: Protestant polemic 1798–1900 was published by Palgrave/Macmillan in 2006.

Contents A Note on the Author Preface Acknowledgements 1 The Intellectual Climate 2 The Church 3 The Birth of Methodism Wesley’s Oxford The Holy Club Georgia Moravian influences The first societies Whitefield 4 Methodism under Wesley Preaching Organization Philanthropy Education 5 Divergences and Distinctions Reason and Revelation Calvinists and Arminians Methodists and Evangelicals 6 Methodism after Wesley The Reformation of Manners Methodism and Politics Chartism and Trade Unionism 7 Methodism and Revolution Guidance on further study Further Insights Titles

Preface The general theme of this study is the interaction between religious belief and social improvement, and should be regarded as part of the debate about Elie Halévy’s claim that Methodists and Evangelicals saved England from violent revolution in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The text was first published in Longman’s Seminar Studies and has been out of print since the 1970s. The main text is somewhat shorter in this online version, but is otherwise substantially unchanged. Some minor errors and ambiguities have been corrected. The documents section of the original edition has been omitted, but reference to many of the sources is now incorporated in the text. References to sources are given in the body of the text in abbreviated form. Frequently cited works are abbreviated as JWD for Wesley’s Diary, JWJ for The Journal of John Wesley, ed. N. Curnock (1909; re-issued 1938), JWL for The Letters of John Wesley, ed. J. Telford, 8 vols (1931), and WHS for Proceedings of the Wesley Historical Society. In the case of the Journal, volume and page references are not shown where the date of the entry appears in full. Complete bibliographical details for all cited titles are given in the updated bibliography. Other relevant titles are also included in the bibliography.

Acknowledgements We are grateful to Epworth Press Ltd for permission to reproduce extensive extracts from The Journal of John Wesley, ed. Nehemiah Curnock (1938 edition). Brief extracts from other copyright material are acknowledged parenthetically in the text and with full bibliographical details in the bibliography. The original version of Methodism and Society (1970) was dedicated to John Walsh. The author’s debt to John’s friendship and expertise has not diminished over the intervening 36 years.

1 The Intellectual Climate Methodism grew up in a climate of irreligion. It was only two years before John Wesley’s Aldersgate Street experience that Joseph Butler, soon to be Bishop of Bristol, announced in the advertisement prefixed to his Analogy of Religion (1736): It is come, I know not how, to be taken for granted by many persons that Christianity is not so much as a subject of inquiry; but that it is now at length discovered to be fictitious. And accordingly they treat it as if, in the present age, this were an agreed point among all people of discernment; and nothing remained but to set it up as a principal subject of mirth and ridicule, as it were by way of reprisals for its having so long interrupted the pleasures of the world.

Butler was exaggerating, and in any case he went on to provide a formidable defence of Christianity. Nevertheless in the first half of the eighteenth century there was undeniably a readiness to assume that natural philosophy had disposed of theology. But not of God. Indeed the ordered universe described in Newtonian astronomy seemed to demonstrate the indispensability of God as the First Cause or Grand Geometer. This was a conviction shared by Christians and Freemasons alike. The Masonic grace before meals was addressed to ‘the great architect of the universe’, while Addison’s famous hymn invoked the heavenly bodies of ‘the spacious firmament on high’ to prove the existence of a Creator: ‘In reason’s ear they all rejoice / And utter forth in glorious voice / For ever singing as they shine / The hand that made us is divine.’ The God revealed in Nature was a less personal and approachable deity than the God revealed in Scripture. He was more akin to the God of the Deists – the eternal watchmaker who made the clock of the universe, wound it up, set it going and then left it to run itself without any further interference with the mechanism. The refusal of the Deists to allow God to intervene in the day-to-day running of His creation is in marked contrast to Wesley’s readiness to recognise the hand of God in the most mundane happenings. The Deists sought God not in the Scriptures or in miraculous revelation, but in the book of nature and the laws of the physical universe. The Deists’ substitution of Reason for Revelation is implied in the very title of John Toland’s Christianity not Mysterious (1696). According to Toland, Christ’s role, far from confirming the

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indispensability of the miraculous, was to rid religion of its mystery and to depict the attributes of God, which a careful study of Nature should in any case have revealed. The same theme was developed by Matthew Tindal in his Christianity as Old as the Creation (1730). The revelation of Christian truth was not dependent on the coming of Christ. ‘The religion of nature’, argued Tindal, is ‘absolutely perfect’. Revelation could ‘neither add to nor take from its perfection’. Even more formidable champions of Natural Religion were Shaftesbury and Bolingbroke. In his Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (1711) Shaftesbury argued that God’s revelation of Himself in Nature was certain, clear and sufficient for all practical purposes, while Bolingbroke dismissed everything in the Bible except the four Gospels, and then proceeded to impugn the credibility of the Gospel writers themselves. Pope dedicated his Essay on Man to Bolingbroke. The effects of the Deistical controversy on the Church of England were twofold. In the first place the energies of the Anglican clergy were for half a century expended in the strenuous albeit successful attempt to refute the arguments of Deism. Tindal alone provoked no less than 115 books or pamphlets in defence of orthodoxy, while even contemporaries regretted that Butler’s determination to defeat the Deists had deflected him from more constructive labours. In his Analogy of Religion Butler claimed that Christian belief was no less reasonable than the assumptions of natural religion, and that many of the objections advanced against Christianity were equally applicable to Deism: both creeds made assertions about God that could not be tested by empirical means. Reason, Butler reminded the Deists, had its limitations: The only question concerning the truth of Christianity is whether it be a real revelation, not whether it be attended with every circumstance which we should have looked for; and concerning the authority of Scripture, whether it be what it claims to be – not whether it be a book of such sort, and so promulged, as weak men are apt to fancy a book containing a divine revelation should. (Butler, p.146)

But the tone of the Analogy was not always so uncompromising, and its Christian critics complained that, in attempting to meet the Deists on their own ground, Butler had conceded too much. That this charge should be made against the arch-opponent of Deism is a reminder of the second and more insidious effect of the dispute with the Deists: the readiness of the Established Church to attempt to compromise with the new philosophy. Bishop Berkeley warned Christians that they must be content with evidence that was not more than probable and with assumptions that were not actually demonstrable,

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while Bishop Hoadly – not a typical Hanoverian bishop but a bishop nevertheless – maintained that the service of Holy Communion was in no sense a mystery, but a purely commemorative rite ‘to be seriously performed in remembrance of an Absent Saviour’. This was the language of what came to be known as ‘latitudinarianism’. Its representatives shied away from any precise formulation of Christian dogma and were anxious to leave as much latitude as possible to individual judgement. One of the most respectable spokesmen of Latitudinarian churchmanship was John Tillotson, William III’s first Archbishop of Canterbury. He believed that ‘with charity and mutual forbearance, the Church may be peaceful and happy without absolute unity of opinion’. And he was prepared to assert from the pulpit: Doctrines are vehemently to be suspected which decline trial. To deny liberty of inquiry and judgement in matters of religion is the greatest injury and disparagement to truth that can be, and a tacit acknowledgement that she lies under some disadvantage, and that there is less to be said for her than for error. (Abbey and Overton, p. 121)

But Tillotson went further. He defended Christianity on prudential principles, in terms that made it sound like an insurance policy: ‘supposing the reasons for and against the principles of religion were equal, yet the danger and hazard is so unequal as would sway a prudent man to the affirmative.’ Warburton might be right to praise Tillotson’s sermons as ‘simple, elegant, candid, clear and rational’, but it was the Latitudinarians rather than the Deists who were to be the chief targets of Methodist invective. Whitefield remarked that Tillotson ‘knew no more of true Christianity than Mahomet’, while Seward, another Methodist, called him ‘a traitor who had sold his Lord for a better price than Judas had done’ (Abbey and Overton, p. 182). In an age when Anglican bishops were attempting to lighten the burden of belief, the doctrine of the Trinity was particularly embarrassing. The so-called Athanasian creed is itself a reminder that the doctrine had been under attack since the fourth century, but the growth of Unitarianism was so marked in the eighteenth century that it even found supporters at court. The piously orthodox George III was hostile, but George II’s wife, Queen Caroline, was supposed to be sympathetic to Unitarian ideas and to have wanted to bestow a bishopric on Dr Clarke, author of the unorthodox Scripture Doctrine of the Trinity (1712). But probably the most persuasive Unitarian of the century was the Dissenter, Joseph Priestley. His History of the Corruptions of Christianity (1782) listed among the perversions of Christian belief, not only the Trinity

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but the Virgin birth, original sin, predestination, the doctrine of the Atonement and the inspiration of the Bible. Yet, rather surprisingly perhaps, he attacked these doctrines as unscriptural and not merely as unreasonable; and, although he objected to these doctrinal mysteries, he was prepared to accept the Gospel miracles, the resurrection of Christ and the Last Judgement. Unitarianism was much more prevalent among the Dissenting sects than among Anglicans – so much so that George III cited this as a reason for retaining the Test Acts. But the Unitarians were sufficiently influential, and sufficiently in tune with the rationalism of the age, for Thomas Jefferson to express the view in 1822 that Unitarianism would ‘become the general religion of the United States’ (Life & selected writings, p. 703). Deism, Latitudinarianism, Unitarianism – all three represented a rationalistic and philosophical approach to religion. The religious certainties of the seventeenth century, which men had thought worth fighting and dying for, had given way in the eighteenth century to a confusing complex of probabilities. In Butler’s phrase, ‘Probability is the very guide of life’ (Analogy, p. xxv). How far was Methodism a reaction against the intellectualism and permissiveness of the new theology with its arguments over ‘evidences’ and its comfortable words about the absence of absolute doctrinal standards? In a letter to Conyers Middleton in 1749, John Wesley himself contrasted the ambiguity of ‘traditional evidence’, which embraced ‘so many and so various considerations that only men of a strong and clear understanding can be sensible of its full force’, with the universal validity of internal evidences which could be understood by the most unsophisticated: How plain and simple is this! and how level to the meanest capacity! Is not this the sum – ‘One thing I know: I was blind but now I see’? An argument so plain that a peasant, a woman, a child may feel its force... If then it were possible (which I conceive it is not) to shake the traditional evidence of Christianity, still he that has the internal evidence would stand firm and unshaken.

Wesley added that he was almost inclined to believe that God had allowed the current objections to be raised against the traditional evidence of Christianity ‘so that men might not rest there, but be constrained to look into themselves also, and attend to the light shining in their hearts’ (JWL, ii pp. 314−24). Wesley’s Journal for December 1755 reproduces a letter from a Methodist layman, who admitted that ‘while my busy imagination ranges through nature, books and men, I often drop into that horrible pit of Deism’. But the correspondent does not share the Deists’ belief that the world exhibits the hand of its Maker:

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Certain it is I discern nothing but beauty and wisdom in the inanimate parts of the creation. But how is the animate side of nature? It shocks me with powerful cruelty and bleeding innocence. I cannot call the earth (as Fontenelle does) ‘a great rolling globe covered over with fools’, but rather a great rolling globe covered over with slaughter-houses, where few beings can escape. but those of the butcher kind – the lion, wolf, or tiger. And as to man himself, he is undoubtedly the supreme lord, nay the uncontrollable tyrant of this globe. Yet survey him in a state of Deism, and I must pronounce him a very poor creature; he is then a kind of Jack Ketch, an executioner-general. (JWJ, iv pp. 141−43)

It can be no mere coincidence that this extract follows immediately after Wesley’s entry for 26 November 1755: ‘Being much importuned thereto, I wrote Serious Thoughts on the Earthquake at Lisbon, directed, not as I designed at first, to the small and vulgar, but the great – to the learned, rich and honourable heathens, commonly called Christians.’ Wesley’s Serious Thoughts soon ran into six editions – clear enough evidence that the Lisbon earthquake of November 1755 had alarmed the great as well as the ‘small and vulgar’. The alarm was all the more acute because in 1750 London itself had suffered two earthquakes, only four weeks apart (Kendrick, The Lisbon Earthquake, pp. 3−11). The first, on 8 February, had been sufficient to cause the collapse of a timber slaughterhouse in Southwark and to bring down chimneys in Leadenhall Street; the second, on 8 March, set the church bells ringing of their own accord and made Horace Walpole think that someone was moving about under his bed. On 16 March Thomas Sherlock, Bishop of London, published a letter to his clergy and people. ‘Little philosophers’, he said, ‘who see a little, but very little, into natural causes’ might try to explain earthquakes without reference to God; but the bishop was in no doubt that these earthquakes were an expression of God’s displeasure at the infidelity and immorality of the day. The Rev. William Stukeley, M.D., F.R.S., who read a paper to the Royal Society on the physical causes of earthquakes, also preached a sermon at St George’s, Bloomsbury, in which he invoked Scripture to show that earthquakes were God’s instruments. The fear that a third shock would follow, four weeks after the second, led to a mass exodus from London. The panic was the more remarkable since the entry for ‘earthquake’ in Ephraim Chambers’s Cyclopaedia (second edition, 1738) begins: ‘In natural history, a vehement shake of the earth; from natural causes.’ Yet, however irrational the belief, these two mild earthquakes were interpreted as a sign from heaven and filled the London churches. And, if this effect soon wore

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off, the news of the Lisbon earthquake brought back the mood of piety with a new intensity. In December 1755 George II issued a Proclamation on the subject of the ‘most dreadful and extensive Earthquake, which hath also in some Degree been felt in several Parts of Our Dominions’ and reminded Englishmen that ‘the Manifold Sins and Wickedness of these Kingdoms have most justly deserved heavy and severe Punishments from the Hand of Heaven’. A general Fast Day was ordered for 6 February 1756, and a month later Walpole wrote to Henry Seymour Conway: ‘The three taxes proposed were on plate, on bricks and tiles, on cards and dice. The earthquake has made us so good that the ministry might have burned the latter in Smithfield if they had pleased.’ (Walpole, Correspondence, xxxvii p. 445) Some twenty years later, when another earthquake tremor alarmed the Manchester area, Wesley wrote to a friend: ‘There is no divine visitation which is likely to have so general an influence upon sinners as an earthquake.’ The earthquakes of the 1750s, like the French Revolution a generation or so later, produced a wave of piety in English society – even in polite society. However rationalistic polite society might appear on the surface, there were still powerful undercurrents of what a more scientific age would regard as superstition. And Horace Walpole, who ridiculed the Londoners’ earthquake panic in the 1750s, nevertheless foreshadowed the Gothic Revival in his home at Strawberry Hill and in his Castle of Otranto. The eighteenth century, like most centuries, was a century of contradictions. The Age of Reason never quite lost its taste for the irrational, while Wesley himself managed to combine an interest in electricity with a belief in witches.

2 The Church William Bancroft, Archbishop of Canterbury from 1677 until he was suspended from office in 1691 for failing to take the oath of allegiance to William III and Mary, described the Anglican Church of his day as ‘a lily among thorns’. It was, he thought, ‘the purest certainly upon earth, as being purified from those corruptions and abuses which the lapse of times, the malice of the devil and the wickedness of men had introduced insensibly into the doctrine and worship and government of it’ (Sykes, Sheldon to Secker, p. 223). It would be difficult to apply the same superlatives to the Church of Hanoverian times. Menaced by Deism without and Unitarianism within, divided by the 1688 Revolution into jurors and nonjurors, it had been deprived of its collective voice by the suspension of Convocation in 1717. It was, moreover, wedded to a political system which retained the Test and Corporation Acts with their insistence on obligatory attendance at the Anglican communion service as a qualification for political and municipal office, yet had repealed the Occasional Conformity Act designed to prevent Dissenters from posing as Anglicans merely to gain office. It was a Church in which pluralism was rife, in defiance of Tudor legislation to curb it, and in which the bishops could be relied upon to vote solidly with the government in the House of Lords. Church offices were now the richest spoils in government patronage. This brutal fact is symbolised by the famous Bangorian controversy, which was important because it represented so flagrant a case of political jobbery that even contemporaries remarked on it. Hoadly, the non-resident Bishop of Bangor from 1715 to 1721, had preached a sermon before George I in 1717 in which he had denied the existence of a visible Church. Yet in spite of this and in spite of his failure ever to visit his Welsh diocese (though he was physically handicapped) he was translated first to Hereford, then to Salisbury and finally to Winchester. He secured for his son the Chancellorship of Winchester, seven parishes, a prebend, and the Mastership of St Cross Hospital. Only Hoadly’s lack of ‘merit’ with the Duke of Newcastle prevented him from making his son Dean of Winchester too. Dr Johnson’s remark that ‘no man for instance can now be made a bishop for his learning and piety’ is often quoted (Boswell, ii pp. 352−53). It is less often remembered that Johnson was an energetic champion of the Church of his day. His

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retort to a Presbyterian clergyman who spoke of fat bishops and drowsy deans – ‘sir, you know no more of our Church than a Hottentot’ – may perhaps be put down to his known antipathy to Scotsmen. But Johnson, like most of his contemporaries, accepted the involvement of the episcopacy in politics as an inevitable feature of Hanoverian government – much as bribery was accepted as an inescapable aspect of political life. Even though political duties and social convention kept the bishops in London for all except the summer months when Parliament was in recess, many a Hanoverian bishop earned the description later applied by Samuel Wilberforce to nineteenthcentury bishops: ‘a man in a constant state of perspiration’. Travel itself was a problem on those eighteenth-century roads so memorably described by Arthur Young – particularly for men who were past middle age. Bishop Nicolson in his diocese of Carlisle, with its four deaneries and about a hundred parishes, might well boast that his visitation ‘seldom kept him above two nights from his own bed’. But it was a different matter in the diocese of Lincoln with 1300 parishes or in that of York with 900. Yet, as Professor Sykes has shown, the number of confirmations was astonishingly large (Sykes, Church and State, pp. 122−27). Between 1768 and 1771 Archbishop Drummond confirmed 41,600 candidates in the diocese of York. In Devon in 1764 and in Cornwall in 1765, Bishop Keppel of Exeter confirmed a total of 41,642, while his successor, Ross, is credited with nearly 27,000 in 1779 alone. Such figures represent a feat of physical endurance as much as of organization. Thomas Secker, who became Archbishop of Canterbury in 1758, was a model of episcopal diligence. During his three years as Bishop of Bristol he held confirmations at fifteen centres besides Bristol itself, and when he moved to Oxford he left his successor a ‘Parochial Account of the Diocese’. As Bishop of Oxford he held three ordinations a year and arranged confirmations independently of his triennial visitation. In 1738 he noted that ‘at Bloxham I confirmed six hours without ceasing, the numbers I know not, as I had not then begun to use tickets’. And when Secker at length moved to Canterbury he held fifteen confirmation services in eighteen days. In his episcopal charge to his Oxford diocese in 1741 Secker urged his clergy to remember that frequency of communion was as important as the number of communicants. And he added the hope that ‘if afterwards you can advance from a quarterly communion to a monthly one, I make no doubt that you will’ (Williams, Eighteenth-century Constitution, p. 367). For most of the country parishes three or four communions a year remained the rule, but the number of communicants seems to have been generally high, and preparation for the Easter Communion was often taken very seriously. Dr Johnson,

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who on Good Friday 1775 attended church twice and ‘fasted so very strictly that he did not even taste bread, and took no milk with his tea’, remarked that Good Friday ‘was upon the whole very well observed even in London’ (Boswell, ii p.356). Some rural parish clergy, like Jethro Tull, doubtless showed more interest in agricultural activities than in pastoral duties, but many country livings carried a pitifully poor stipend that had somehow to be supplemented. As late as 1809 the diocesan returns estimated that there were 3,998 livings worth less than £150 a year. The curate had to be paid out of this figure. In 1730 John Wesley told his mother that he had accepted a curacy and ‘the salary of £30 a year’. It was not until 1796 that bishops were authorized to raise stipends of curates to £75. Nor were there enough livings to go round. Robert Robson, a graduate of Queen’s College, Oxford, remained a curate for thirty years and obtained a living only five years before his death. Thus if pluralism was a luxury for the higher clergy, it was often a necessity for the parish clergy. A curate would try to augment his pittance by some teaching; several parishes would have to share one vicar. The archiepiscopal visitation of the diocese of York in 1743 revealed that of 896 parishes 393 had a non-resident incumbent, and that nearly half of the 700 clergy officiating in the diocese were pluralist. Where an incumbent had to serve more than one parish, church services suffered accordingly. Out of 436 churches in London in 1741−42 only 236 were holding two services on a Sunday. More glaring abuses are undeniable. There was much competition for prebends at the larger cathedrals, since the responsibility of preaching in the cathedral twice a year carried with it an annual stipend of £300-£450. Well might Dr Edmund Pyle, who became a prebendary of Winchester in 1756, admit that ‘the life of a prebendary is a pretty easy way of dawdling away one’s time: praying, walking and visiting; and as little study as your heart would wish’ (Turberville, i p. 23). The less excusable forms of pluralism did not go uncondemned. In 1681 Archbishop Sancroft, though failing to prevent the appointment of John Sharp, rector of St Gilesin-the-Fields, to the deanery of Norwich, recorded that he had told Sharp plainly that ‘how great soever his merit might be otherwise, I could never think him fit for that dignity, till he could take up his parish of St Giles and set it down at the gates of Norwich’ (Sykes, Sheldon to Secker, p. 190). Fifty years later Edmund Gibson, Bishop of London, sketched a scheme of ecclesiastical reform that would have compelled cathedral dignitaries to be resident for a greater part of the year and would have devoted the revenues of prebends to augmenting the poorer bishoprics. He also proposed to fix the maximum distance between livings held in plurality and to require non-resident incumbents to pay their curates a higher salary. He suggested the revival

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of the Tudor institution of suffragan bishops and even recommended the wholesale redrawing of diocesan boundaries, to the extent of abolishing the sees of Rochester, Bristol and Gloucester, and creating three new dioceses of Brecknock, Southwell and Eton. In the absence of any theological colleges (the first was at Chichester in 1838) Gibson hoped that it could be arranged for the philological and philosophical studies in the universities to be finished and exercises for Bachelor to be performed in three years, the fourth to be spent wholly under a Divinity Tutor. The bishops to fix and signify to Heads of Colleges what kind and degree of knowledge they will insist on for Orders. Testimonials to express that the persons have been examined before the Head, the Dean and Tutor. (Sykes, Sheldon to Secker, p. 200)

This was too much to hope for in Hanoverian Oxford, so scathingly described by Gibbon and Johnson – or indeed in Cambridge, where Gray, as professor of history, ‘constantly intended to lecture’, but never did so. Not one of Gibson’s projected reforms was implemented. Many of his proposals had to await the advent of Sir Robert Peel, while the suffragan sees were not reestablished until 1870, when Mackenzie became Bishop of Nottingham – the first suffragan bishop to be consecrated since 1592. Gibson’s failure was due not to lack of vision or of vigour but to the strength of anticlericalism in Parliament. The 1730s saw a series of parliamentary measures relating to the payment of tithes, the conduct of proceedings in the ecclesiastical courts, the fixing of church rates, and restrictions on the acquisition of land by the Church. In 1741 Convocation, which had been suspended in 1717 as a result of the disputes aroused by the Bangorian controversy, was again summoned; but the experiment was short-lived, for the old disputes between the upper and lower Houses broke out afresh. Not until the 1850s did the government allow Convocation to sit again. It was ministerial obstruction, too, that frustrated all attempts to secure the consecration of bishops for the North American colonies. In Anne’s reign the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel had proposed a scheme for the settlement of four bishops – New Jersey, Virginia, Barbados and Jamaica – with salaries of £1,000 for the mainland bishops and £1,500 for those in the islands. At Anne’s death the project was shelved. In the 1720s Gibson suggested a more modest scheme which was to be financed partly by benefaction (including £1,000 from Gibson himself), partly from the Crown customs and partly by a temporary appropriation of one prebend from four of the cathedrals. He discounted fears that a native episcopate and clergy might stir

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up rebellion among the colonists, but the government took a more cautious view. As late as 1767 the two archbishops, Secker and Drummond, waited on Lord Shelburne, Secretary of State, to recommend ‘the appointment of Bishops in America’ but ‘could make no impression at all upon him’. The whole debate illustrates the helplessness of the bishops of the Established Church in the face of the hostility of His Majesty’s Government (Sykes, Sheldon to Secker, p. 210). The political subordination of the Hanoverian Church thus helps to explain its pastoral shortcomings. In June 1810 the Earl of Harrowby commented in Parliament on the lack of churches, particularly those places which ‘the increase of commercial and manufacturing wealth had, of late years, raised from villages to towns’. He pointed to the legal difficulties in obtaining the permission to erect an additional Anglican church within an existing parish. The following year Viscount Sidmouth referred to the fifty new churches authorised for London during Anne’s reign, of which only ten had been built. Since then the rise in population meant that 100 were now needed. Thus the parish of Marylebone, with a population of 40,000, had to be content with a village church with seats for 200. There is similar evidence from the new industrial areas (Wickham, pp. 41−48). Sheffield in the 1730s contained the parish church of Holy Trinity, the Anglican chapel of Shrewsbury Hospital, two Dissenting chapels and a small Quaker meetinghouse to cater for a population of some 14,000. The new church of St Paul’s, completed in 1721, remained empty until 1740 because the vicar and the patron of Holy Trinity could not agree on which of them had the right to present to the living. Only one more Anglican church was built in Sheffield during the eighteenth century, and it could hardly be said to cater for the poor: it cost £3,000, raised in shares of £50 each which entitled subscribers to a pew as a freehold inheritance and a family vault. Although during the last twenty-five years of the century five Dissenting chapels and a Wesleyan chapel were opened, it was not until 1821 that another Anglican church was built – by which time the population was over 60,000. In Manchester in 1815 the Rev. C. D. Wray, assistant chaplain at the Collegiate Church, complained of ‘the yearly erection of places of worship not in unison with the ecclesiastical establishment’. It was over twenty years since a new Anglican church had been built, although the population of Manchester had increased by 30,000, and although seven or eight Dissenting chapels had been built during the same period (Read, Peterloo, pp.27−28). What Sykes calls the ‘cumbrous machinery’ of the Church of England was no more able to adapt itself to the Industrial Revolution than the unreformed parliamentary system. In 1818 Parliament set up a fund of £1 million to build churches in populous

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areas. But by then it was too late: Methodism had already contrived to fill the vacuum. Yet it was not just a question of preaching in new areas of population, for the Methodists also preached in a new way. John Wesley himself contrasted the fervour of a Methodist meeting with the atmosphere of the Anglican service, while Dr Johnson admitted that ‘the established clergy did not preach plain enough; and that polished periods and glittering sentences flew over the heads of the common people, without any impression on their hearts’. He thought that ‘something might be necessary to excite the affections of the common people, who were sunk in languor and lethargy, and therefore he supposed that the new concomitants of Methodism might probably produce so desirable an effect’ (Boswell, i p.123). The implied tribute is no less impressive for being paid so grudgingly. What of the Dissenting denominations? The Dissenting Academies of the period are justly famous, but their very intellectual vigour seems to have hastened the drift of Dissenting congregations into various forms of Unitarianism. The hymns of the Dissenters Philip Doddridge and Isaac Watts played their part in the religious revival of the eighteenth century; but Joseph Priestley and Richard Price were perhaps more typical both in their Unitarianism and in their interest in the new political ideas of the age. Meanwhile English Presbyterianism declined. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, it was reckoned to account for two-thirds of the total number of Dissenters, but by the beginning of the nineteenth century it was thought to comprise barely five per cent. It is true that in 1796 there were still fifteen Presbyterian congregations in London compared with thirty-three Independent, eighteen Baptist and thirty Methodist; but in Hampshire, where there had been forty Presbyterian chapels in 1729, there were only two by 1812. English Presbyterians never adopted the pyramidal structure of the Scottish Kirk, and eighteenth-century Presbyterian congregations in England were particularly liable to drift into Unitarianism (Andrews, Unitarian Radicalism, chapter 1). Some historians have claimed that it was only the Methodist movement that saved the older dissenting bodies from extinction. In Sheffield no dissenting chapels were built between 1714 and 1774. Then came five between 1774 and 1790. It is difficult to know whether to give Methodism the credit for inspiring this spate of building – particularly as in the first half of the nineteenth century Methodism strengthened its hold on Sheffield at the expense of the older dissenting sects (Wickham, p. 47). But it seems safe to accept the verdict of recent historians of the Evangelical Revival that Dissent provided many recruits for Methodism, but few of the early and influential leaders (Cragg, Church and the Age of Reason; Bennett and Walsh, Essays in Modern

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Church History). One contribution Dissent had made, however. It had given England the mother of John Wesley. Susanna Annesley, whose father had abandoned his Anglican living to lead an independent congregation in Bishopsgate, lost her heart to the Rev. Samuel Wesley as he argued with her and at length convinced her of the reality of the Holy and Undivided Trinity.

3 The Birth of Methodism Wesley’s Oxford Edward Gibbon’s famous description of the dons of Magdalen, whose ‘days were filled by a series of uniform employments: the chapel and the hall, the coffee-house and the common room, till they retired weary and well-satisfied to a long slumber’, has too often been regarded as a definitive picture of eighteenth-century Oxford (Autobiography, pp. 131−33). It is true that the dons were Jacobite in their politics, and that in 1715 and 1716 there had been anti-Whig riots and demonstrations in Oxford. Archbishop Wake thought the government was justified in proposing to give the Crown the right to nominate to all offices in the universities and colleges for a limited period. This drastic step was never taken. Instead Robert Walpole’s ministry contented itself with the less dramatic expedient of endowing the Regius professorships of modern history at Oxford and Cambridge, and instituting the Whitehall preacherships, by which twelve chaplains from each university were appointed for a month to officiate in the King’s chapel (Green, The Young Mr. Wesley, pp. 17−26). It was the political unreliability of the university rather than the indolence of its tutors or the paucity of its scholarship that brought Hanoverian Oxford into disrepute. Although the professors were clearly reluctant to lecture – and in the absence of an examination syllabus there was little incentive for them to do so – much teaching seems to have gone on in the colleges. Wesley himself would later define the seven features of common-room life as ‘pride and peevishness, sloth and indolence, gluttony, sensuality and proverbial uselessness’; but he spoke kindly of his own Christ Church tutor, and when he himself was elected a Fellow of Lincoln in 1726 he considered that he would have been ‘little better than a highwayman’ if he had not lectured on every weekday in the week (Green, p. 99). Some of the professors did write books. Thomas Shaw was the only professor of Greek to publish anything, and that under the unlikely title of Travels and Observations relating to several parts of Barbary and the Levant (1738); and the professors of divinity were too busy as heads of colleges to publish more than the occasional sermon. But Thomas Hunt, who held the chairs of Hebrew and Arabic, published several works

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of oriental scholarship, while his Observations on several Passages in the Book of Proverbs was edited after his death by his pupil, Kennicott – himself a considerable Hebrew scholar. For thirty-eight years (1704−42) the Savilian professor of geometry was the Astronomer-Royal, Edward Halley, while his successor, Nathaniel Bliss contributed some useful observations on the satellites of Jupiter (Green, p. 40). It would evidently be misleading to regard Wesley’s Oxford, for all its political intrigues and somnolent high tables, as totally devoid of teaching or scholarship. But what of its piety? Georgian Oxford continued to enshrine the High Church traditions of Caroline England. These took the form not just of a nostalgia for divine-right theory and a reluctance to recognize the Hanoverian dynasty. They stood also for a diligent study of the writings of the Fathers of the early Church – a branch of scholarship in which seventeenth-century Oxford had excelled – and a marked hostility to such modernizing tendencies as the politicizing of the episcopate and to the socalled Latitudinarianism that was becoming so fashionable. Orthodox in theology, devoted to the liturgy of the Prayer Book, convinced of the priestly nature of the Christian ministry, High Churchmanship survived uneasily and anachronistically at Oxford, while Anglicans elsewhere faced the challenge of Deism, Unitarianism and Methodism. In his Oxford days John Wesley was himself a High Churchman. His home background, it is true, was at least in part Nonconformist: his grandfather and greatgrandfather had been ejected from their livings in 1662, and his father had at first been intended for the Dissenting ministry. Wesley’s mother was also of Nonconformist stock. John Wesley’s father, Samuel, had, however, been up at Exeter College, Oxford, during the heyday of High Anglicanism and was ordained deacon in the year of the Glorious Revolution. Henceforth he was an unbending critic of Dissent. His loyalty to the new dynasty was rewarded in 1695 by his presentation to the living of Epworth in Lincolnshire. Here he stayed for his remaining thirty-eight years, finding in his library, and in the writing and publishing of mediocre poetry, sufficient consolation for his disappointed hopes of preferment. When the rectory caught fire, Samuel Wesley was famously so busy saving his books that it was left to a neighbour to rescue the six-year-old John Wesley from the flames. At the time of the rectory fire John’s elder brother, Samuel, was already at Oxford, while his younger brother, Charles, was not yet born. John thus grew up in a predominantly female society, presided over by a dominating mother. Susanna Wesley’s influence remained strong as long as she lived – indeed long after she had died. When the two were separated, as during John’s schooldays at Charterhouse and

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the years at Oxford, the influence was wielded by letter. John conducted a lengthy exchange with his mother on the theological teaching of Thomas à Kempis and Jeremy Taylor; and in July 1725 he wrote, ‘You have much obliged me by your thoughts on Dr Taylor, especially with respect to humility, which he does not seem to me sufficiently to clear.’ This was answered by a maternal lecture on the doctrine of predestination with arguments strikingly similar to those used by Wesley in later years when preaching on the same topic (Piette, pp. 254−55). Wesley had gone from Charterhouse to Christ Church in 1720. After graduating as BA in 1724 he stayed on at Christ Church to take his master’s degree and prepare himself for ordination. He took his preparation seriously: he asked his father’s advice on the best biblical commentaries and impressed his mother by his evident solemnity. One of Wesley’s biographers (Piette) has gone so far as to claim that his ordination in 1725 was a more important milestone in his spiritual progress than his Aldersgate experience thirteen years later. Yet his reading during the six months that elapsed between his ordination and his election at Lincoln was far less narrowly theological than it later became. He found time, too, for a game of cards or royal tennis, while in the autumn of 1725 he records that he ‘played an hour at billiards’ (Green, p. 71). During this period there are indications of Wesley’s sympathy for the High Church line in politics. Although he was certainly no Jacobite, Wesley admits that at New College on 5 November 1725 he engaged in ‘evil speaking’ of Walpole, and in December, after conversing with a friend ‘against King George’, he thought it necessary to resolve not to detract ‘against the King’. This did not, however, prevent him from listening to Dr Owen preaching the annual sermon in commemoration of Charles I on 31 January 1726 (Green, pp. 77−79). The Holy Club Perhaps it was his High Church politics rather than his high-mindedness that finally persuaded the Fellows of Lincoln, after much hesitation, to elect John Wesley to a college fellowship on 17 March 1726. The Journal later described the mood in which he embarked on this new stage of his career: Removing soon after to another College [Lincoln], I executed a resolution which I was before convinced was of the utmost importance – shaking off at once all my trifling acquaintance. I began to see more and more the value of time. I applied myself closer to study. I watched more carefully against actual sins; I advised others to be religious, according to that scheme of religion by which I modelled

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my own life. (JWJ, i p. 467)

The ‘scheme of religion’ which Wesley had drawn up for himself after ordination included the setting aside of a time for meditation each Saturday evening during which he reflected on his shortcomings of the previous week. These reflections were committed to his diary, usually in cipher, and the entry for 29 January 1726 records his resolutions: to work for at least six hours every day, to rise at five o’clock every morning, never to mention God’s name ‘but in religion’, and ‘never to let sleep or company hinder me from going to prayers’ (JWD in JWJ, i p. 52). Morning and evening prayers were said daily in Lincoln College Chapel in Wesley’s day, and Holy Communion was celebrated there regularly, though not weekly. He stayed at Lincoln over Easter 1726, recording in his diary for Good Friday: ‘breach of resolution, in devotion, want of mortification, sleep, idleness, sins, flattery of Dr Hole [Rector of Exeter], lying, detraction’. He then walked home to Epworth to help his father during the summer months. When he returned to Oxford in the autumn he was elected Greek lecturer for his college. In spite of this new focus he became dissatisfied with the random nature of his reading, bitterly reproaching himself for the time he devoted to the newly published Gulliver’s Travels. In January 1727 he drew up a new scheme of studies: Roman and Greek literature and history on Mondays and Tuesdays; logic and ethics on Wednesdays; Hebrew and Aramaic on Thursdays; metaphysics and natural philosophy on Fridays; poetry and oratory on Saturdays; divinity on Sundays. And from now on he would get up even earlier. He wrote to his mother in March: ‘I am full of business, but have found a way to write without taking any time from that. ’Tis but rising an hour sooner in a morning and going into company an hour later in the evening; both of which may be done without any inconvenience.’ (JWL, i p. 43) Wesley was not yet a tutor. He accordingly felt somewhat unsettled and seems to have considered becoming a schoolmaster or accepting a country living. Instead he was given leave of absence by his college, on several occasions over the next two years, to enable him to help his aging and ailing father as his curate. In the autumn of 1729 the Rector of Lincoln summoned Wesley back into residence as a tutor. He arrived to find the Holy Club already in existence. His younger brother, Charles, had come up to Christ Church in 1726, and, as he himself engagingly admitted, ‘My first year at College I lost in diversions: the next I set myself to study.’ Application to his studies was accompanied by a more serious attitude to his devotions. As he later recorded:

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I went to the weekly sacrament and persuaded two or three young students to accompany me, and to observe the method of study prescribed by the statutes of the university. This gained me the harmless name of Methodist. In half a year my brother left his curacy at Epworth, and came to our assistance. (Green, p. 148)

With the return of John Wesley to Oxford in November 1729, the Holy Club seems to have numbered four: the two Wesley brothers, William Morgan of Christ Church, and perhaps Francis Gore of the same college. In his oft-quoted account of the origins of the Holy Club in the opening pages of his Short History of Methodism, John Wesley says that the fourth member was Bob Kirkham, but it seems unlikely that he joined before early 1730. From November 1729 the four founder-members ‘began to spend some evenings in a week together, in reading chiefly the Greek Testament’. In addition to this, John in effect became tutor to Charles and Morgan. As he later told Morgan’s father: ‘Our design was to read over the classics, which we had before read in private, on common nights, and on Sunday some book in divinity.’ (JWJ, i p. 90) Meanwhile, John reported to his mother that Kirkham had decided to give up tea at breakfast, to drink only enough ale each evening to quench his thirst and ‘to read Greek or Latin from prayers in the morning until noon and from dinner till five at night’ – resolutions that he surprisingly succeeded in keeping (JWL, i pp. 48−49). It seems to have been William Morgan who persuaded the members of the Holy Club that they ought to visit the prisoners in the castle jail. In 1729 a parliamentary committee had been set up to inquire into prison conditions, and Oglethorpe, who was later to lead the mission to Georgia, was both a member of the committee and prominent in the campaign for improving the lot of imprisoned debtors. Wesley began visiting the castle jail in 1730. The visits were later extended to the debtors’ prison known as the Bocardo, while Morgan started a school for the prisoners’ children (JWJ, viii pp. 264−67). Meanwhile, in order to be able to give more money to the poor, Wesley dispensed with the obligatory powdered wig and wore his own hair long instead. At this even his mother protested, but the only reply she got was: ‘I am certain that in so doing I am acting in conformity with the Scriptures; I am not at all sure that my long hair is contrary to it.’ (Piette, p. 280) These activities did not escape censure and ridicule – though chiefly, it seems, from the younger members of the university. Wesley had taken the precaution of getting the approval of his bishop for the prison visitations, and the Rector of Lincoln himself contributed towards the charitable work of the Holy Club. And then, in 1732, William Morgan died – with symptoms that strongly suggested religious mania. The Wesleys were blamed both for his extreme religiosity and for

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his emaciated physical condition, the result, it was claimed, of religious fasting. On hearing that these charges were widely believed, John Wesley wrote his celebrated letter to Richard Morgan senior which seems to have convinced him that his son’s death had nothing to do with the Holy Club (JWJ, i pp. 87−102). Indeed he sent his younger son, Richard, to Lincoln. Oxford was less easily convinced, and Wesley had a number of anxious interviews with the Vice-Chancellor and several heads of colleges, including his own. Yet this was the year in which John Clayton of Brasenose College became a member of the Holy Club. Clayton, himself a High Churchman, was attracted to the Club by its High Church features and by what he saw as its faithfulness to the usage of the apostolic Church. It was he who persuaded the Wesleys to observe Wednesdays and Fridays as fast days. The Holy Club prospered despite its critics. It even found a vociferous champion in the anonymous author of The Oxford Methodists, published in London in 1733, who predicted that if these young men continued as they had begun, ‘they may be the Means of reforming a vicious world; and may rejoice in the good they have done, perhaps Half a Century after most of their Social Opponents, the gay Scoffers of the present Generation, are laid low, and forgotten, as if they had never been.’ (Oxford Methodists, p. 8) But although it had survived the death of William Morgan, the Holy Club’s existence was still more seriously threatened by the illness of Samuel Wesley, who was very anxious that one of his sons should succeed him as Rector of Epworth. During his father’s illness in 1733 the family tried to persuade John to do so. Eventually, in December 1734, John wrote a long letter to his father giving his reasons for refusing the living, and concluding: ‘I am not likely to do that good anywhere, not even at Epworth, which I may do at Oxford.’ He was convinced that his duty lay wherever ‘we can most promote holiness in ourselves’ in order that ‘we can promote it in others’. Oxford, he claimed, provided the environment in which ‘I can most promote this holiness in myself’ (JWL, i pp. 166−78). Yet within the year John and Charles were on their way to Georgia. Georgia General Oglethorpe’s project for a colony in Georgia had grown out of his interest in prison reform: it would be a colony of debtors. John Wesley’s decision to accept the post of chaplain was not quite so irrevocable a step as accepting the living of Epworth would have been. He could hold the Georgian chaplaincy as well as his Lincoln fel-

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lowship simply by obtaining leave of absence from his college. The reason he gave for going to Georgia was the same as the one he had earlier given for staying at Oxford – his own spiritual well-being. ‘My chief motive,’ he wrote, ‘to which all the rest were subordinate, is the hope of securing my own soul. I hope to learn the true sense of the gospel of Christ by preaching it to the heathen.’ It seems an odd reversal of priorities. Rather romantically, Wesley expected ‘to live on water and the fruits of the earth’; and he thought that such simplicity of diet ‘will assist me – especially where I see no woman but those which are almost of a different species from me – to attain such a purity of thought as suits a candidate for that state wherein they neither marry nor are given in marriage’ (JWL, i pp. 188−91). He had reckoned without Miss Sophia Hopkey whom he met in March 1736. The entry in his Journal for 8 February 1737 carries this startling admission: ‘My heart was with Miss Sophy all the time. I longed to see her, were it but for a moment. And when I was called to take boat, it was as the sentence of death; but believing it was the call of God, I obeyed.’ Wesley did not marry Miss Sophy; he quarrelled with the people of Savannah whose minister he was; he quarrelled with Mr Dison, chaplain of the Independent congregation; and he refused to admit Miss Sophy to communion when she decided to marry someone else. Nor did he convert the Indians. He found they were by no means the noble savages he had supposed. ‘They are likewise all,’ he wrote, ‘except perhaps the Choctaws, gluttons, drunkards, thieves, dissemblers, liars. They are implacable, unmerciful; murderers of fathers, murderers of mothers, murderers of their own children . . .’ (JWJ, i p. 407). On 7 October 1737, the Journal records: I consulted my friends whether God did not call me to return to England. The reason for which I left it had now no force, there being no possibility, as yet, of instructing the Indians; neither had I, as yet, found or heard of any Indians on the continent of America who had the least desire of being instructed.

Before the end of the year, he was on his way home. Yet Wesley’s two years in America, despite the disillusionment they brought him, are not irrelevant to the development of the Methodist movement. The Oxford rules went with him to Georgia. He rose early and reserved the first hour of the morning for devotion; he read the scriptures according to the Calendar and expounded one of the lessons (usually the second) twice every day; he prayed morning and evening, following the rule of the early Church, which had been adopted by the Holy Club. He taught Greek, Hebrew, French, German, church history, canon law and even anatomy.

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He also taught himself some new subjects, and seems during his time in Georgia to have learned German, Spanish, Italian and conversational French. He compiled grammars and dictionaries, and condensed works of devotion, theology and ecclesiastical history. He wrote many of his best sermons. He composed the first hymnbook ever prepared for use in the English Church. And he perfected the Methodist organisation. As the editor of the standard edition of the Journal concludes: The circuit, the society, the itinerant ministry, the class-meeting, the band-meeting, the love-feast; leaders and lay assistants; extempore preaching and prayer; even the building of a meetinghouse – all this and much else in the form and spirit of early Methodism came to John Wesley in Georgia and was transplanted by him to English and Irish cities and villages. (JWJ, i, pp. 425−26)

But he brought back with him from Georgia something still more significant – an intensified dissatisfaction with his own spiritual state. ‘I went to America to convert the Indians; but oh, who shall convert me? who, what is he that will deliver me from this evil heart of unbelief?’ (JWJ, i p. 418). Wesley had abandoned the security of his Lincoln fellowship and was on his way to Aldersgate Street. Moravian influences On the evening of 1 February 1738, Wesley arrived in Faversham: ‘I here read prayers, and explained the Second Lesson to a few of those who were called Christians, but were indeed more savage in their behaviour than the wildest Indians I have yet met with.’ That, according to the Journal, is how Wesley spent his first evening in England after his return from Georgia. Four days later, when preaching in Westminster on the text, ‘If any man be in Christ, he is a new creature’, the Journal records: ‘I was afterwards informed many of the best people in the parish were so offended that I was not to preach there any more.’ These two entries seem to mark the beginning of his career as an itinerant preacher, but the Journal makes clear that the period leading up to his Aldersgate Street conversion was a time of great spiritual turmoil for Wesley. On 7 February 1738 – described by Wesley as ‘a day much to be remembered’ – he met a group of Moravians in London. The Moravians were a Protestant sect with roots that went back beyond the Reformation to the Hussite controversies of the fifteenth century. But the ‘Moravian Brethren’ suffered almost total eclipse during the Thirty Years War, and when revival came in the eighteenth century under the patronage of Count Zinzendorf, it was virtually a new movement. The Moravians’

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protest had always been against moral laxity rather than against Catholic theology. They held aloof from the Lutheran debate over the nature of grace and justifying faith, and instead pointed to the self-indulgent habits of many Lutherans. Luther, for his part, regarded the Moravians as ‘stiff, serious people, who looked grimly on you’, and who thought they could win salvation through good works. By the eighteenth century the Moravians had assimilated the Lutheran doctrine of justification by faith, and Zinzendorf made no attempt to provide his followers with a separate creed or system of theology. What he did seek to provide was a rigidly ordered way of life. An aristocrat and a landowner himself, he encouraged the creation of communities, like the settlement at Herrnhut on his Saxon estate, whose disciplined style of living would be a model for Christians of all churches. And when, in the early 1730s, Zinzendorf was persuaded to create a separate Moravian ministry, he prudently had himself ordained as a Lutheran pastor before accepting consecration as a Moravian bishop. Among the group Wesley met in London was the twenty-six-year-old Moravian minister Peter Böhler, who had been tutor in Zinzendorf’s household. In Oxford a few weeks later Wesley was again with Böhler, ‘by whom’, the Journal records, ‘(in the great hand of the great God) I was, on Sunday the 5th clearly convinced of unbelief, of the want of that faith whereby alone we are saved’ (JWJ, i p. 442). Wesley was so sure of his own lack of faith that he wanted to stop preaching; but Böhler showed a shrewder insight when he urged him to ‘preach faith till you have it; and because you have it, you will preach faith’. Böhler’s teaching on justification by faith seemed to Wesley to agree with the definition contained in the official Anglican homily ‘Of Salvation’ and cited in the Journal: ‘a sure trust and confidence which a man hath in God, that through the merits of Christ his sins are forgiven and he reconciled to the favour of God’ (JWJ, i p. 454). At first Wesley could not accept the idea of instantaneous conversion, but he was soon arguing in its favour with such vehemence that he shocked his brother Charles. Why was John Wesley so receptive to Moravian teaching? He had been much impressed by the courage shown on the outward voyage to Georgia by a group of Moravians who had continued singing their psalms even when heavy seas were breaking over the ship and pouring in between decks. Wesley could not but observe ‘the difference between him that feareth God and him that feareth Him not’. But he knew that he himself had been terrified by the storm, and this led him to doubt the quality of his own faith. In Savannah he questioned Professor Spangenberg, one of the leaders of the Moravian community there, about the principles of their religion, and the answers he received are reproduced in the Journal (JWJ, i pp. 372−74). The

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uneasiness, which Wesley again experienced during the Atlantic storms on the voyage home, seems to have revived in him a conviction that his own conversion was at best only partial – that he was, in the famous phrase of a later sermon, an ‘almost Christian’. He saw that he lacked the inner assurance that he knew the Moravians possessed and which Böhler now persuaded him was the crucial mark of a true ‘justifying faith’. It was in this mood that on 24 May 1738 Wesley opened his New Testament at the words ‘Thou art not far from the Kingdom of God’. At St Paul’s that afternoon he listened to the anthem ‘Out of the deep have I called unto Thee, O Lord’. The famous account in the Journal continues: In the evening I went very unwillingly to a society in Aldersgate Street where one was reading Luther’s preface to the Epistle to the Romans. About a quarter before nine, while he was describing the change which God works in the heart through faith in Christ, I felt my heart strangely warmed. I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone for salvation; and an assurance was given me that he had taken away my sins, even mine, and saved me from the law of sin and death.

It seems that Wesley had found the inner certainty for which he had been searching for so long. Yet, if his Aldersgate Street conversion gave Wesley a firm conviction in place of an agonising doubt, it did not mark a change in his theology. An emphasis on justification by faith and on the doctrine of the atonement had been characteristic of Anglican theology since the Reformation. Wesley’s own exposition of justification in The Principles of a Methodist agrees very closely with articles xi, xii and xiii of the Thirty-nine Articles. And he is careful to make clear that, although justification was by faith alone, ‘faith which brings not forth good works is not a living faith but a dead and devilish one’. And even after his Aldersgate Street experience Wesley was still capable of expressing himself in what sound like terms of disillusionment. He wrote in the Journal for 4 January 1739: ‘My works are nothing, my sufferings are nothing; I have not the fruits of the Spirit of Christ. Though I have constantly used all the means of grace for twenty years, I am not a Christian.’ This does not necessarily mean that Wesley himself minimized the significance of what had happened at Aldersgate Street. As he wrote in the preface to the second part of the Journal, published in 1740: ‘A man may have a degree of justifying faith before he is wholly freed from all doubt and fear, and before he has in the full, proper sense, a new clean heart.’ This, he claimed, was the teaching of the Moravian Church no less than that of the Church of England. Wesley was evidently satisfied that his

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conversion was real enough, and it is clear that the period of persistent psychological torment was past (JWJ i pp. 429–31). Wesley’s own organization of his societies would be much influenced by what he saw of the organization of the Moravian Church during his stay in Herrnhut. But the Moravian theology of justification also left its stamp on Methodism. It was not the notion of justification by faith that was new, so much as the tendency to look for evidence of spiritual grace in terms of an inward experience rather than the outward and visible signs of an institutionalized church. Methodism laid great emphasis on the validity of such inward experience – what might be called an Aldersgate Street awakening. In this sense, at least, Methodism was a religion of the heart rather than of the head. The first societies In the Journal for 18 September 1738 Wesley wrote: ‘I rejoiced to meet with our little society which now consisted of thirty-two persons.’ This society had been formed on 1 May at James Hutton’s house in Little Wild Street, though it soon moved to Fetter Lane. Although the setting-up of the society had been suggested by Peter Böhler, it was not a Moravian meeting; nor was it a Methodist society. It was in fact a Church of England ‘Religious Society’, many of which seem to have sprung up in London during the last two decades of the seventeenth century. In 1701 they numbered about forty in the Metropolitan area, and there were similar societies at Oxford, Cambridge, Bristol and Windsor. All these societies were in strict communion with the Church of England. They used the Book of Common Prayer at their meetings, and their members attended Holy Communion at their parish church once a month. Even before his visit to Germany in the summer of 1738, Wesley had frequently attended meetings of several such societies. On his return, we find him leading prayers for them, preaching to them, reading his ‘Account of Herrnhut’ to them, and joining with them in visiting their own sick and the condemned felons in Newgate. Wesley’s own Fetter Lane society, though modelled on the Anglican religious societies, also incorporated such Moravian features as the love feast (Wesley, Plain Account, p. 12). On New Year’s Day 1739 about sixty attended a love feast at Fetter Lane. Those present included John and Charles Wesley and George Whitefield. The Journal continues: About three in the morning, as we were continuing instant in prayer, the power of God came mightily upon us, insomuch that many cried out for exceeding joy, and

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many fell to the ground. As soon as we were recovered a little from that awe and amazement at the presence of His majesty we broke out with one voice, ‘We praise Thee, O God; we acknowledge Thee to be the Lord.’

It was 6.30 a.m. before Wesley got to bed. In A Concise Ecclesiastical History published in 1781 Wesley distinguished three stages in the rise of Methodism: The first rise of Methodism was in November 1729, when four of us met together at Oxford; the second was at Savannah in April 1736, when twenty or thirty persons met at my house; the last was in London on this day May 1 1738 when forty or fifty of us agreed to meet together every Wednesday evening in order to have free conversation, begun and ended with singing and prayer. (Piette, p. 455)

It all sounds delightfully informal. But the minute regulation of the life of the Methodist societies of the future is already foreshadowed in the rules drawn up ‘in obedience to the command of God and St James, and by the advice of Peter Böhler’. Among the points agreed on were: That we will meet together once a week to ‘confess our faults one to another, and pray for one another that we may be healed’. That the persons so meeting be divided into several bands, or little companies, none of them consisting of fewer than five or more than ten persons. That no particular member be allowed to act in anything contrary to any order of the society; and that if any persons, after being thrice admonished, do not conform thereto, they be not any longer esteemed as members. (JWJ, i pp. 458−59)

The purpose of the society was, as Wesley explained in A Plain Account of the People Called Methodists, obvious to everyone: ‘They wanted to flee from the wrath to come, and to assist each other in so doing’ (Plain Account, p. 3). The first Methodists, like the first monks, were concerned only with the salvation of their own souls. Whitefield It was George Whitefield rather than John Wesley who brought to Methodism the techniques of mass evangelism. The son of a Gloucester inn-keeper, Whitefield had come under the influence of the Wesleys while an undergraduate at Oxford between 1733 and 1736. He was invited by Wesley to go as a missionary to Georgia, though he did not set out for the colony until a week after Wesley had sailed for home. Even before he left for Georgia, Whitefield had established a London reputation as a

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preacher, and when he returned to England at the end of 1738, he devoted his preaching talents to raising funds for an orphanage in Georgia. During the first six months of 1739, while Wesley was allowed to preach only six sermons in London churches, Whitefield preached more than thirty. But the antagonism of clergy and churchwardens soon made it as difficult for him as for Wesley to find a pulpit. On 8 February 1739 he told an audience of a hundred in a large room in an inn at Basingstoke: God forbid that the word of God should be bound, because some, out of a misguided zeal deny the use of their churches. . . The more I am bid to hold my peace, the more earnestly will I lift up my voice like a trumpet, and tell the people what must be done in them before they can finally be saved by Jesus Christ. (Piette, p. 342)

Arriving at Bristol on 14 February, Whitefield (though, still only twenty-five) asked permission to preach in St Mary Redcliffe. When this was refused he turned instead to the prison, to the religious societies of the city and to the fields. On the 17th he preached in the open to a congregation of colliers on Kingswood Hill, while the next day, according to the Gentleman’s Magazine, he gathered a crowd of 20,000 people on the common. Wesley was at first doubtful about Whitefield’s methods, writing on 31 March 1739: I could scarce reconcile myself at first to this strange way of preaching in the fields, of which he set me an example on Sunday; having been all my life (till very lately) so tenacious of every point relating to decency and order that I should have thought the saving of souls almost a sin if it had not been done in a church.

On 1 April, however, it occurs to him that the Sermon on the Mount was ‘one pretty remarkable precedent of field preaching, though I suppose there were churches at that time also’. The next day Wesley records: ‘At four in the afternoon I submitted to be more vile, and proclaimed in the highways the glad tidings of salvation, speaking from a little eminence in a ground adjoining to the city, to about three thousand people.’ The same day Whitefield laid the first stone of the colliers’ new school at Kingswood (JWJ, ii pp. 167−73). Thus, by the end of 1739, the essential characteristics of the Methodist movement were already apparent. The emphasis on the theology of justification, and the appeal to an inner spiritual experience as evidence of ‘justifying faith’, the organisation into societies and bands within societies, the formulation of society rules, itinerant

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preaching in the open air, the education of the young and the encouragement of thrift and sobriety among the poor – all are to be found in the formative years of 1738 and 1739. Yet in 1740 the Fetter Lane society fell apart. While Wesley was in Bristol a Moravian, Philip Molther, persuaded members of the London society that there could be no degrees of faith, no justifying faith short of complete assurance. Until they had attained that state, aspirants should practise ‘being still before the Lord’ – which meant abstaining from communion and even from attendance at church. Wesley was recalled from Bristol to counter the Moravian arguments, but the result was a split in the society. Fewer than twenty followed Wesley when he walked out, leaving the remainder to reorganize themselves as a Moravian society. The Wesleyan group moved to the Old Foundery in Moorfields which Wesley had already acquired and adapted at a cost of £800. It now had seats for 1500, with a band-room and schoolroom behind, and Wesley’s own rooms above them. There was also accommodation for his preachers together with a coach-house and stable. On 23 July 1740 Wesley reported in his Journal: ‘Our little company met at The Foundery, instead of Fetter Lane.’ Thus the links with the Moravian movement were finally severed and Methodism acquired a distinctive identity of its own.

4 Methodism under Wesley Preaching It has been reckoned that during the last fifty years of his life Wesley travelled some 225,000 miles and preached more than 40,000 sermons – an average of about fifteen a week. And this in spite of the fact that at the age of twenty-seven he had been spitting blood. Of course, Wesley claimed that a lifetime spent in the saddle had cured his tuberculosis and improved his health generally. A mere seven years before his death he recorded in his Journal: ‘I am as strong at eighty-one as I was at twenty-one; but abundantly more healthy, being a stranger to the headache, toothache, and other bodily disorders which attended me in my youth.’ Ten years earlier he had attributed the robustness of his health to the fact that he rose daily at 4 a.m. and preached at 5 a.m., and to his ‘never travelling less, by sea or land, than four thousand five hundred miles in a year’ (JWJ, vi pp. 521, 29). That meant travelling in all weathers and at night. In November 1745 he and his horse got stuck in the dark at Wednesbury: ‘several coming with candles, I got out of the quagmire; and leaving them to disengage my horse, walked to Francis Ward’s and preached on “Fear not ye; for I know ye seek Him that was crucified”.’ (JWJ, iii p. 225) In the following February ‘the brooks were so swoln with the late rains that the common roads were impassable; but our guide, knowing the country, carried us round about through the fields, so that we escaped the dangerous waters, and soon after sunset came (wet and dirty enough) to Evesham’ (JWJ, iii p. 233). Sometimes it was frost that made the going treacherous, and on other occasions the normal hazards of the road were increased by his receiving faulty directions (JWJ, iv pp. 255, 371). Although bad weather sometimes drove him to preach indoors, at other times he continued to preach in the open air in spite of rain or, as at Plessey on 5 March 1746, in ‘a vehement storm’. In February 1751, after slipping on the ice on London Bridge, Wesley had to preach kneeling because he had sprained his ankle. This was only a few days before his marriage to Mrs Vazeille of Threadneedle Street, the widow of a London merchant. A month later he left his wife in London, while he set out on a tour of the North. ‘I cannot understand’, he wrote in his Journal, ‘how a Methodist

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preacher can answer it to God to preach one sermon or travel one day less in a married than in a single state. In this respect surely “it remaineth that they who have wives be as though they had none”.’ (JWJ, iii pp. 512−13, 517) Occasionally, even Wesley was tempted to call a halt. At Norwich on 9 March 1759 he reflected, ‘How pleasing would it be to flesh and blood to remain in this little quiet place, where we have at length weathered the storm!’ But he quickly silenced his own thoughts: ‘Nay, I am not to consult my own ease, but the advancing the kingdom of God.’ Soon after his eightieth birthday, he treated himself to a fortnight in Holland, but the nearest he usually got to a holiday was an occasional brief respite, like that recorded in the Journal for 24 September 1760: ‘I found myself a little exhausted; but a day’s rest set me up.’ Only six months before his death in 1791 he was still preaching in towns as far apart as Bristol, Portsmouth and King’s Lynn. What were Wesley’s sermons like? Although he preached extempore, they seem to have been variations on a theme that he had by heart. Sometimes a sermon was not committed to paper until some years after it was first preached. We know that he preached many times on the same text, and when Horace Walpole heard him at Bath he decided that the same sermon had been preached many times before (JWJ, v pp. 188–89). Wesley himself certainly had no hesitation about using his sermons many times over, and indeed he could hardly have maintained his preaching rate of three sermons a day without doing so. He had heard of a preacher who burned his old sermons every seven years. But Wesley tells us in the Journal for 1 September 1778: I cannot write a better sermon on the Good Steward than I did seven years ago; I cannot write a better on the Great Assize than I did twenty years ago; I cannot write a better on the Use of Money than I did nearly thirty years ago; nay, I know not that I can write a better on the Circumcision of the Heart than I did five-andforty years ago . . . Forty years ago I knew and preached every Christian doctrine which I preach now.

To modern eyes his printed sermons seem rational and low-pitched rather than passionate and rhetorical. But there is a dimension missing: we cannot recapture Wesley’s personality or the magnetism it exerted over his hearers. Perhaps it was something to do with earnestness of manner; perhaps it was something in the quality of his voice. It was certainly a remarkable voice. At Birstall in Yorkshire in April 1752 Wesley was himself surprised to find that his voice had carried ‘seven score yards from the place where I stood . . . I did not think any human voice could have reached

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so far’ (JWJ, iv p. 17). At Whitby on 20 June 1772, as soon as he began to preach they started ringing the church bells; ‘but it was lost labour, for all the people could hear, to the very skirts of the congregation’. At Chapel-en-le-Frith in May 1745, the local miller had tried to drown Wesley’s voice by opening the sluice-gates and ‘letting out the water, which fell with a great noise’. But Wesley managed to make himself heard nevertheless (JWJ, iii p. 176). He was used to interruptions. On 27 September 1739 he was preaching in Turner’s Hall, Deptford, in a room reckoned to hold 2,000 people. As he began his sermon the main beam supporting the floor broke. According to Wesley: ‘The floor immediately sunk, which occasioned much noise and confusion among the people. But, two or three days before, a man had filled the vault [below] with hogsheads of tobacco. So that the floor, after sinking a foot or two, rested upon them, and I went on without interruption.’ When he preached at Birmingham in March 1764 in what had previously been a theatre, Wesley reported that the mob ‘threw some dirt and stones at those who were going out. But it is probable they will soon be calmed, as some of them are in jail already.’ It was much the same at Derby later the same month: A multitude of people were gathered at five, and were pretty quiet till I had named my text. Then ‘the beasts of the people’ lifted up their voice, hallooing and shouting on every side. Finding it impossible to be heard, I walked softly away. An innumerable retinue followed me; but only a few pebble-stones were thrown, and no one hurt at all. (JWJ, v pp. 48−49, 53–54)

Wesley and his fellow preachers did not always escape so lightly. Charles Wesley was brutally stoned at Sheffield in 1743. In October 1740 William Seward, a Methodist preacher who had accompanied Whitefield on his first visit to Georgia, was stoned to death at Hay-on-Wye. John Nelson narrowly escaped a similar fate near York in April 1747, while, in West Cornwall in 1744, the house in which James Wheatley was staying would have been pulled down about his ears by the mob, if the mayor had not arrived to read the riot act. Charles Wesley was beset by rioters at St Ives, but was able to record in July 1743: ‘Yet the sons of violence are much checked by the Mayor, an honest Presbyterian, whom the Lord hath raised up.’ (Pearce, p. 29) But even when the authorities did not intervene to protect the Methodists, attempts at molestation often misfired. At Leicester on 31 July 1770, when Wesley was preaching in the Castle Yard, ‘a man was sent to cry “fresh salmon” at a little distance; but he might as well have spared the pains, for none took the least notice of him’. Violence was perhaps only to be expected in Ireland (JWJ, iii p. 486). Irish

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audiences were certainly very mixed. On a May morning in 1760 he preached to ‘Churchmen, Papists, Presbyterians, Cameronians’. A month later he found himself preaching mainly to Catholics, whose ‘behaviour was such as might have made many Protestants ashamed’. But Wesley had to admit that out of every hundred Catholics, ninety-nine remained loyal to the religion of their fathers (JWJ, iv pp. 388, 391). The response of audiences varied enormously from town to town, and often from time to time within the same town. At Grimsby on 10 May 1751 Wesley preached to ‘a mixed congregation, some of whom (the greater part) were exceeding serious, and some exceeding drunk’. In August 1755 he preached to ‘a sleepy congregation at Reading on “It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God”.’ Two months later he found a Bristol audience so ‘serious and attentive’ that he was able to record in the Journal: ‘No rudeness is now at Bristol.’ A similar change was noted in 1760 at Dudley, ‘formerly a den of lions’ (JWJ, iv pp. 129, 138, 370). Other audiences apparently required hell-fire sermons. At Stockton-upon-Tees on 27 June 1774 he preached ‘on a text suited to the congregation, “Where their worm dieth not, and the fire is not quenched”.’ At Bath on 23 March 1777 he decided that Justification by Faith was not ‘a profitable subject to an unawakened congregation’ and so took as his text: ‘It is appointed unto men once to die.’ Sometimes – though not as frequently as some accounts of his preaching might suggest – Wesley’s sermons produced paroxysms in his hearers. One of the earliest recorded occasions was at Bristol on 22 June 1739. A week later at Weavers’ Hall ‘seven or eight persons’, the Journal tells us, ‘were constrained to roar aloud, while the sword of the Spirit was dividing asunder “their souls and spirits, and joints and marrow”. But they were all relieved upon prayer…’ And in London nearly fifty years later: ‘The power of God came mightily upon us, and there was a general cry. But the voice of two persons prevailed over the rest, one praying, and the other shrieking as in the agonies of death.’ (JWJ, vii p. 139) It was the matter-of-fact preaching of Wesley more often than the dramatic oratory of Whitefield that gave rise to such physical effects. (Garrick is supposed to have remarked that he would ‘give a thousand pounds to be able to say “Oh!” like Mr Whitefield’.) But Wesley describes one occasion in July 1739 when Whitefield had been questioning ‘those outward signs which had so often accompanied the inward work of God’. Next day, when Whitefield was himself preaching, four members of his congregation fell to the ground: ‘One of them lay without either sense or motion; a second trembled exceedingly; the third had strong convulsions all over his body but made no noise, unless by groans; the fourth, equally convulsed, called upon God,

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with strong cries and tears.’ (JWJ, ii p. 240) And we know that on another occasion Whitefield continued preaching on the text ‘It is appointed unto men once to die, and after that the judgment’ when two deaths among his audience had already been reported to him (Knox, p. 527). Wesley’s attitude to the paroxysms that attended his own preaching was a cautious one. He saw that it was difficult to distinguish genuine manifestations of religious experience from the bogus. But that did not mean that all such manifestations were worthless. He reflects in the Journal for 25 November 1759: Let us even suppose that, in some few cases, there was a mixture of dissimulation – that persons pretended to see or feel what they did not, and imitated the cries or convulsive motions of those who were really overpowered by the Spirit of God; yet even this should not make us either deny or undervalue the real work of the Spirit.

That so many were visibly moved by his sermons was in Wesley’s view a convincing vindication of field preaching. He claimed to have done more good in preaching for three days from his father’s tomb in the churchyard, than in preaching for three years from his pulpit. And after delivering a sermon to an immense audience in Moorfields in September 1759, he asked himself what building except St Paul’s Cathedral could contain such a congregation. ‘And who can say the time for field-preaching is over while (1) greater numbers than ever attend; (2) the converting as well as convincing power of God is eminently present with them?’ (JWJ, iv p. 354). Much Methodist field preaching was done by laymen. Charles Wesley’s Journal for 16 May 1739 records: ‘At Fetter Lane a dispute arose about lay preaching. Many, particularly Bray and Fish, were very zealous for it. Mr Whitefield and I declared against it.’ John himself had doubts at first. But at the end of 1740 Thomas Maxfield was accepted as a lay preacher after Wesley’s mother had warned him: ‘John, take care what you do with respect to that young man, for he is as surely called of God to preach as you are.’ (Harrison, p.117) In 1744 Maxfield was one of four laymen co-opted by the first Methodist Conference as ‘Lay Assistants’. ‘Soul-damning clergymen’, Wesley wrote, ‘lay me under more difficulties than soul-saving laymen.’ The minutes of the twelfth Conference in 1753 listed forty-one Methodist preachers. Of these, the first group of ‘itinerant preachers’ included Anglican clergymen as well as lay preachers. These were the men who were sent out on ‘circuit’. The second group – the ‘half-itinerants’ – were laymen who had not given up their secular employment altogether, but who left their businesses from time to time to travel about preaching

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at Wesley’s direction. The third group – ‘local preachers’ – worked a full day at their normal jobs and preached at services and society meetings in their home districts. John Nelson, who described himself as ‘a wandering bird, cast out of the nest, till Mr John Wesley came to preach his first sermon in Moorfields’, began his ministry as a ‘local preacher’ in his home town of Birstall in Yorkshire. But he later turned to itinerancy. He had a hand in the founding of Methodism in the northern cities of Leeds, York, Manchester and Sheffield; and in 1767 he joined Wesley on his tour of Cornwall, when they were sometimes so hungry that they lived off blackberries picked from the hedges. Silas Todd (1711−79) had abandoned the slave trade and set up in business in London. After hearing Wesley preach he gave up his business and gathered together ‘threescore boys and six girls’ at the Foundery, where he taught them under Wesley’s guidance. After seven years, he decided that his work lay with the prisoners at Newgate, and for nearly thirty years he travelled in the cart with the condemned felons on their way to Tyburn. Among other early Methodist preachers were John Downes, whom Wesley regarded as ‘by nature full as great a genius as Sir Isaac Newton’, Thomas Olivers, author of ‘The God of Abraham Praise’, and Thomas Walsh, a carpenter’s son, who renounced Catholicism and became the Methodist ‘Apostle of Ireland’. Walsh, who was only twenty-eight when he died, was well versed in Hebrew and New Testament Greek, and Wesley paid tribute to the effectiveness of his preaching. Yet Wesley knew that preaching was not enough. ‘Fair blossoms! But how many of these will bring forth fruit?’ he wonders after preaching in Aberdeen on 3 May 1761. And throughout the Journal there are frequent reminders about the difference between blossoms and fruit. While touring South Wales in August 1763 he expresses the conviction that ‘preaching like an apostle without joining together those that are awakened and training them up in the ways of God, is only begetting children for the murderer’. In spite of twenty years of preaching in Pembrokeshire ‘nine in ten of the once-awakened are now faster asleep than ever’. And although he was pleased by the response he met with in Swansea, he had to admit that ‘as there is no society, I expect no deep or lasting work’. (JWJ, v pp. 26−27) The Methodist societies rather than Wesley’s sermons were to be the key factors in the religious revival. Organization The main unit of Methodist organization was the society while its sub-unit was the class, which normally numbered between five and twelve members under the charge

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of a class leader. The division into classes originated as a means of raising money for a meeting-hall. The Journal for 15 February 1742 describes how it was decided that each member of the Bristol society should contribute a penny a week for this purpose, that ‘the whole society should be divided into little companies or classes’ and that ‘one person in each class should receive the contribution of the rest, and bring it in to the stewards, weekly’. The class leader was required to see each person in his class at least once a week, ‘to advise, reprove, comfort or exhort, as occasion may require’, and to receive not only the penny subscription towards the cost of the meetinghouse but also whatever the class members were willing to give ‘toward the relief of the poor’. Terms of membership were rigorous enough. There was strict segregation of male and female, married and unmarried, and, in addition to the searching questions asked of everyone before admission, the following were asked at every meeting: 1. What known sin have you committed since our last meeting? 2. What temptations have you met with ? 3. How were you delivered? 4. What have you thought, said or done, of which you doubt whether it be sin or not? 5. Have you nothing you desire to keep secret?

These questions were included in the rules of the earliest societies (Piette, p. 459). A new set of rules was drawn up in 1744 (Works, viii p. 273). The society regulations invaded every department of life. There were explicit instructions on food and clothing: ‘Take no more food than nature requires’; ‘sleep early and rise early’; ‘let your apparel be as clean as your situation in life will allow’ and ‘cheap, not expensive, far cheaper than others in your circumstances wear’. Wesley added personal recommendations: ‘I do not advise women to wear rings, ear-rings, necklaces, laces, or ruffles. . . Neither do I advise men to wear coloured waistcoats, shining stockings, glittering or costly buckles or buttons, either on their coats or in their sleeves.’ ‘Let an Englishman dress like other Englishmen, not like a Turk or a Tartar. . .’ Travelling preachers were warned to ‘converse sparingly and cautiously with women, particularly with young women’. They must avoid ‘clownishness either in speech or dress’; they must ‘wear no slouched hat’; they must abstain from ‘spirituous liquors’ but might ‘take a little lemonade after preaching’ (Wearmouth, Common People, pp. 242−47). It seems that these rigid rules were often rigidly enforced. Early in 1743 the

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Newcastle society excluded sixty-four members, and at Bristol five years later 170 were removed from the roll because they refused to attend the weekly fellowship meeting. At Nottingham in 1746 Wesley found that ‘so many of the society were either triflers or disorderly walkers that the blessing of God could not rest upon them; so I made short work, cutting off all such at a stroke, and leaving only that little handful who (as far as could be judged) were really in earnest to save their souls’ (JWJ, iii pp. 71, 380, 237). Discipline was indeed maintained only by constant visitation. It is true that when Wesley examined the Sheffield society in 1755 he was ‘agreeably surprised to find that though none had visited them since I did it myself two years ago, yet they were rather increased than diminished in number’. But the Journal abounds in less flattering reports. At Launceston in 1760 he found ‘the small remains of a dead scattered society; and no wonder, as they have scarce any discipline, and only one sermon in a fortnight’; while at Cardiff in 1763 he found ‘the society in as ruinous a condition as the Castle’ (JWJ, iv pp. 122, 406; v p. 28). Hearing that ‘through the ill conduct of the preachers, things were in much disorder at Colchester’, Wesley travelled down from London in January 1782 and found that ‘part of the class-leaders were dead, and the rest had left the society; the bands were totally dissolved; morning preaching was given up; and hardly any, except on Sunday, attended the evening preaching’ (JWJ, vi p. 342). It is not surprising that Wesley felt that he ought to try to visit all the societies once a year. In spite of the principles of devolution and decentralization apparently embodied in its structure, the Methodist system of church government was scarcely democratic. In January 1790 Wesley wrote to John Mason: ‘As long as I live, the people shall have no share in choosing either Stewards or Leaders among the Methodists. We have not, and never had, any such custom. We are no republicans and never intend to be. . .’ (Taylor, p. 44). Methodist preachers were not to write books without Wesley’s permission, and any books that were so authorized had to be printed at Wesley’s press and sold by his booksellers; nor were itinerant preachers, after 1768, allowed to keep on their own jobs in addition to their preaching. And Wesley insisted that the Methodist Conference, not the individual congregations, had the power to decide who was to preach in Methodist chapels. Nor was the structure of the Conference itself particularly democratic. Wesley defined the Conference as ‘those preachers whom I invite to confer with me’. They did not desire the meeting [he explained], but I did, knowing that in the multitude of counsellors there is safety. But I sent for them to advise, not to govern

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me. Neither did I at any of those times divest myself of any part of that power which the Providence of God cast upon me without any desire or design of mine. (Southey, ii p. 71)

The first Conference, held in London in 1744, was attended by John and Charles Wesley and four other Anglican clergymen. At the fourth Conference in 1747, discussion had ranged from justifying faith and the ‘right of private judgment’ to field preaching and the possibility of schism. The question of Methodism’s relationship to the Established Church was frequently raised. At Leeds in 1755 Wesley ‘desired all the preachers to speak their minds at large’ on whether they ought to separate from the Anglican Church. ‘On the third day,’ Wesley reports, ‘we were all fully agreed in that general conclusion – that (whether it was lawful or not) it was in no ways expedient.’ (JWJ, iv p.115) The question reappeared on the agenda in 1756, 1761 and 1778. Wesley’s injunction to his itinerant preachers was to ‘go always not only to those who want you, but to those who want you most’. There was little need to compete with the Established Church when so many areas of England were inadequately served by its ministers. Where there was a parish church in a Methodist area, Wesley arranged his society meetings so as not to coincide with the times of the church services. At Bradford-on-Avon on 27 September 1759 he was supposed to preach at 7 p.m. ‘But when I came I found Mr Hart was to preach at six. So I delayed till the church service was ended, that there might not appear (at least on my part) even the shadow of opposition between us’. And in 1761, on one of his frequent visits to Norwich, Wesley records: ‘I met the society in the morning, and many of them went with me to the cathedral.’ The Methodist services that day were held at 2 and 5 o’clock (JWJ, iv p. 431). Protestations of loyalty to the Anglican Church were numerous and constant. At the first Conference in 1744 he expressed the belief that even after his death the majority of Methodists would remain within the Church ‘unless they are thrust out’. And as late as 1783 he could still assert: ‘If ever the Methodists in general leave the Church, I must leave them.’ Yet that same year the independence of the American colonies was formally recognized. The severing of the colonists’ links with the mother country was the cue for the severing of links between the Methodists and their mother church. By the end of the war there were only twenty-eight Anglican clergy in the American colonies. Yet in spite of Bishop Gibson’s earlier attempts to provide for the American mission field, Wesley was unable to persuade the Bishop of London to ordain Methodist preachers for service in America. And so he ordained them himself. The dramatic step is described in the Journal with stark brevity: ‘Being now clear in

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my own mind, I took a step which I had long weighed in my mind, and appointed Mr Whatcoat and Mr Vasey to go and serve the desolate sheep in America.’ The next day he ordained Dr Coke ‘as a Superintendent, by the imposition of my hands, and prayer (being assisted by other ordained ministers)’ (JWD in JWJ, vii p. 15). But Dr Coke was already in Anglican orders. Did Wesley think he was making him a bishop? Certainly not in the Anglican sense, and he would object to American Methodists’ later use of the title of bishop (Rack, pp.509−11). It is clear that Wesley had come to the conclusion that in apostolic times there had been no difference in function between bishop and presbyter, so that every ordained minister had the power to ordain others. He also seems to have been influenced by the indisputable fact that the Church of England was no longer the established church in America. And what was true of Jeffersonian America was equally true of Presbyterian Scotland. That was why the ministers Wesley subsequently ordained for Scotland were not to exercise their ministerial functions or wear clerical attire when they crossed the border into England. They were what Ronald Knox called ‘Gretna Green ordinations’ which, unlike Gretna Green marriages, had no validity south of the Tweed (Knox, p. 511). But although Wesley might assert that ‘whatever then is done either in America or Scotland is no separation from the Church of England’, he must have known that a precedent had been set and that it would be applied to all Methodists everywhere. At the 1785 Conference, when Charles Wesley protested against his brother’s action, John not only expounded his view of the presbyter’s function, but also explained why he objected to making a further appeal to the English bishops: As our American brethren are now totally disentangled both from the State and from the English Hierarchy, we dare not entangle them again, either with the one or the other. They are now at full liberty simply to follow the Scriptures and the primitive Church. And we judge it best that they should stand fast in that liberty wherewith God has so strangely made them free. (JWJ, vii 17n)

In other words, the American Methodists were no longer members of the Church of England and their witness would therefore be all the more effective. That was the language of Dissent. But even if the issue of ordination had not arisen, it seems unlikely that the Methodists would have remained within the established church for long. It was all very well for Wsley to remark on 19 January 1783: ‘The tide is now turned; so that I have more invitations to preach in churches than I can accept of.’ For the ordinary Methodist the strain of attending society meetings in addition to Anglican services

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was too great; and not all the itinerant preachers had Wesley’s stamina. Although the Methodist movement long hovered, in Halévy’s phrase, ‘on the borders of Church and Dissent’, after 1784 the drift into Nonconformity gathered speed. Philanthropy When John Jane, an itinerant preacher, died of a fever contracted in his journeyings, leaving exactly sixteen pence to his executors, Wesley’s comment was that it was ‘enough for any unmarried preacher of the Gospel to leave’ (JWJ, iii p. 494). He would doubtless have been gratified by the report in the Leeds Intelligencer for 16 August 1791, which concluded that ‘Mr Wesley’s real worth is demonstrated by nothing more convincingly than by his dying . . . worth nothing’. Methodist philanthropy was a personal philanthropy and thus much less conspicuous than the large-scale philanthropic enterprises of the age. This was the century that saw the foundation of many of the principal London hospitals. The bequest of a fortunate South Sea speculator resulted in the founding of Guy’s in 1724. Westminster, St George’s, London and Middlesex were founded between 1719 and 1746 by public subscription, the Foundling Hospital in 1739, St Luke’s Hospital for Lunatics in 1751 and the Royal Dispensary in 1777. It was also the century of the charity school movement. Many of these schools were sponsored by the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge founded in 1699. Between 1697 and 1712, over 100 new charity schools were founded in London alone (Jones, chapters 1 and 2). The philanthropic impulse was slower to make its impact in the field of poor relief. Poverty was still too often regarded as the product of economic necessity or indolence, or a combination of both, and in any case an expression of the divine will. The trend of eighteenth-century legislation in this respect is epitomized by Fielding’s remark in his Proposal for making an Effectual Provision for the Poor (1753): ‘The sufferings of the poor are indeed less observed than their misdeeds. . . They starve and freeze and rot among themselves, but they beg and steal and rob among their betters’ (Turberville, i p. 305). Methodist teaching sought to bring about a change of emphasis. Wesley denounced as ‘wickedly, devilishly false’ the contention that poverty was the fruit of idleness. The real cause of poverty was the inequitable distribution of the fruits of industry, and the remedies were these: let everyone avoid luxuries; let everyone work; provide employment for all. Methodists were to learn that God was ‘the sole proprietor of all things’. After providing for the necessities of life, Methodists must give not one tenth, nor one half, ‘no, nor three fourths, but all!’ Those who failed

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to do so, argued Wesley, were ‘not only robbing God, continually embezzling and wasting their Lord’s goods, and by that very means corrupting their own souls, but also robbing the poor, the hungry, the naked; wronging the widow and the fatherless; and making themselves accountable for all the want, affliction and distress which they may but do not remove’ (Warner, p. 210). Parents were warned not to ‘seek riches for your children by their marriage’ for to call such a union a ‘good match’ was ‘by parity of reason’ to ‘call hell a good lodging’ (Works, vii p. 85). The aim was thus to inspire a philanthropic disposition in the individual Methodist. There were, however, also some corporate ventures. Collections for poor relief were taken up in Methodist classes, and in London in 1740 a small group of poor people were employed for about four months on carding and spinning cotton. Six years later a loan fund was established from which deserving persons could borrow up to 20 shillings, and this was later enlarged until in 1772 the borrowing limit was set at £5 (Warner, p. 219). In 1741 a group of volunteers in London had joined with Wesley in regular visitation of the sick, and the minutes of the 1748 Conference directed class leaders to report every sick person weekly to the preacher and also to notify the regular visitor (JWJ, ii pp. 453−54). At Bristol in March 1790 Wesley commented on the Strangers’ Friend Society recently instituted ‘wholly for the relief, not of our society, but for poor, sick, friendless strangers’. He could not remember having come across such an institution ‘till within a few years ago’. This, too, he concluded, ‘is one of the fruits of Methodism’ (JWJ, viii p. 49). The Manchester Strangers’ Friend Society, founded in 1791, was reported to have received £3,000 in subscriptions within three weeks of its formation, and in one year 1,678 families were relieved and over 4,000 visits made. By 1800 most of the large towns supported a similar society, and in 1798 the Methodist Magazine claimed as one of the society’s features that ‘Protestants, Roman Catholics, Strangers and Foreigners have an equal right to be relieved by it’. That Methodists were themselves expressly excluded from the benefits of the Strangers’ Friend Society is borne out by an early nineteenth-century historian of Liverpool. Writing of the city’s Strangers’ Friend Society, which had ‘originated among the Methodists of the town’ and was ‘in great measure supported by them’, he recorded: ‘It included the wretched of every religious persuasion except their own, who are relieved from another fund. The only recommendation is distress’ (Edwards, After Wesley, p. 118). The Methodist preacher was often an amateur physician as well. Wesley’s Primitive Physick, published in 1747, ran through twenty-three editions by 1828. It prescribed homemade remedies for the treatment of 288 specific ailments. Wesley’s own account

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of how he started to provide medical treatment for members of the Methodist societies is suitably diffident. But he made some dramatic claims for the therapeutic properties of electricity. The Westminster Journal in 1772 carried this notice: We are assured that Mr Wesley has procured an Electrical Machine at the Foundery near Moorfields, where any person may be electrified gratis, from nine to twelve every day except Saturdays and Sundays. . . Mr Wesley says that Electrifying in a proper manner cures St Anthony’s Fire, Gouts, Headaches, Inflammations, Lameness, Palpitations of the Heart, Palsy, Rheumatisms, Sprain, Wan, Toothache, sore Throat and Swellings of all sorts.

Wesley’s Desideratum or Electricity Made Plain and Useful was published in 1759. It was not an original work: like so many books in that encyclopaedic age, it was a compendium of what was already known. The aim, Wesley explained, was to ‘specify several disorders, wherein electrification has been found eminently useful, and then subjoin a few particular instances’ (Desideratum, p. 42). Most of the examples were taken from the writings of Dr Richard Lovett’s Subtil Medium: or the Wonderful power of Nature (1756). But Wesley’s treatise was at least up to date, and it ended with an appeal to medical opinion of the day to keep an open mind on the subject of electricity: ‘Let every candid man . . . for two or three weeks (at least) try it himself in the above-named disorders. And then his own senses will show him whether it is a mere plaything, or the noblest medicine yet known in the world’ (Desideratum, pp. 71−72). The Methodists were perhaps more advanced in their approach to medicine than they were in their attitude to slavery. In 1760 Wesley baptised a slave-holder and two of his slaves without recording any protest. Whitefield’s zeal for the prosperity of his orphanage in Georgia had prompted him in 1748 to use his influence to promote the introduction of slavery into a colony where it had previously been prohibited. Yet Wesley’s Thoughts upon Slavery (1774) if anything exaggerated the harshness of the slave-owners, and called on them to do away with ‘all whips, all chains and all compulsion’. The book sold well and resulted in the decision of the American Methodist Conference in 1790 to regard every person holding slaves as acting contrary to the laws of God and man. Wesley did not indeed call on the British government to legislate against the slave trade, but nor did he expect the government to legislate on public morals. He did write a letter of encouragement to the Committee for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, formed in 1787, and when the abolitionist movement got under way, the Arminian Magazine supported the campaign. Wilberforce knew Charles Wesley better than he did John, but the famous letter to Wilberforce (24

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February 1791) was almost the last letter that John Wesley wrote: ‘Go on, in the name of God and in the power of His might, till even American slavery (the vilest that ever saw the sun) shall vanish away before it.’ And when, in 1806, Wilberforce looked like losing his seat at York, it was the Methodists who rallied round and helped to secure his re-election (Edwards, After Wesley, p. 66). In much the same way, though the Methodists did not take the initiative in campaigning for prison reform, they gave enthusiastic support to General Oglethorpe’s work in Georgia and John Howard’s work at home. The official rules of the Methodist societies, which became standard after 1743, made ‘visiting or helping them that are . . . in prison’ one of the conditions of membership. Sermons were preached to raise funds for poor debtors (more than half the prison population, according to Howard’s findings in 1776), but in general, the relief of prisoners was left to individual and local initiative – which means that, like so much Methodist philanthropy, it has not found its way into the history books. Education The Methodists made a practical contribution to education in three distinct ways: through day schools, Sunday schools and the dissemination of educative literature. Kingswood School, the Methodist independent school of today, was established with the approval of the Methodist Conference in 1748. It was distinct from the school founded among the colliers of Kingswood in 1739, during Wesley’s partnership with Whitefield (JWJ, ii pp.322−3). The boarding school opened by Wesley in 1749 had more ambitious aims. Wesley knew something of the famous public schools of the day. He himself had been at Charterhouse, while his brothers had been at Westminster – where discipline was notoriously lax. Wesley identified three defects. Such schools were usually placed in ‘great towns’; there was no systematic selection (with the result that many parents had no more religion than their ungodly offspring) while the schoolmasters had no more religion than their scholars, and so did not care (Wesley claimed) whether their pupils were Papists or Protestants, Christians or Moslems (Ives, Kingswood School, pp. 6−7). Wesley was determined to ‘have a Christian school or none at all’. No pupils were to be admitted after the age of 12, since beyond that age there could be no guarantee that the child was not already ‘rooted in bad habits or bad principles’. Parents must be such as desired their sons ‘should not be almost but altogether Christians’. There were to be no holidays, since ‘he that plays when he is a child will play when he is

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a man’. In addition to reading, writing and arithmetic, the curriculum drawn up by Wesley lists: English, French, Latin, Greek, Hebrew; history, geography, chronology; rhetoric, logic, ethics; geometry and algebra, physics and music. (Wesley, ‘A short account of the school in Kingswood’, in Ives, pp. 11−18). In spite of its demanding curriculum and disciplinary restrictions there was no shortage of applicants. Under Wesley’s care the school fulfilled the additional function of providing an education for the sons of his itinerant assistants, since they could not hope to offer their families a settled home. Thirty years later, when he paid one of his frequent visits to the school, Wesley considered that ‘the grievance now is the number of children’. Instead of the thirty originally envisaged, there were nearly fifty ‘whereby our masters are burdened’. Discipline was also a problem since it was scarcely possible ‘to keep them in so exact order as we might do a smaller number’. In spite of this, Wesley nevertheless thought that ‘this still comes nearer a Christian school than any I know in the kingdom’ (JWJ, v pp.340−41). There was much of his mother in Wesley’s approach to the education of children. Susanna Wesley insisted ‘upon conquering the will of children betimes because this is the only strong and rational foundation of a religious education without which both precept and example will be ineffectual’ (Harrison, Son to Susanna, p. 17). It was twenty years after Wesley’s death before Conference decided that the boys might visit their parents once a year during the month of September – though this was soon extended to a vacation of two months every two years (Edwards, After Wesley, p. 100). Wesley’s rules for his school at the Foundery in London, where sixty children were taught by two schoolmasters, included the provision that ‘they have no playdays’, that ‘no child is to speak in school, but to the masters’, and that ‘the child who misses two days in one week, without leave, is excluded the school’ (Wesley, Plain account, p.21). But despite their rigour and lack of resemblance to the precepts of Rousseau, these schools fulfilled a useful function. And there were in addition many charity schools maintained by individual Methodist societies. West Street Chapel, London, for instance, had at one time as many as 140 pupils (Warner, p. 227). As early as 1769 a Methodist woman at High Wycombe was providing a regular Sunday school for the children of the neighbourhood. But the chief credit for the Sunday school movement lay outside Methodism; indeed, official Methodism was slow to appreciate its importance. The real pioneer was Robert Raikes, editor of the Gloucester Journal, who opened his first Sunday school in 1780. The Evangelical clergy were quick to take up the idea, but there is more than a note of surprise in the entry in Wesley’s Journal on 18 July 1784: ‘I find these schools springing up wherever

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I go; perhaps God may have a deeper end therein than men are aware of.’ It was not until 1837 that the Methodist Conference declared that every chapel should have a Sunday school (After Wesley, p. 107). Wesley was nevertheless a great educator in a wider sense. His treatises on medicine and electricity were serious attempts to popularise recent developments in the physical sciences, and he even went so far as to publish a three-volume Compendium of Natural Philosophy. Besides his scientific works, Wesley produced his own editions of Locke, Spenser and Shakespeare in the Christian Library. This project, which eventually ran to fifty duodecimo volumes, began as a means of providing his preachers with essential theological reading. In the 1740s Wesley had already submitted to Blackwell a scheme for eighty or a hundred volumes ‘on a fine paper and large letter . . . cast for the purpose; selected, abridged, corrected, where necessary explained, from the most valuable stores of English theology’ (JWJ, iii p. 354n). In 1749 he was abridging Dr Cave’s Primitive Christianity: ‘Oh what pity that so great piety and learning should be accompanied with so little judgment!’ Later the same year he translated a life of Martin Luther, and the following year he records how he ‘set upon cleansing Augeas’s stable, upon purging that huge work, Mr Fox’s Acts and Monuments, from all the trash which that honest, injudicious writer has heaped together, and mingled with those venerable records which are worthy to be had in everlasting remembrance’ (JWJ, iii pp.392, 409, 507). And the Conference minutes of 1770 complained that ‘the societies are not half-supplied with books; not even with Kempis, Instructions for Children and Primitive Physick, which ought to be in every house’ (Warner, p. 231). The volumes of the Christian Library were expurgated editions. From the religious writings were excised most of the references to predestination; from the philosophical writings were removed any phrases that supported the notion of innate ideas; while Wesley’s treatment of Shakespeare foreshadowed Dr Bowdler’s more drastic surgery of a generation later. Yet the expurgated editions of Wesley and Bowdler may have done more to revive interest in Shakespeare and create a reading public than the higher literary criticism of Johnson and Coleridge. Every Methodist preacher was expected to act as a book agent, and subscriptions, were collected in order to establish local libraries for general use. The income from these publications would have made Wesley a rich man if he had not devoted all the profits to the relief of preachers and the extension of preaching. It is difficult to calculate the impact of all this literature on the individual Methodist; but its very variety is a reminder that Methodism preached a gospel not only of personal salvation, but also of self-improvement and self-help.

5 Divergences and Distinctions Reason and Revelation John Wesley’s interest in medicine, electricity and natural history, and the importance he evidently attached to his role as an educator, are clear enough proof that he was not so much at variance with the rational spirit of the eighteenth century as is sometimes supposed. His treatise on electricity was chiefly concerned with the therapeutic effects of electric shocks, but the first half of the pamphlet was devoted to electricity as a phenomenon. The treatise claimed to be based on experimental evidence, and the first chapter begins: ‘From a thousand experiments it appears that there is a fluid far more subtle than air, which is every where diffused thro’ all space which surrounds the earth and pervades every part of it.’ Wesley then goes on to describe Musschenbroek’s Leyden jar and gives a detailed description of an experiment involving a dry bottle, an iron shot, a cork ball on a silken thread and a sharp bodkin. He adds that if anyone thinks that electricity passes only along the surface rather than through the substance of bodies, ‘a strong shock taken thro’ his own body will prevent his doubting any longer’. He describes Franklin’s kite experiment in detail and calls it a ‘demonstration that the electric fire thereby obtain’d is the very same with that of lightning’ (Desideratum, pp. 3, 11−16, 29). The same emphasis on experimental evidence is found in Wesley’s Primitive Physick, which he intended as a challenge to those ‘philosophical men’ who had made medicine abstruse because they ‘set experience aside ... to form theories of diseases and their cure and to substitute these in place of experiments’. Like his other scientific works, it was a compendium of other people’s experiments and experience. But Wesley saw more clearly than many of his contemporaries that merely to collect was not enough. In November 1748 he had spent an hour in the Apothecaries’ Garden at Chelsea. ‘It would be a noble improvement of the design’, he reflects, ‘if some able and industrious person were to make a full and accurate inquiry into the use and virtue of all these plants. Without this, what end does the heaping them thus together answer, but the gratifying an idle curiosity?’ (JWJ, iii p. 381) And in December 1780 a visit to the British Museum prompted similar reflections:

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What an immense field is here for curiosity to range in! . . . Seven huge apartments are filled with curious books, five with manuscripts, two with fossils of all sorts, and the rest with various animals. But what account will a man give to the Judge of quick and dead for a life spent in collecting all these? (JWJ, vi p. 301)

Thus it is no surprise to find that Wesley’s Compendium of Natural Philosophy had a dual purpose: its alternative title was A Survey of the Wisdom of God in the Creation. Yet, although Wesley doubtless intended the book as a demonstration of the working-out of God’s purposes, the approach is that of the natural philosopher rather than of the theologian. In his introduction to the three-volume work Wesley pays tribute – just as the editors of the French Encyclopédie had done in their prospectus – to the example of Francis Bacon ‘who, well understanding the defects of the school-philosophy, incited all lovers of natural philosophy to a diligent search into natural history. And he himself led the way, by many experiments and observations’ (Compendium, i p. 10). Much of the Compendium consists of verbatim extracts from the works of John Ray, FRS (1628−1705), and from those of eighteenth-century writers intent on popularizing the scientific discoveries of the seventeenth century. In particular, stress is laid on the way in which the microscope had revolutionized the study of natural history. Wesley gives (or quotes) a minute description of a louse, beginning: ‘A louse also affords to our observation a very delicate structure of parts’; and the ant, he tells us, ‘examined by the microscope appears a very beautiful creature’ (Compendium, i pp. 190, 206). Occasionally Wesley permits himself a moral gloss or scriptural allusion. He observes that although ‘almost all birds produce their young by incubation, yet the Scripture gives us one exception. The ostrich leaveth her eggs in the earth and forgetteth the foot may crush them – because God hath deprived her of wisdom, neither hath he imparted to her understanding. Job xxxix. 14. etc.’ He also comments that ‘the God of Nature seems to have formed the sloth to represent to us in a strong light that odious and despicable vice from which it takes its name’. On the other hand there are no theological overtones in his remark that ‘there is a great deal of geometrical nicety in the sinuous motion of serpents’ (Compendium, i pp. 140, 116). Later sections of Wesley’s Compendium of Natural Philosophy contain detailed accounts of the eruptions of Etna in 1755 and Vesuvius in 1754 and 1760; there is also a description of meteors and the not very plausible suggestion that ‘falling stars’ may be produced by ‘what is vulgarly termed electricity’ (Compendium, ii p. 100). And in an appendix Wesley adds miscellaneous pieces of additional information such as the following:

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The blood of tortoises is colder than any common spring water. That Death Watch [beetles] do woo one another, but not always, we may learn from the account of an accurate observer. There is very little difference between the bottom of the Adriatic Sea and the surface of the neighbouring countries. (Compendium, iii pp. 52−64, 136)

Well might Wesley introduce these additional facts as ‘not a system of Natural Philosophy, but barely a Collection of Philosophical Experiments and Observations’. But in another appendix Wesley attempts to relate the factual content of the Compendium to philosophical and theological principles. Much of what he says is in accordance with John Locke’s psychology of sensation as set forth in the famous Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690). For Wesley, as for Locke, ‘our senses are the only source of those ideas upon which all our knowledge is founded’. For Wesley, as for Locke, innate ideas are a fiction: ‘Properly speaking we have no Idea of God. We come to our Knowledge of his very Existence, not from any Idea of him, but from our Reasoning upon the works of the visible Creation.’ Again, according to Wesley, ‘Evangelical Faith is no precarious or implicit Assent, but founded on the utmost Evidence we are capable of receiving, for a Truth of that Nature.’ (Compendium, ii pp. 204−7, 222) Thus for Wesley the Evangelical Faith, the religion of the heart, so many manifestations of which are described in the pages of the Journal, was also the religion of experience. The appeal to the individual’s conviction of sin and awareness of salvation was not, in Wesley’s eyes, a repudiation of reason: it was an appeal to a different kind of evidence, but to empirical and experiential evidence nevertheless. Wesley claimed to have given in his Compendium ‘as short and plain an account as I could of all that is certain in Natural Philosophy’. But there was much that was not certain, and twelve pages of one of the appendices to the Compendium are devoted to unanswered questions about the universe. Reason had its limitations: it was incomplete without Revelation – and yet Revelation could not be divorced from Reason. ‘I believe and reason, too’, Wesley wrote in 1745, ‘for I find no inconsistency between them. And I would as soon put out my eyes to serve my faith as lay aside my reason.’ But the Compendium was not the book that Methodist preachers carried with them as they set out to convert England. Natural philosophy might be a proper sphere for the exercise of Reason, but Revelation was to be sought in Scripture. In A Plain Account of Christian Perfection (1766), Wesley pointed to the year 1729 as the time when he ‘began not only to read, but to study the Bible, as the one, the only standard

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of truth, and the only model of pure religion’ (Wood, pp. 212−13). In the preface to his published sermons Wesley expressed the wish to be homo unius libri – a man of one book. He claimed to have tried in his sermons ‘to describe the true, the scriptural, experimental religion, so as to omit nothing which is a real part thereof, and to add nothing thereto which is not’ (Sermons on Several Occasions). In Dundee in 1766 he could be found admitting proudly that he was ‘a Bible-bigot’, and in the same year he wrote to John Newton that he had told the Moravians: ‘The Bible is my standard of language as well as sentiment. I endeavour not only to think but to speak as the oracles of God.’ (JWJ, v p. 169; JWL, v p. 8) Wesley’s respect for the very language of the Bible doubtless derived from his conviction that the words of Scripture were the words of the Holy Spirit. Those words had to be accepted or rejected in toto. As he wrote in the Journal on 24 July 1776: ‘Nay, if there be any mistakes in the Bible, there may as well be a thousand. If there be one falsehood in that book, it did not come from the God of truth.’ And Wesley would not abandon his belief in witches, since there seemed to be clear biblical evidence of their existence (JWJ, v pp.265−6). What about problems of interpretation? Scripture was to be its own interpreter. ‘The general rule of interpreting Scripture is this’, he wrote to Samuel Furly in 1755: ‘the literal sense of every text is to be taken, if it be not contrary to some other texts; but in that case the obscure text is to be interpreted by those which speak more plainly.’ And if doubts remained, the individual was to judge. ‘I must still insist on the right of private judgment’, wrote Wesley in the Journal on 7 June 1746. ‘I dare call no man Rabbi. I cannot yield either implicit faith or obedience to any man or number of men under heaven.’ This was Lutheran language. Well might Wesley in his letter to the Westminster Journal in January 1761 deny that Methodism was a new discovery in religion: ‘We pretend no such thing. We aver that it is the one old religion; as old as the Reformation, as old as Christianity, as old as Moses, as old as Adam.’ Wesley’s ‘Bible Christianity’ stood squarely in the Protestant tradition. Calvinists and Arminians Wesley’s gospel was a gospel of conversion, but what kind of conversion was it? Was it an instantaneous change or was it a gradual growing towards God? The question had tormented Wesley in the days immediately after his return from Georgia when he sought spiritual guidance from Peter Böhler and the Moravians. Methodists have usually regarded Wesley’s Aldersgate Street experience as an example of instantaneous conversion; but the earlier devotional experience of the Holy Club was not entirely

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effaced by what happened at Aldersgate Street. In his Oxford days Wesley had been much influenced by William Law’s Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life (1728). For Law, and for the members of the Holy Club, ‘a devout and holy life’ was marked by works of charity in the world as much as by worship in church. And for all his later emphasis on justifying faith, Wesley never abandoned this insistence on the importance of Christian behaviour. Indeed the whole apparatus of Methodist organization was directed towards ensuring that the newly converted brought forth fruits worthy of repentance. Yet Wesley preached ‘justification by faith alone’. As he wrote in the Journal for 22 June 1740: After we had wandered many years in the new path of salvation by faith and works, about two years ago it pleased God to show us the old way of salvation by faith only. And many soon tasted of this salvation, ‘being justified freely, having peace with God, rejoicing in hope of the glory of God’, and having His ‘love shed abroad in their hearts’.

‘Justification’, Wesley explained in a later sermon, ‘is another word for pardon. It is the forgiveness of all our sins; and, what is necessarily implied therein, our acceptance with God. The price whereby this hath been procured for us . . . is the blood and righteousness of Christ.’ This was the theme of Wesley’s preaching – not hell-fire, but free grace (Sermons on Several Occasions). Grace, Wesley declared in a famous sermon preached at Bristol in 1740, ‘is free to all to whom it is given. It does not depend on any power or merit in man; no, not in any degree, neither in whole, nor in part. It does not in any wise depend either on the good works or righteousness of the receiver; not on anything he has done, or anything he is.’ (Wood, p. 226) But if salvation came through faith alone, and if faith came only by the grace of God, why was it that some men received the gift of grace while others did not? It was the same dilemma which, in the sixteenth century, had led remorselessly from Luther’s doctrine of justification by faith to Calvin’s doctrine of predestination. This was precisely the logical step that Wesley refused to take. Instead, he accepted the title of Arminian – after the sixteenth-century Dutch theologian Arminius who had opposed Calvin’s uncompromising teaching on predestination. Wesley called the magazine he founded in 1777 the Arminian Magazine: it was not renamed the Methodist Magazine until seven years after his death. Wesley was indeed at his most intemperate in his attacks on the doctrine of predestination. In a famous sermon on the Trinity he asked:

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What are all the absurd opinions of all the Romanists in the world, compared to that one, that the God of Love, the wise, just, merciful Father of the spirits of all flesh, has from eternity fixt an absolute, unchangeable, irresistible decree, that part of mankind shall be saved, do what they will, and the rest damned, do what they can! (Sermons on several occasions )

And in a letter to a friend, in May 1765, he claimed that thirty years before he and his brother had thought it ‘our duty to oppose Predestination with our whole strength; not as an opinion, but as a dangerous mistake, which appears to be subversive of the very foundation of Christian experience’ (JWJ, v p. 116). Wesley found the doctrine of unconditional predestination offensive in at least two respects. In the first place it seemed to inhibit the preaching of the Gospel since, in strict Calvinist theory, only those predestined to salvation could receive the divine grace – which Wesley taught could be received by all. According to Wesley, God’s grace was freely offered to all, but many refused to receive it. Thus God did not damn half mankind: they damned themselves. Wesley’s answer to Calvinistic doctrine was the one suggested by his mother in a letter she wrote to him in August 1725: ‘Nor can it with more reason be supposed that the prescience of God is the cause that so many finally perish, than that one knowing the sun will rise tomorrow is the cause of its rising’ (Piette, p. 258). The second danger Wesley saw was that of Antinomianism – the belief that to the pure all things are pure. If, as Whitefield and the strict Calvinists held, justification meant the certainty that a man was unconditionally destined for heaven, what incentive was there to lead a blameless life? John Fletcher of Madeley was one of Wesley’s staunchest allies in resisting this tendency. He claimed that the grossest immoralities were becoming rife in Methodist societies. Methodism might, he thought, ‘by this time have turned this favourite isle into a land flowing with spiritual milk and honey, if Apollyon, disguised in his angelic robes, had not played, and did not continue to play, his old Antinomian game’ (Knox, p. 494). As early as 1744 the first Methodist Conference had defined Methodism’s position as distinct alike from Rome, Luther and Calvin. Justification was by faith, but justification meant ‘to be pardoned and received into God’s favour, and into such a state that, if we continue therein [my italics] we shall finally be saved’. Conversion was only the beginning; sanctification was a slow process, distinct from justification; men and women must endure to the end to be saved. Wesley’s belief that one can fall from grace was embodied in the Conference minutes of 1770. The dispute over Predestination split the Methodist movement. Inevitably, each .

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side held the other responsible for the breach. ‘[Mr Whitefield] made the first breach among the Methodists,’ wrote Wesley in his Journal for 3 January 1766; ‘oh that God may empower him to heal it!’ Meanwhile Whitefield remarked: ‘God himself, I find, teaches my friends the doctrine of election. Sister H. hath been lately convinced of it, and if I mistake not, dear and honoured Mr Wesley hereafter will be convinced also.’ It was a forlorn hope. In 1762 Whitefield’s patroness, the Countess of Huntingdon, had presided over the Methodist Conference at Leeds. But in 1764 Wesley recorded in his Journal the wish that ‘our brethren were as zealous to make Christians as they are to make Calvinists’ (JWJ, v p. 59). In 1766 Wesley sent a letter to ‘forty or fifty clergymen’, some of them helpers of the ‘Countess of Huntingdon’s Connection’, in an attempt to persuade them at least to agree to differ. Only three of the men to whom it was addressed took the trouble to acknowledge the letter. Meanwhile Wesley was warning the Arminian Fletcher about the contradictions implicit in his position as Warden of Trevecca College, Lady Huntingdon’s own foundation. If his appointment had been intended as a goodwill gesture, the idea was not a success. ‘Dear Mr Fletcher’, Lady Huntingdon complained, ‘has been severely reprimanded for endeavouring to maintain peace and unanimity in the household of God’ (Knox, p. 500). Peace and unanimity were finally shattered in 1770 when the Conference Minutes, with their reaffirmation of the Arminian position, were rightly regarded by Lady Huntingdon as a declaration of open war. Bitter recriminations followed. Fletcher continued to conduct the Arminian case, while Wesley was locked in controversy with the Rev. Augustus Toplady, author of ‘Rock of Ages’. They matched one another in invective: Toplady accused Wesley of ‘costermongering’ false quotations, while Wesley declined to ‘fight with chimney sweepers’ (Hattersley, p. 325). Whitefield died in 1770 while on a visit to Massachusetts, and most of the Methodist lay preachers remained loyal to Wesley. But at Grimsby on 18 March 1779 Wesley had cause to complain that ‘those striplings who call themselves Lady Huntingdon’s preachers have greatly hindered the work of God’. And at Stourport in 1790, barely a year before his own death, he noted sadly in the Journal: ‘The first chapel was built about three years ago, by the joint contributions of Arminians and Calvinists, agreeing that they should preach by turns. But in a short time the poor Arminians were locked out’ (JWJ, viii p. 51). To the last, Wesley remained convinced that all the intolerance was on one side.

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Methodists and Evangelicals In his famous strictures on the Methodists in the pages of the Edinburgh Review during the early years of the nineteenth century, Sydney Smith refused to distinguish between Wesleyan Methodists, Calvinistic Methodists and the Evangelical clergy of the Church of England. As he wrote in 1808: ‘We shall use the general term of Methodism to designate these three classes of fanatics, not troubling ourselves to point out the finer shades and nicer discriminations of lunacy, but treating them all as in one general conspiracy against common sense and rational orthodox Christianity.’ Modern historians have similarly used ‘Evangelical Revival’ as a blanket term to cover the eighteenth-century religious revival as a whole. But in spite of their obvious affinity to the Methodists, the Evangelicals as a group – Evangelicals with a capital E – deserve separate and stricter definition. It has sometimes been rather loosely assumed that the Evangelicals were, as Halévy put it, ‘a rearguard’ left behind in the Church of England when Wesley was ‘driven out’. And even those historians who have drawn a firmer distinction between Methodists and Evangelicals have often seen the Evangelicals as the spiritual descendants of the first Methodists. The question of antecedents is not, however, quite so easily settled, as Dr Walsh has shown (Bennett and Walsh, pp. 133−6). In the first place the revival did not begin with Whitefield and Wesley. A religious revival was already well under way in Wales by the time John Wesley underwent his Aldersgate Street experience. As early as 1714 Griffith Jones had been in trouble with his bishop for preaching in the churchyards and on the hills, and in 1736 Howell Harris, soon to become one of the most famous leaders of the Methodist revival in Wales, began itinerant preaching – three years before Whitefield started preaching to the miners of Kingswood. The early Evangelical clergy either disowned the Methodists or were disowned by them. William Romaine, the famous preacher, was in Wesley’s own phrase ‘not my son in the Gospel’, while William Grimshaw at the time of his conversion was ‘an entire stranger to the people called Methodists’ (JWJ, iv p. 494). Even the later Evangelicals, who inevitably knew more about the Methodists, did not owe their conversion to Methodism. At the time of John Berridge’s conversion in 1756, his biographer records, ‘Messrs Wesley and Whitefield were personally unknown to him; and as common report had operated much to their disparagement, he found no inclination to seek an acquaintance with them’. Yet when the fame of Berridge’s preaching persuaded John Wesley to visit Everton to hear for himself, Berridge’s words moved him to tears (JWJ, iv p. 341). Henry Venn was led to adopt an Evangelical temper of life by the imminent

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prospect of ordination – he even gave up cricket because, as he put it, he would not have it said ‘well struck parson!’ Charles Simeon experienced a similar change of heart at Cambridge when he found that, as a scholar of his college, he was required to receive communion. Joseph Milner seems to have been brought to the point of realisation by disillusionment at his own shortcomings: ‘By bitter experience rather than by reasoning I have been convinced that if a man is to be saved, it must be by free grace in the proper and full sense of the word’ (Bennett and Walsh, p. 155). Milner’s words appear to echo the Calvinistic doctrine of Predestined Election. How far was Evangelical piety a survival from seventeenth-century Puritanism rather than a revival in protest against eighteenth-century rationalism? Remarkably few of the eighteenth-century Evangelical leaders – or Methodist leaders for that matter – came from a Calvinist background. As Dr Walsh remarks: ‘some of them underwent an evangelical experience well before they acquired an evangelical theology.’ (Bennett and Walsh, p. 155) In contrast to seventeenth-century Puritans, the Evangelicals were not much interested in theology. Their approach was practical rather than doctrinal. In the words of one of their pamphleteers, their aim was to expel from the parsonage Parson Dolittle and Parson Merryman and to replace them by Parson Lovegood. How successful were they in their assault on the parsonages of England? Lecky was certainly mistaken in his confident assertion that ‘before the close of the eighteenth century the Evangelical movement had become dominant in England’ (History of England, ii p. 619). Even Gladstone’s calculation that at the end of the eighteenth century five per cent of Anglican clergy were Evangelicals is an overestimate. Parson Dolittle and Parson Merryman were not expelled so easily. It is true that in Yorkshire and Cornwall at the turn of the century there were compact groups of Evangelical clergy, but in the eastern and south-eastern counties there seem to have been hardly any at all, while in London, Evangelical clergy were excluded from all but three livings. But exclusion from the parsonage need not imply exclusion from a pulpit. The bishops encouraged the increase in the number of chapels built by lay patrons – which the episcopate saw as a way of coping with a growing population when the law still prevented the formation of new parishes. Other preaching opportunities arose from the aristocracy’s right to appoint private chaplains. The Countess of Huntingdon built chapels in various towns from Bath to Brighton and added a chapel to her house in Chelsea. When her right to appoint as many chaplains as she liked was disallowed by the London Consistory Court in 1779, she evaded the prohibition by registering her buildings as Dissenting Chapels – though she continued

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to regard herself as an Anglican. In London, the chief Evangelical preachers benefited from the system of lectureships that dated from Stuart times. William Romaine held the lectureship at St Dunstan’s, Fleet Street, for forty-six years, so that it could be said that people came up to London ‘to see Garrick act and hear Romaine preach’. (On Romaine, see Balleine.) The Evangelicals were fashionable in a way that the Methodists, with their humbler origins, could never be. Wilberforce, friend of the Younger Pitt, is the most obvious instance of the Evangelicals’ ability to wield political influence in a manner denied to the Methodists. It was Wilberforce, afraid that the reassembling of Parliament on a Monday might cause members to travel up to London on Sunday, who persuaded Spencer Perceval to alter the day of assembly to Tuesday. Lord Shaftesbury, born in 1801, belongs to a later generation of Evangelicals, but his successful campaign for Factory Reform and against the use of climbing boys by chimneysweeps was as much a parliamentary triumph as the abolition of slavery had been. By contrast the Methodists, lacking the political influence and social cachet of the Evangelicals, made their contribution to philanthropy by private charity rather than by Act of Parliament. But in spite of their differing spiritual and social origins and in spite of the fact that the Evangelicals remained within the established Church while Methodism joined the ranks of Dissent, the two movements exhibited a similar mood of moral earnestness and a corresponding concern with philanthropy. The historian may trace their separate and distinctive paths of development, but in trying to assess their social and moral impact on English society, he must examine them in conjunction. Neither movement can be fairly judged in isolation

6 Methodism after Wesley The Reformation of Manners Methodism after Wesley was also Methodism after the French Revolution. Wesley’s Journal ends abruptly in October 1790, four months before his death, and the entries for the period from July 1789 onwards do not contain a single reference to events in France. Yet the French Revolution probably did more to change the moral mood of England than all Wesley’s preaching. As the Annual Register put it in 1798: ‘It was a wonder to the lower orders, throughout all parts of England, to see the avenues to the churches filled with carriages. This novel appearance prompted the simple country people to enquire what was the matter.’ ‘The red skies of Paris,’ commented J. L. and Barbara Hammond, ‘sobered the English Sunday and filled the English churches’ (Town Labourer, p. 235). The Hammonds are admittedly some of the bitterest twentieth-century critics of the social contribution made by both Evangelicals and Methodists, but it is undeniable that the campaign for the reformation of manners was greatly stimulated by the spectacle of irreligion triumphant in France. Yet before the fall of the Bastille, George III’s 1787 proclamation forbade ‘playing on the Lord’s day at dice, cards, or any other game whatsoever, either in public or private houses’, and called for enforcement of laws against ‘excessive drinking, blasphemy, profane swearing or cursing, lewdness, profanation of the Lord’s Day, or other dissolute, immoral or disorderly practices’. This time, though no earthquake had preceded it, the proclamation had more marked effect. Not only had the country by now experienced half a century of Methodism, but the government enjoyed the more formidable support of William Wilberforce and the Evangelicals. Wilberforce saw the proclamation as an essential part of his campaign to make criminal legislation unnecessary by reforming society as a whole. Some twenty years after the 1787 proclamation, the Rev. Sydney Smith used a notice in the Edinburgh Review of 1808 as an excuse for attacking the Methodists. In a review of Causes of the Increase of Methodism and Dissension by Robert Ingram, Smith cites extracts from the Evangelical Magazine and the Methodist Magazine of the previous year to demonstrate the mood of moral earnestness that Methodists

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and Evangelicals alike had induced, if not in the country as a whole, at least among their own followers. ‘The Methodists’, concluded Smith (and he evidently meant the Evangelicals as well), ‘have made an alarming inroad into the Church, and they are attacking the army and navy. The principality of Wales, and the East India Company they have already acquired. All mines and subterranean places belong to them; they creep into hospitals and small schools and so work their way upwards.’ Moreover, ‘all the amusements of the rich and of the poor must disappear, wherever these gloomy people get a footing’. G. W. E. Russell in his account of life in an Evangelical household paints a more sympathetic picture, though he does not altogether dispel the suggestion of gloom. Gambling, horse-racing and card-playing are condemned. When, as a child, Russell wins some money in ‘the race game’ at a children’s party, it is impounded for benefit of missionaries. Ball-going is ruled out, though in some families square-dancing is allowed and in others you may go to a ball provided you come down to prayers at 8 o’clock the next morning. Sunday is a dull day: no hospitality is given or accepted; all games and exercises are forbidden; the distinction between ‘Sunday books’ and others is rigidly enforced; meals are ordered so as to allow servants to attend church, and in the strictest families there is no hot food (The Household of Faith, pp. 235−36). The Victorian Sunday was the product of legislation inspired by the Evangelicals, but the legislation itself reflected a middle-class mood for which the Methodists as much as the Evangelicals were responsible. In 1802 a society originally founded with the object of enforcing the royal proclamation of 1787 was re-organised as the Society for the Suppression of Vice. It conducted a vigorous war against blasphemous and obscene publications, brothels and fortune-tellers, but its chief object was Sunday observance. It kept a close watch on the days chosen for markets, for the manoeuvres of the militia and the pleasures of the aristocracy. The opening of the Newmarket races was changed from Easter Monday to the Tuesday. The Duke of York in answer to criticism admitted that he travelled to the races on Sunday, but added that he always had a Bible and a prayer book in his carriage (Town Labourer, p. 236). The rigid enforcement of a biblical Sabbath was a more serious matter for the working classes. All forms of sport were forbidden and thus, in the words of an engineer before the Factory Commission, ‘a man can do nothing but go to a public house on Sunday and when there you can do nothing but drink’. Chadwick, citing this very evidence, suggested to the Committee on Drunkenness that public gardens should be provided, with free admission after morning service on Sundays. The proposal was rejected. At Liverpool in 1834 it was stated in evidence before the same

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committee that ‘on Sundays . . . all the public houses are opened, and all the public walks, cemeteries, and zoological and botanical gardens, where the people might amuse themselves innocently, are closed’. Well might Frederick von Raumer write in his England in 1835: ‘The lower classes, who often have to toil wearily through every other day, find Sunday, as it is constantly described, the weariest of all. Often, after serving an austere master, they are made to find in the Father of Love an austerer still’ (Hammond, Age of Chartists, p. 262). Similarly, the campaign against vicious sports, though aimed at a genuine abuse tended to become a movement against all popular amusements. Sheridan thought that the campaign ought also to promote innocent sports, but Lord Dartmouth, who set aside a field for athletic sports in an attempt to wean the people of West Bromwich from bullfighting, does not seem to have been often imitated by his peers (Age of Chartists, p. 255). The theatre also suffered from the new morality. The last half of the eighteenth century was described by Lecky as the golden age of English drama. It was the age of Garrick and Mrs Siddons, of the Shakespeare revival, and of Goldsmith and Sheridan. The Act of 1737, which confined legitimate drama to the Haymarket, Covent Garden and Drury Lane, was evaded, and money was spent by large towns to get a special Act of Parliament to enable them to set up a theatre. Thus in the period 1767−75, theatres had been built at Edinburgh, Bath, Bristol, York, Hull, Liverpool, Manchester and Chester. Yet, in spite of its increased population, there was still only one theatre in Manchester in 1853. The Evangelicals and Methodists could claim much of the credit for this (Edwards, After Wesley, pp. 129−30), but the influence of cheap printing must also be remembered. Dickens, whose very success was a symptom of the decline of the theatre, remarked three months before he died: ‘The narrow-minded fanatics who decry the theatre and defame its artists are absolutely the advocates of depraved and barbarous amusements. For wherever a good drama and well-regulated theatre decline, some distorted form of theatrical entertainment will inevitably arise in their place’ (Age of Chartists, p. 258). Again, it was lack of moderation and a sense of proportion that marred the approach of Methodists and Evangelicals to the question. The same failings characterized the so-called ‘Temperance’ movement, which began as a call for moderation and ended as a demand for prohibition. The rules of the earliest Methodist societies had forbidden the drinking of ‘spirituous liquors’, but total abstinence from all forms of alcohol – that prominent characteristic of more recent Methodism – was a surprisingly late development. Gin-drinking was notoriously the curse of the eighteenth century. Legislation was opposed by vested

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interests and victims alike, but the worst excesses were in fact checked by the Act of 1751 which imposed heavier duties and expressly forbade distillers, chandlers, grocers, and keepers of jails and workhouses to retail spirits (Turberville, i p. 313). The Webbs have shown that the justices of the peace became increasingly firm in dealing with publicans in the last fifteen years of the eighteenth century, and cite figures to show a decrease of 11 per cent in the number of spirit licences between 1779 and 1790. But by the 1820s the trend had been reversed (History of Liquor Licensing, pp. 87, 113−14). In 1826 the Surrey magistrates petitioned Parliament ‘to authorise the excise to grant a beer licence after the manner in which a tea licence was granted’. The Beer Act of 1830 permitted the selling of beer on payment of a fee for an excise licence, and within six months no less than 24,000 new sellers of beer paid the excise fee. JPs were now placed in the anomalous position of trying to persuade publicans to take out a spirits licence so as to bring their ale-houses back under the control of the magistrates. The Beer Bill had been urged by the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Goulbourn, as a means of reducing drunkenness. Michael Sadler was nearer the mark when he described it as ‘offering a bonus to tipplers’, while Sydney Smith wrote a fortnight after the Act: ‘Everybody is drunk. Those who are not singing are sprawling. The sovereign people are in a beastly state’ (Letters, p. 197). Until 1830 both Evangelicals and Methodists had reserved their strictures for spirits. Berridge’s advice to a country clergyman had been: ‘Keep a barrel of ale in your house; and when a man comes to you with a message, or on other business, give him some refreshment, that his ears may be more open to your religious instructions.’ And Wesley had taken more pains to discourage Methodists from drinking tea – which he regarded as an expensive luxury – than to deter them from drinking wine or beer (Wearmouth, Common People, p. 244). But in 1832 a movement for total abstinence was started by a group of thirty-three people, most of them working men, at Preston – later to be called ‘the Jerusalem of teetotallers’ – and three years later the British Association for the Promotion of Temperance was formed. The Methodist Conference took alarm, and in 1841 passed the following resolutions: 1. That no unfermented wines [my italics] be used in the administration of the Sacrament throughout the connexion. 2. That no Wesleyan Chapel be lent for the meetings of the Temperance Society. 3. That no preacher shall go into another circuit to advocate teetotalism without the sanction of the Superintendent of the circuit to which he may be invited.

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Meanwhile teetotallers noted that part of the basement of the Wesleyan Centenary Hall in London was let to a wine and spirit dealer. A Temperance Association was soon formed within the Methodist denomination (Age of Chartists, p. 166). But the temperance movement was slow to make any impact on government policy. The Act of 1869, which brought all licensed premises under the control of the justices, was described by the Webbs as ‘practically the first step on the path of legislative repentance’ (History of Liquor Licensing, p.142). In the 1870s, however, the influence of the temperance movement is reflected in the growing stringency of the licensing policy of most benches. Meanwhile from 1875 onwards the Wesleyans began to promote temperance among the young by means of Bands of Hope. In characteristic Methodist fashion, the movement depended on local initiative rather than official leadership. Methodism and Politics It is sometimes claimed that Methodism, by changing the moral tone of England, saved her from the excesses of the French Revolution. It would probably be truer to say that the French Revolution changed both the character and course of the Methodist movement – with consequences that are still in dispute. ‘What directions shall be given concerning our conduct to the Civil Government?’ asked the Methodist Conference in 1792. Its answer: 1. None of us shall, either in writing or conversation, speak lightly or irreverently of the government under which he lives. 2. We are to observe that the oracles of God command to be faithful to the higher powers and that honour to the King is there connected with the fear of God. (Edwards, After Wesley, pp. 26−27)

Similar resolutions were passed in 1794, 1797, 1798 and 1799. These were, of course, war years; but the Conference was not concerned only with patriotism. In this period immediately after Wesley’s death, Conference was trying to ensure that Methodist discipline was preserved now that the inspiration of Wesley’s leadership had been removed. Under the Plan of Pacification drawn up in 1795 no Methodist society was to administer the sacraments without the express permission of the Conference, nor must the sacraments be administered at times when the local Anglican Church was holding similar services (Taylor, p. 71). This was in keeping with the strict limitations imposed by Wesley himself, but there was

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now a new generation of Methodists prepared to challenge such authoritarianism. In 1796 Alexander Kilham challenged the Conference by advocating democracy in church government: ‘We all have an equal right to vote in these matters, as we are all redeemed by Christ and have each a soul to save, equally precious in the sight of God.’ In 1797 he founded the Methodist New Connexion – ‘Tom Paine Methodists’ as they would be called in Huddersfield. Kilham’s Methodists made no attempt to conceal the fact that they were a democratically minded Dissenting sect owing no allegiance to the Church of England. As minister of the New Connexion Chapel in Scotland Street, Sheffield, Kilham boasted: ‘I never preach on Sunday mornings at eight, or on a weeknight, without having about 1,500 hearers, and on Sunday evenings we do not know what to do.’ Meanwhile the number of registered Wesleyan Methodists in Sheffield declined from 3,099 in 1796 to 1,080 in 1804 (Wickham, p. 67). As soon as Wesley’s movement begins to fragment in this way – and in 1812 the Primitive Methodists were expelled from the Conference – it becomes practically impossible to define the political complexion and sociological composition of Methodism. First, there was the inevitable trend towards respectability noted by Wesley in 1763, when he observed that ‘in London, Bristol and most other trading towns’ Methodists ‘in business have increased in substance sevenfold, some of them twenty, yea an hundredfold’ (JWJ, v pp. 30−31). And an anonymous critic in 1813 went so far as to claim that ‘the immediate temporal advantages which people of the lower classes feel as soon as they enter the society must be numbered among the most efficient causes of its rapid and continual increase’ (Warner, p. 191). There is some evidence that the early Methodists fulfilled Wesley’s hope that ‘those who “gain all they can” and “save all they can” will likewise “give all they can”.’ (Sydney Smith accused Methodists of giving beyond their means.) But more worldly weaknesses prevailed. In 1792 it was complained that Wesleyans sent ‘their children to boarding schools where music, dancing and finery were introduced’, while in 1821 An Address to the Preachers late in Connection with the Rev. J. Wesley recorded: ‘It is an appalling truth that very few of the children of rich Methodists ever become members of our Society’ (Warner, p. 91). Meanwhile the historian of Methodism in Macclesfield could record that in 1803 no fewer than five aldermen were seat-holders at Sunderland Street Methodist Chapel, and that ‘the pew rents from July 1802 to April 1803, inclusive, amounted to more than 148 pounds’ (Smith, Methodism in Macclesfield, p. 232). About one-third of the 750 seats in the new Wesleyan Chapel at Bridgehouses, Sheffield, were free; but when erected in 1834 to replace the earlier brick chapel, it was commended as ‘a chaste and beautiful Grecian structure of

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freestone, an ornament to the place, and an honour to the persons by whose taste and liberality it was erected’ (Wickham, p. 73). One is reminded of Wesley’s comment in his Journal after visiting the newly built Octagon Chapel at Norwich in 1757: ‘How can it be thought that the old, coarse gospel should find admission here?’ (JWJ, iv p. 244) It is no great surprise to find that Wesleyan Methodism in the 1820s and 1830s showed little sympathy for radical politics. A writer in the Leeds Patriot later accused Methodist preachers of having delivered sermons in 1819 supporting Castlereagh and the Six Acts. We know that in that year several scholars of a Wesleyan Sunday school at Manchester were expelled for wearing radical badges, and that for the first time in its history Methodism acknowledged a decrease of over 5,000 in its membership. In the summer of 1820 the Leeds Mercury reported that a Mr Monckton had been excluded from Methodist pulpits for using ‘improper expressions in praying for the Queen, which were offensive to many respectable people in the congregations. He was admonished, and advised to go home and read his Bible more carefully and learn his politics from that book.’ In 1834 the Conference expressed ‘surprise and deep regret’ that some Methodist chapels had been used for political meetings, and eight years later it was still condemning the activity of ‘infidels and irreligious men’ who ‘are charging all the sufferings of the community upon the selfish policy of rulers’. The leader of the quarter of a million Wesleyan Methodists at this period was Jabez Bunting (Edwards, After Wesley, pp. 154−58). He has had a bad press. In particular he has had attributed to him the almost certainly apocryphal statement that ‘Methodism hates democracy as much as it hates sin’ (Taylor, p. 122). It is true that in 1812 he refused to bury a Luddite and that in 1834 he declined to intercede on behalf of those famous Dorset Methodists, the Tolpuddle Martyrs. But it is unfair to portray him as the perverter of Wesley’s movement. Authoritarian he undoubtedly was, but Wesley was himself an autocrat. He had kept a firm hold over his itinerant preachers, and he expected the itinerants in turn to control the local Methodist societies. Nor did Wesley welcome the involvement of his followers in politics. He condemned the principle of representative government, considering that political judgment, ‘requires not only a good understanding, but more time than common tradesmen can spare, and better information than they can possibly procure’ (Works, xi p. 19). Thus if Jabez Bunting deserves censure, it is not for betraying John Wesley’s political principles and views on church government, but for clinging doggedly to them in a more democratic and less deferential age. In January 1833, when the Short Time Committee launched its campaign for a shorter working day in factories, it

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met in a Primitive Methodist Chapel because the Wesleyan Methodists had refused accommodation (Ward, p. 85). But there was no lack of radicals in the Methodist movement. As early as 1821 an informer in London wrote to the Home Office that ‘great numbers of Methodists have separated from the orderly and regular Wesleyan body’ and to these ‘the seditious are directing their attention’. The Methodist societies did not teach sedition, but they did teach the working classes to read. It was claimed that by 1810 on Tyneside being able to write among the working classes was almost synonymous with being a Methodist. All the Manchester Sunday schools in the early nineteenth century taught reading, and Samuel Bamford, one of the leading ‘Peterloo’ demonstrators, reckoned that the Sunday schools ‘had produced many working men of sufficient talent to become readers, writers and speakers in the village meetings for Parliamentary reform’. It was at about the time of Peterloo that Primitive Methodism first took root in the Manchester area (Read, pp. 32, 202−3). Thirty years later a more serious schism in Methodism showed that radicalism in religion and radicalism in politics still went together. In 1849 40,000 Methodists broke away from the parent body to found the ‘United Methodist Free Churches’. Among them was Griffith, who not only signed his letters ‘William Griffith—New Testament Bishop’, but declared: ‘If I am a Chartist, my Bible has made me so.’ Chartism and Trade Unionism Although the official voice of Methodism continued to condemn involvement in political agitation for better social conditions, individual Methodists did play a leading role. And even those leaders who would not have described themselves as Methodists had often come under Methodist influence in early life. Richard Oastler was an Evangelical, and it was a meeting with another Evangelical, John Wood, that led to his famous letter to the Leeds Mercury on ‘Yorkshire slavery’ in 1830. But he had been educated by the Moravians and was attracted to Methodism in his youth. Michael Sadler, that other champion of factory reform, had also been a Methodist when young, though, like Oastler, he later became an Evangelical. Joseph Rayner Stephens, who joined the Ten-Hour Movement in early 1835, had a more recent Methodist past. Brought up a Methodist, he had become a Methodist preacher in 1825 – two years before his father became President of the Methodist Conference. After serving for some years in Sweden, first as a Methodist missionary and then as a domestic chaplain to the British plenipotentiary at Stockholm, he was ordained a Methodist minister. But in 1834 he was expelled by the Conference for advocating the separation of Church and State.

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The Chartist leader William Lovett had a Cornish mother who was a strict Methodist, while Thomas Cooper, the ‘General’ of the Leicestershire Chartists, although a Baptist, owed his conversion to the Primitive Methodists during a revival in Gainsborough and had been a Wesleyan local preacher for five years. Another Methodist local preacher, Ben Rushton of Halifax, had left the Methodists at the time of Peterloo and turned first to anti-Poor Law agitation and then to Chartism (Thompson, pp 398−99). How many Methodists were active Chartists? It is difficult to be sure. We know that the Chartists used the camp-meeting techniques of the Primitive Methodists and that when in 1839 the political ‘class’ was introduced among the Chartists of Sheffield, the Sheffield Mercury called it a ‘practical parody of private religious assemblies which have so long been known among our Wesleyan friends’. One of the leading Nottinghamshire Chartists, George Harrison of Calverton, was a Methodist local preacher. Perhaps rather more suggestive is the fact that Bradford, which had the strongest Wesleyan congregation in the West Riding in 1851, and Huddersfield, which had the second strongest, were both centres of Chartist agitation. Indeed ten of the seventeen towns chosen by Feargus O’Connor for his northern tour on his release from prison were towns in the West Riding – a stronghold of Wesleyan Methodism. It is thus difficult to claim that Methodism provided an acceptable substitute for political agitation or that it sublimated the urge to improve working conditions. What is undeniable is that a noticeable Methodist involvement in trade unionism dates from about the time that Chartism collapses. Before 1850 Methodists were active in the Agricultural Labourers’ Union in Dorset, and in 1844 the Hayes brothers of Pinxton on the Nottinghamshire-Derbyshire border were organising teams of ‘beggars’ to raise funds in support of the local miners’ union (Griffin, WHS, xxxvii pp. 2−3). But these cases seem to have been exceptional. The trade unionism of the 1850s and 1860s, with its emphasis on friendly society benefits rather than strike action, was in any case more in tune with traditional Methodist activities; and Wesleyan Methodism now began to produce trade unionists of national repute. Henry Broadhurst, a stonemason, organised a trade union among his fellow workers in London in the 1860s, and in 1873 secured for all the masons an increase in their hourly wage and a reduction of the working week. He subsequently became secretary of the Trades Union Congress and sat on the Royal Commission of 1892−95 inquiring into the condition of the aged poor. Arthur Henderson, first elected to Parliament in 1903 and destined to be Home Secretary in the first Labour Government, had been a district delegate for the Friendly Society of Ironfounders and had voted for nationalization at the Trades Union Congress of 1894. He, too, was a Wesleyan Methodist and had been

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a class leader at Newcastle upon Tyne and then a local preacher. He remarked of the Wesleyan mission church, to which he had come at the age of sixteen: ‘They were a merry lot. I was encouraged to express myself; to preach and speak. I was given their warm, helpful friendship, and the hospitality of their homes’ (Wearmouth, Working Classes, p. 174). The Methodist New Connexion, despite its radical character under Alexander Kilham, does not seem to have contributed greatly to trade union development. Probably its most colourful trade union leader was the coal-miner, William Brown. Sacked from the mines because of his trade union activities, he set up as a greengrocer and eked out his income by earning £10 a year as a singer at a Methodist New Connexion chapel. In 1863 he became the miners’ agent for the Leeds and Methley district and spoke with the fervour of a revivalist preacher at meetings of miners throughout the Midlands. The proceedings customarily opened and closed with a hymn from the Miners’ Hymn Book, probably published and sold by Brown. There seems little doubt that he was largely responsible for the success of the Midlands miners’ unions in the 1860s and 1870s (Griffin, pp. 4−5). By the 1880s one of the most dynamic leaders among the Nottinghamshire miners was William Bailey, a Primitive Methodist local preacher. And it was the Primitive Methodists who figured most prominently in trade union activity in the latter part of the century. Thomas Burt became secretary to the Northumberland Miners’ Association in 1865; in 1874 he became MP for Morpeth and was one of the first two working men to enter Parliament; in 1891 he became President of the TUC and in 1892 Gladstone made him President of the Board of Trade. Another miner was Charles Fenwick of Cramlington. Secretary of the TUC for four years, he asserted: ‘If my life has been in any degree a success I owe it all to the providence of God, and my early and continued connection with the Primitive Methodist Church’ (Working Classes, pp. 185−87). Most of the trade union leaders in the county of Durham were ‘Prims’ – many of them local preachers – and one of them, Peter Lee, has had a town named after him. As Sidney Webb wrote of the Primitive Methodists of Durham: From the very beginning of the Trade Union movement among the miners, of the Co-operative movement among all sections of wage earners, of the formation of Friendly Societies, and of the attempts at adult education, it is the men who are Methodists in Durham County, especially the local preachers of the Primitive Methodists, whom we find taking the lead and filling the posts of influence. (Webb, Durham Miners, pp.22−23)

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Methodist trade union leadership was admittedly less concentrated in the Midlands and the North-west than it was in the North-east. But there is enough evidence to vindicate the view endorsed by Herbert Morrison that ‘English trade unionism has been more Methodist than Marxist’.

7 Methodism and Revolution In his eight-volume History of England in the Eighteenth Century, written in the 1870s, W. E. H. Lecky claimed that Methodism, by its civilizing mission among the working classes, saved England from violent revolution (Lecky, ii pp. 635−36). This theory was given greater currency by the French historian Elie Halévy. In his History of the English People in 1815, first published in English in 1924, he remarked in the section entitled ‘Religion and Culture’: We shall witness Methodism bringing under its influence, first the dissenting sects, then the establishment, finally secular opinion. We shall attempt to find here the key to the problem whose solution has hitherto escaped us; for we shall explain by this movement the extraordinary stability which English Society was destined to enjoy throughout a period of revolutions and crises; what we may truly term the miracle of modern England, anarchist but orderly, practical and businesslike, but religious, and even pietist.

Some of Methodism’s most hostile critics have been inclined to agree that by preaching resignation rather than revolution Methodist leaders helped to preserve the political stability of nineteenth-century England – though at the cost of holding down working-class living standards. Writing in 1824, William Cobbett described the Methodists as ‘the bitterest foes of freedom in England’. He continued: Books upon books they write. Tracts upon tracts. Villainous sermons upon villainous sermons they preach. . . They are continually telling the people here that they ought to thank the Lord for the blessings they enjoy: that they ought to thank the Lord, not for a bellyful and a warm back but for that abundant grace of which they are the bearers, and for which they charge them only a penny per week.

A century later, the Hammonds accused the Methodists of teaching their workingclass followers to fix their thoughts on the next world and to ignore the discomforts of this. The very bleakness of working-class life in the first half of the nineteenth century was, according to the Hammonds, in part produced by the Methodists’ preoccupation with Sabbatarianism and eschatology rather than with relieving social distress. The same theme is developed in E. P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working

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Class (1965), which contains what must be the most malicious attack on Methodism ever to appear in a work of serious historical scholarship. Thompson’s book was reissued in a Penguin edition – complete with a postscript in which he replied to hostile reviewers. In the chapter entitled ‘The Transforming Power of the Cross’, he not only claims that Wesley’s theology ‘selected unhesitatingly the worst elements of Puritanism’, but offers a Freudian interpretation of the imagery of Methodist hymns and suggests that Methodist devotional practices were ‘a ritualised form of psychic masturbation’ (Thompson, pp. 362, 368−71). Thompson also argues, though less dogmatically, that between 1790 and 1830 working men turned to Methodism in compensation for the disappointment of their political hopes, and that the peak periods of Methodist expansion thus occurred when the forces of counter-revolution were at their strongest. Less speculative is Thompson’s assertion that Methodist teaching was well calculated to turn men into industrious and well-disciplined factory operatives – though it seems unfair to imply that Methodism would have served the working man better if it had made him lazier and more rebellious. While Thompson and the Hammonds blame Methodism for exercising a baneful influence on nineteenth-century industrial Britain, E. J. Hobsbawm has challenged the Halévy thesis by arguing that the restraining influence exercised by Methodism on would-be revolutionaries has been much exaggerated. He points to the small number of Methodist members relative to the total population (Hobsbawm, History Today, February 1957). Admittedly by 1850 the registered membership of Wesleyan societies in England and Wales was no more than 340,000. Even when the numbers for the Primitive Methodists (100,000), the Methodist New Connexion (22,000), the Bible Christians (16,000) and the United Free Methodists (40,000) are added in, the total is only a little over half a million in a population of almost 18 million. But these figures are for society members, and beyond those who submitted to the rigorous discipline that society membership entailed, there were those who never became members but nevertheless remained within the orbit of Methodism. The figures for Census Sunday 1851 show over two million Methodist churchgoers – a far more significant total. Hobsbawm is on surer ground when he reminds us of the great diversity within the Methodist movement itself. While the Wesleyans remained conservative in politics and respectable in behaviour, the Kilhamites and Primitive Methodists were to be found in the ranks of the radicals. Hobsbawm argues (in contrast to Thompson) that Methodism recruited most rapidly in periods of mounting popular agitation: 1793−94, 1813−16, 1831−34, 1837−41 and 1848−50. Yet revolutions in the nineteenth century needed not only radical working men, but radical middle-class leaders. It

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was probably the Reform Act of 1832 that persuaded the middle classes to oppose revolution. Having achieved parliamentary reform, they turned to social reform – and the middle-class legislation of the 1830s was prompted by Utilitarian principles as much as by Methodist and Evangelical piety. As Gordon Rupp has written of John Stuart Mill: ‘His utilitarian friends believed equally fervently in the importance of being earnest.’ It is the mood of the middle classes rather than the sobriety of the working classes that explains why spectators and special constables outnumbered the Chartist demonstrators at Kennington on that wet April day in 1848. The Methodist contribution to working-class politics and the rise of the Labour movement has been well documented in the works of R.F. Wearmouth. But the part played by late nineteenth-century middle-class Methodism in the evolution of the Liberal party, and in local government, needs further study. Methodism after 1850 was not simply ‘the Labour Party at prayer’, as Wearmouth makes it seem; nor was it simply a matter of Temperance and Lord’s Day Observance. The Wesleyan-Methodist Magazine in the first six months of 1860 contained articles on such varied themes as ‘Voyage of the Fox in the Arctic seas’, ‘The Carmelites’, ‘Socrates and his times’, ‘The youth of the Esquimaux’ and ‘The Italian question’. And in a section entitled ‘Varieties’ could be found shorter items on such topical questions as the Glasgow water supply, trees in London streets, ‘How long can our coals last?’ and ‘Vegetation on the Moon’s surface’. In June 1860, the editors, commenting on the slow progress of a parliamentary reform Bill in the House of Commons, remarked: Whatever may be its merits or demerits as a political measure, it should be regarded by Christians as an additional incentive to seek the improvement of the masses… Whatever be the political condition of the people, it is, of course, the imperative duty of the church to seek their salvation; but at the present juncture, it is obviously our interest as citizens, no less than our duty as Christians, to spread Gospel truth, by every possible means, amongst those whom the state is about to invest with political power.

It was necessary to evangelize as well as educate our masters. The tone adopted by the Wesleyan-Methodist Magazine may seem distastefully condescending. But middle-class Methodism of the second half of the nineteenth century cannot be accused of indifference to social conditions. More research in this particular field remains to be done, but the career of Hugh Price Hughes (1847−1902) provides some interesting pointers. Hughes, the son of a surgeon, was something of an enfant terrible among Wesleyan Methodists, but he was finally elected President

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of the Methodist Conference in 1898. He is best remembered for the manner in which he personified the so-called Nonconformist conscience at the height of the Parnell crisis and by the uncompromising words he addressed to the Irish people in 1890: We have sacrificed much for Ireland. She is entitled to many sacrifices at our hands; but there is one thing we will never sacrifice, and that is our religion. We stand immovably on this eternal rock: what is morally wrong can never be politically right . . . (Hughes, Life of Hughes, p. 353)

Six years later the Methodist Times, which Hughes had himself founded in 1885 to provide ‘a perfectly independent organ in which any intelligent and courteous writer may freely ventilate his opinions’, carried this proud boast: Sir Charles Dilke defied the Nonconformist conscience and is a political outcast today. Parnell despised the Nonconformist conscience and he destroyed himself and his party. Lord Rosebery ignored the Nonconformist conscience for a racehorse, and the world sees the result.

The triumphs of the Nonconformist conscience may appear to modern critics as futile and misconceived as Hughes’s warm support of the Anti-Vaccination Society. There is perhaps less reason to smile at his campaign for higher moral standards in public life. ‘Who is Mr Gladstone, father?’ Hughes’s children asked one day. ‘A man who says his prayers every morning’, was his prompt reply. It was not just that politicians were to behave like Christians. According to Hughes, Christians must enter politics. In 1887 he had founded the West London Mission. In the introduction to its first report he explained: ‘Like the missionaries of the Teutonic peoples in the Middle Ages, we established a colony of workers between Oxford Street and Piccadilly.’ Each Sunday he held a ‘people’s service’ in St James’s Hall, Piccadilly, at which he preached against the social evils of the day, while during the week the social work of the mission was carried on by a sisterhood presided over by his wife. Hughes welcomed the setting-up of the democratically elected London County Council in 1888. In two afternoon lectures at St James’s Hall devoted to the subject of the London County Council, he ranged over such questions as water and gas supplies, municipal docks, trams, hospitals and police, a reformed Poor Law, and the provision of better housing for the poor. It was after these lectures that the Spectator, in an article ‘Politics in the pulpit’, praised Hughes for his advocacy of social justice. He carried on his campaign in the pages of the Methodist Times. In 1899 he urged his readers to support the Bill for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children; he repeatedly called for a more humane prison system; he condemned the refusal of the coal-owners in the

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South Wales coal strike of 1898 to accept arbitration – and the Bishop of Hereford had offered to arbitrate (Edwards, Methodism and England, pp.150−51). An ally of Hughes in his attack on social evils was another Wesleyan, S. E. Keeble. A frequent contributor to the Methodist Times before he founded his own more radical Methodist Weekly, he attacked the building of back-to-back houses at Leeds in 1890 and supported the demand for an eight-hour day. ‘Wesleyan ministers,’ he wrote, ‘will have increasingly to choose between helping or deserting the poor. There is no neutrality in this war’ (Methodism and England, p. 178). Keeble’s own Methodist Weekly was a short-lived affair, but in one of its last issues in July 1903 he warned the President of the Methodist Conference that the long reign of the Tories had ended and that of the long-persecuted Liberal party had begun. Hughes himself objected to party labels, claiming that the real dividing line will be ‘increasingly betwixt those who are in sympathy with the masses of the people, and those who are in sympathy with wealth and privilege’. But it is clear that his own sympathies lay with the Liberals. The Methodist Times for 15 January 1885 had asserted that the overwhelming majority of Methodists were Liberals and that most Methodist MPs supported Gladstone. In its analysis of the election results of the same year, the Methodist Times reported the ‘annihilation of Tory ascendancy’ in the English counties. For the first time since 1837, the Liberals had carried a majority of the county seats: ‘England has been handicapped by the dead weight of parsonic and squirearchical immobility and now a change has come because of Methodism. Our Local Preachers and Class leaders have shattered the dual control of parson and squire.’ John Kent argues that Hughes’s violent condemnation of Parnell owed as much to his desire to show that the Liberal party was the party of English Nonconformists rather than of Irish Home Rulers, as it did to his hatred of adultery (Bennett and Walsh, p. 194). As the Methodist Times itself declared on 4 December 1890, the Parnell case provided an opportunity to assert that ‘the Liberal Party is really a religious party’. This is an aspect of Methodist history that deserves a separate study in itself. It seems a far cry from William Law and the Holy Club to Hugh Price Hughes and the Liberal party. But John Wesley would have understood and endorsed the sermon that Hughes preached to the London Missionary Society in 1889: I say that neither by sacraments nor by syllogisms can men be saved, but only by the power of the Holy Ghost. The most perilous delusion that possesses many educated men and women in the present day is that Christianity is a matter of opinion; that to become a Christian means merely to accept certain opinions; and that to give up Christianity means to reject those opinions. The Christian ideas which will

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regenerate human society are rooted in the Christian life.

And the ‘New Life’ which will ‘necessarily create the new ideas of unselfishness and of highest happiness achieved in accomplishing my neighbour’s good – how is it to be communicated to me? By the miraculous personal intervention of the Holy Spirit’ (Hughes, p. 322). The language recalls not only John Wesley’s own sermons, but the words that the Wesley brothers are supposed to have heard at their father’s deathbed: ‘The inward witness, son, the inward witness; this is the proof, the strongest proof of Christianity.’ Whatever its shortcomings, nineteenth-century Methodism did not lose the Wesleys’ faith in the power of the Holy Spirit to change men’s lives.

Guidance on further study Local or regional histories For local or regional histories see the Bibliography of Methodist Historical Literature published annually since 1974 as a supplement to the Proceedings of the Wesley Historical Society. Periodicals Periodicals that may usefully be consulted include: Arminian Magazine 1778−97; Edinburgh Review 1802−20; Evangelical Magazine 1793−1815; Gentleman’s Magazine 1731−1816; Methodist Magazine 1798−1821; Wesleyan-Methodist Magazine 1822−60. Online resources Online research centres include: the Methodist Studies Unit at Oxford-Brookes University OX2 9AT, http://www.brookes.ac.uk/methodist-heritage/research.html which publishes a directory of Methodist libraries (revised 1999) available from MSU for £5 plus postage and packing; the Methodist Archive and Research Centre (MARC) at John Rylands University Library, Manchester MA3 3EH, due to be established on the University’s Deansgate site by the beginning of 2007, http://www.rylibweb.man. ac.uk/data//dg/text/method.html; the Wesley Centre, Kingswood School, Bath BA1 5RG, [email protected]. For a collection of Methodist ceramics consult Mount Zion Methodist Church, Ogden, Halifax HX2 8XG, http://www.mountzionhalifax.org.uk. See also: http://www.forsaith-oxon.demon.co.uk/methodist- heritage/research.html

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Bibliography Abbreviations JWD Wesley, John, Diary JWJ The Journal of John Wesley JWL Wesley, John, Letters WHS Proceedings of the Wesley Historical Society

Titles in the first (long) list are cited in the text. If only the year of publication is shown, the place of publication is London. A separate (short) selection of books published since 1980 follows the main list. Contemporary works Background Boswell, James, Life of Samuel Johnson, ed. G. B. Hill, 4 vols (1934). Butler, Joseph, The Analogy of Religion, Natural and Revealed (Dent Everyman, 1906). Gibbon, Edward, Autobiography (Oxford University Press, 1907). Hume, David, A Treatise of Human Nature (Dent Everyman, 1911). Jefferson, Thomas, Life and selected Writings of Thomas Jefferson, ed. A. Koch and W. Peden (New York: Random House, 1944). Law, William, A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life (Dent Everyman, 1906). Locke, John, Essay Concerning Human Understanding (Dent Everyman, 1947). The Oxford Methodists, being some account of a Society of Young Gentlemen in that city, so denominated (1733). Priestley, Joseph, Memoirs written by Himself in Autobiography of Joseph Priestley ed. Jack Lindsay with an introduction (Adams & Dart, Bath, 1970). Smith, Noel C., ed., Selected Letters of Sydney Smith (Oxford University Press, 1956). Tillotson, John, Sermons, ed. G. W. Weldon (1886). Horace Walpole’s Correspondence, ed. W. S. Lewis and others, 48 vols Yale edn (Oxford University Press, 1937−83). Williams, E. N., (ed.), The Eighteenth-Century Constitution, 1688−1815: Documents and a Commentary (Cambridge University Press, 1960).

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Writings by the Wesleys The Journal of Charles Wesley, ed. Thomas Jackson, 2 vols (1849). The Journal of John Wesley, ed. Nehemiah Curnock, 8 vols (Epworth Press, 1938). Wesley, John, Diary, printed in 1938 edition of Journal. The Works of John Wesley, ed. Thomas Jackson, 14 vols (1831). Wesley, John, Letters, ed. J. Telford, 8 vols (Epworth Press, 1931). Wesley, John, The Almost Christian: a sermon preached at St Mary Oxford before the University, July 25, 1741 10th edn (Bristol, 1762). Wesley, John, The Desideratum or Electricity made Plain and useful (1759 and 1871). Wesley, John, A Plain Account of the People called Methodists, in a Letter to the Revd Mr Perronet, 5th edn (1755). Wesley, John, Primitive Physick, or An Easy and Natural Way of Curing Most Diseases (1747; Epworth Press, 1960). Wesley, John, The Principles of a Methodist, 3rd edn (1756). Wesley, John, A Survey of the Wisdom of God in the Creation or A Compendium of Natural Philosophy, 2nd edn (Bristol, 1770).

Secondary works Background Abbey, C. J. and Overton, J. H., The English Church in the Eighteenth Century (1887), Andrews, Stuart, Unitarian Radicalism: Political Rhetoric, 1770−1814 (Basingstoke, 2003). Bennett, G. V. and Walsh, J. D., eds, Essays in Modern English Church History (1966). Cragg, G. R., The Church and the Age of Reason, 1648−1789 (1962; revised edn in Pelican History of the Church, vol. iv). Jones, M. G., The Charity School Movement (Cambridge, 1938). Kendrick, T. D., The Lisbon Earthquake (1956). Lecky, W. E. H., A History of England in the Eighteenth century 8 vols (1878–90). Sykes, Norman, Church and State in England in the Eighteenth Century (Hamden, Connecticut, 1962).  From Sheldon to Secker (Cambridge, 1959). Turberville, A. S., ed., Johnson’s England, 2 vols (Oxford, 1933).

Wesley and Methodism Andrews, Stuart, ‘John Wesley and the Age of Reason’, History Today, January 1969.

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Green, V. H. H., The Young Mr Wesley (1961). Harrison, Elsie, Son to Susanna (Harmondsworth, 1944). Hattersley, Roy, John Wesley: A Brand from the Burning (2004). Knox, Ronald, Enthusiasm: a Chapter in the History of Religion (Oxford, 1950). Pearce, John, The Wesleys in Cornwall (Truro: Bradford Barton, 1964). Piette, Maximin, John Wesley in the Evolution of Protestantism (1937). Rack, Henry, Reasonable Enthusiast: John Wesley and the Rise of Methodism (1989). Rupp, E. G. and Davies, R. E., A History of the Methodist Church in Great Britain, vol. i (1965). Southey, Robert, Life of Wesley, 2 vols (1889). Wood, A. Skevington, The Burning Heart: John Wesley, Evangelist (Exeter, 1967).

The Evangelical Movement in General Balleine, G. R. A History of the Evangelical Party in the Church of England (1951). Bennett, G. V. & Walsh, J. D., eds, Essays in Modern English Church History (1966). Russell, G. W. E., The Household of Faith (1906).

Social Impact Edwards, Maldwyn, After Wesley (1935). Methodism and England (1943). Griffin, A. R., ‘Methodism and trade unionism in the Nottinghamshire-Derbyshire coalfield 1844−90’, WHS (February, 1969). Halévy, Elie, History of the English People in 1815, trans. Watkin and Barker, paperback edn (1961). Hammond, J. L. and Barbara, The Town Labourer (1925). The Age of the Chartists (1930). Hobsbawm, E. J., ‘Methodism and the threat of revolution in Britain’, History Today (February 1957). Hughes, Dorothea, The Life of Hugh Price Hughes by his Daughter (1903). Ives, A.G., Kingswood School in Wesley’s Day and Since (1970) Raumer, F. von, England in 1835… (1836) Read, Donald, Peterloo: the ‘Massacre’ and its Background (Manchester, 1958). Smith, B., Methodism in Macclesfield (1875) Taylor, E. R., Methodism and Politics, 1791−1851 (Cambridge, 1935). Thompson, E. P., The Making of the English Working Class (1965). Ward, J. T., The Factory Movement 1830−55 (Basingstoke, 1962). Warner, R. J., The Wesleyan Movement in the Industrial Revolution (1930).

Wearmouth, R. F., Methodism and the Common People of the Eighteenth Century (1945).  Methodism and the Struggle of the Working Classes (Leicester, 1954). Methodism and the Working Class Movements, 1800−1850 (1937). Webb, Sidney and Beatrice, History of Liquor Licensing (1903). Webb, Sidney, History of Trade Unionism (1920).  The Story of he Durham Miners, 1662−1921 (1921). Wickham, E. R., Church and People in an Industrial City (1957).

Select list of titles published since 1980 The Wesleys A new edition of John Wesley’s Journals and Diaries appears as: The Works of John Wesley, vols 18−24: Journals and Diaries 1735−91, ed. W. R. Ward and R. P. Heitzenrater (Nashville, 1988−2003). Two recent collections of John Wesley’s selected writings are: John Wesley: the best from all his Works (Nashville, 1989) and The Writings of John Wesley: a man for all ages, ed. F. N. Mitchell (New York, 1997). For an anthology of Charles Wesley’s writings, including numerous hymns, see Charles Wesley: A Reader, ed. J. R. Tyson (Oxford, 1989).

Secondary works on the Wesleys and Methodism Bebbington, D. B., The Nonconformist Conscience, Chapel and Politics 1870−1914 (1982). Ditchfield, G. M., The Evangelical Revival (1998). Hels, S. J., ed., Methodism and Education: from roots to fulfilment (Nashville, 2000). Hempton, D., The Religion of the People: Methodism and popular religion, c. 1750−1900 (1996). Kent, J. H. S., Wesley and the Wesleyans (2002) Lenton, J., ed., Vital Piety and Learning [papers on Methodism and education, given at the 2002 Conference of the Wesley Historical Society] (WHS, 2004). Milburn, G. E., Primitive Methodism (2002). Newton, J. A., Susanna Wesley and the Puritan tradition in Methodism, 2nd edn (2002). Scarth, R., We’ll all be union men: the story of Joseph Arch and his union (1998). Turner, J. M., John Wesley: the evangelical revival and the rise of Methodism in England (2002).

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