110 Wesley and the Wesleyans
years before, had accepted the secondary theological formu-
lae taught her by the Wesleys, and had enjoyed experiences
which she was encouraged to regard as confirming what she
had been told. She was aware of a sexual element in what was
going on, but did not think this was out of her control. She
does not seem, to use Felicity Nussbaum’s expression, to re-
ject the dependent character which men were imposing on her.
There is a further clue, however, to her outlook. Halfpenny
wrote that her business called her among ‘fashionable people
of the world’,
12
who tried to persuade her not to listen to the
Wesleyan preachers.
13
She was almost certainly unmarried,
supporting herself in one of the trades which supplied the
needs of the fashionable, or at any rate some of the better-
off, people in Bristol. Her situation, it may be supposed, was
vulnerable, and in the primary religious tradition she turned
first to Whitefield, then to the Wesleys, as sources of support-
ing power. She had accepted the support which her religious
adventures seemed to provide. Although this clearly meant a
high degree of dependence on the Wesleys at the time when
Halfpenny was writing, her emotional relationship with them
formed only part of what was ha ppening.
Some of these themes are repeated in the case of Elizabeth
Sayce.
14
Hereagain the first contacts had beenwith Whitefield,
and she reacted as Halfpenny did to Charles Wesley’s saying
that ‘we deserve to be damned ...I thought I might be ex-
cepted, thinkingthat Iwas notso badas awhoreor adrunkard.’
Nevertheless, she came round to the view that she was wicked,
‘in so much that when I went to bed, I feared I should be in Hell
before the morning. I was afraid to go to prayer for fear of the
Devil, who I thought was in every corner of the house ...’
15
Sayce’s record makes the interplay between the primary ex-
ploitation of Christianity and the official religion very clear:
for her, to be stirred religiously legitimated a vivid fear of