Kent J. Wesley and the Wesleyans: Religion in Eighteenth-Century Britain

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44 Wesley and the Wesleyans

forgive his mentors. He criticised them endlessly and bitterly,

both for their Calvinist tendencies and for their ‘stillness’, the

habit of waiting until one was certain of a divine prompting

before passing on to action. Baptist growth always suffered

when it reached that large section of the population which

preferred infant baptism, a sacr ament long established as a

rite of passage.

A Protestant institutional renewal of conﬁdence, to which

the Methodists contributed, did take place, but the explanation

of what happened lies largely at a secular level. Protestantism

as a world movement recovered to a remarkable extent from

its hard-pressed situation in the 1690s, when the Counter-

Reformation states still seemed to have it in their power to put

an end to serious opposition. The change in Protestant for-

tunes was military and political rather than religious. Prussia,

ﬁrmly under the control of the Hohenzollern family, became

an aggressive Protestant state, bent on reorganising Germany

politically to its own material advantage, and on reducing the

power of the Roman Catholic Habsburgs to the south-east

and of Catholic France to the west. Hanoverian England,

with its German Protestant royal family, solidly supported

the Prussians. A decline in political and military power af-

fected European Roman Catholicism, which began to look

soft-centredby the 1740s,though itwas only during the French

Revolution that the Vatican discovered how weak its grasp on

European culture and society had become, and how deep ran

civil resentment against the political power and form of its

institutions. Women would rescue the Roman Catholicism

which men had mismanaged, but Europe would not revert

completely to the ancien regime.

In England Anglicanism slowly strengthened its grip on

the political community under the ﬁrst two Georges, and this

meant that Protestantism gradually identiﬁed itself with a new

Early Wesleyanism: 1740–1770 45

British nationalism.

For the time being Roman Catholicism

in England could survive and slightly increase, but it could not

prosper. Neither the Stuart dynasty nor the Roman Catholic

ChurchrestoreditsformerpositioninEngland–apoliticalfact

which had become obvious by 1745, when the new Wesleyan

societiesrejectedtheJacobiteinvasion.Britain gaveProtestant

culture a potentially vast new powerhouse by the completion

of the conquest of North America at the expense of the French,

and here, unlike Ireland and Scotland, the American provinces

proved fertile gr ound for the Wesleyan itiner ants. In turn the

political and economic strength of Britain and the new United

States would rapidly enable Protestant missionary societies,

including the new Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society,

ofﬁcially founded in 1818, to compete with Catholic mission-

ary orders in much of the world outside Europe. One of the

stranger examples of competition was the Wesleyan campaign

to establish societies in France: this was no more successful

than the earlier campaign in Catholic Ireland.

The Pr otestant crisis ended by 1815, and it is evident that

the Protestant churches had beneﬁted as much from economic,

military and political change as they did from the First and

Second Great Awakenings in America and from the spread of

Wesleyanism in Britain itself.

George Whiteﬁeld (1714–70)

visited the American Colonies seven times, going particularly

to New England. The First Awakening certainly reinforced

Protestantism as the dominant form of American religion; it

ran parallel with the ﬁrst Wesleyan generation from the 1740s

to the 1770s, but the overall effect was divisively disastrous.

Whiteﬁeld encouraged a predominantly Calvinist tone,

hostile to the Wesleyan holiness movement but equally

concerned to produce ecstatic conversion experiences. The

revivals split both the Baptists and the Presbyterians, because

of the number of American ministers who were open to the

46 Wesley and the Wesleyans

inﬂuence of new philosophical ideas: Harvard, after all, had

been founded in the seventeenth century. As in England, the

intelligentsia,smallthoughit was,urban,andnot yetpowerful,

was questioning the orthodox Christian account of a virtuous

life, of how one should behave if one wanted to become a

good man or woman. At the same time American intellectuals

moved steadily towards the radical view that the modern state

had its own foundation, independent of organised religion,

in a concept of the freedom of the mind which guaranteed

citizens equality whatever their religious allegiance or lack of

one. The federal constitution accepted the supremacy of di-

vine justice, but gave no speciﬁc Church the authority to deﬁne

either justice or the structure of American citizenship. This

amounted to a dissent from Dissent itself, and was in line with

David Hume ’s opinion that there was no method of reasoning

more common, nor more blamable, ‘than in public debates to

endeavour to refute any hypothesis by a pretext of its dan-

gerous consequences to religion and morality’.

Wesleyan

preachers came into the picture about 1760, but they made no

attempt to place the new Wesleyan societies in subjection to

the Anglican hierarchy in the Colonies. The itinerants sent

from England sometimes longed, as we have seen, to take the

dynastic side in the American struggle, but they knew that

the majority of American Wesleyans wanted separation from

the Anglican establishments.

The movement played a much larger role in the Second

Awakening, which remains even more controversial than the

First, and lasted from about 1800 to the 1840s.

Both re-

vivals depended heavily on acting as channels for primary

religious energies, and Wesleyan holiness preaching featured

prominently after 1800 . These revivals did not revive or re-

form Anglicanism: they often gave a Wesleyan character to

Northern Irish and German Protestants who had emigr ated to

Early Wesleyanism: 1740–1770 47

America, and who had no interest in an Americanised Church

of England. By the 1770s in England itself even the monar-

chical party of Lord North no longer thought that religious

uniformity was necessary to national identity. There is no

need to suggest a temporary loss of nerve on the part of the

Anglicanelites,whetherin England or in America, as Jonathan

Clark has done.

In neither country was there a confessional

state, one in which membership of the Church automatically

deﬁned one as a subject of the state, and being a subject equally

deﬁned one as owing a duty to the established Church.

If one goes back to the 1740s, then, Wesleyanism may be

interpreted not as a revival of primitive Christianity (one of

Wesley’s favourite descriptions) but as an attempt to redeﬁne

Anglicanism, and even to restore Anglican clerical claims to

authority over the laity. Wesleyan evangelism did not stop

at the conversion of the individual, but required the bonding

together of the converts, ﬁrst into small classes, some for men

and some for women, with leaders drawn from their mem-

bers; and second into societies of which the ﬁnal oversight

remained in the hands of the Wesleys and their handful of

clerical helpers. Ideally these societies might have become the

parish, and then a kind of social revolution would have taken

place, but this was only possible where the incumbent sympa-

thized with the Wesleyans, a situation Wesley made less likely

by his steady attacks on Anglican moder ate Calvinists, as well

as on Dissenters and Moravians. The idea of reforming the

Church of England did not have a wide social appeal, if such

a reform implied the strengthening of the claims of the local

parish to play a decisive role in deﬁning, governing, and in

some cases even policing society. (Such a struggle for control

lay at the root of the eighteenth century’s inability to organise

effective poor relief on a parochial basis.) This was not so

much a lack of faith as a pragmatic lack of faith in the value of

48 Wesley and the Wesleyans

faith. Those who ﬂowed naturally into the new Wesleyan so-

cieties were less obsessed with professional, clerical direction

than with primary religious impulses, which responded less

freely to the idea of salvation from hell than to the guarantee

of survival and happiness in the here and now.

So if one asks the familiar question – why did the Wesleyan

movement succeed in the 1740 s? – one encounters the tra-

ditional response that the country had become corrupted by

deism, immorality and social insubordin ation, against all of

which the evangelical revival came as a triumphant reaction.

What is really fascinating about this explanation is not only

that as late as the 1820 s in north Somerset a parish priest like

John Skinner and his bishop (George Law, of Bath and Wells)

were still repeating the same list of the forces that had de-

stroyed the cohesion of society, but that they now added to it

as a clincher the evangelical passion with which both Primitive

Methodist local preachers and evangelical Anglican parsons

asserted their certainty that they knew they had been saved.

Neither education nor ignorance, thought Law and Skinner,

who were both High Churchmen, justiﬁed this willingness to

contradict the teaching of the clergy and the bishops.

Nevertheless, one can still quote a history textbook of the

1990s which states that ‘what the hungry and lost sheep needed

was a message of salvation, rooted in hope and directed at

the heart. They might never have received that message, and

indeed Christianity might conceivably havelost its hold on the

bulkofEnglishmenandwomenentirelybythe end oftheeight-

eenth century, but for the beginning, in the 1730s, of what we

now know as the Evangelical Revival.’

This view should

be balanced against a version of eighteenth-century religious

history which starts from the assumption that the many drives

which constantly go to produce religious behaviour would

have operated in eighteenth-century England even if the

Early Wesleyanism: 1740–1770 49

‘revival’ had not taken place. Neither poverty nor emotional

crises were about to disappear, and neither medicine as it was

nor miracle as it might have been freed the population from

the knowledge of death.

Moreover, English radical philosophy in the tr adition of

John Locke (1632–1704), Samuel Clarke (1675 –1729), Shaftes-

bury and Hutcheson offered no direct threat to eighteenth-

century primary religion, as distinct from Christian theology.

‘Deism’ has become too uncertain a term over the years to

be very useful: radicalism is more inclusive. It is true that

these writers dismissed any simple idea of a divine personality

willing to intervene in the affairs and emotions of individuals.

They reacted against any institutionalised theological system

which might generate or justify social or political passion, a

reaction against the perceived results of Christianity in the bit-

ter wars of the seventeenth century. This did not mean there

were grounds for claiming that theological radicalism cor-

rupted society: to encourage a more sensitive, self-conscious

attitude to morality, to advocate scepticism about witchcraft,

to protest against the theological dogmatism of the Churches –

none of this struck at the r oot of civilised behaviour.

In any case, these philosophers’ views did not touch the

majority of ordinary people in the ﬁrst half of the eighteenth

century. The world in which the Wesleyans ﬂourished be-

lieved that criticism of Christianity was being refuted by a

visible display of divine power in everyday life. At the same

time the settling down of an ofﬁcially Protestant culture meant

that most people no longer turned to local Roman Catholic

saints to ask for divine intervention, and this was important,

because the well-known images of these men and women had

in the past made it easier for many people to grasp the no-

tion of appealing to a quasi-human intermediary with special

powers of intercession qualiﬁed to bring help. It is not fanciful

50 Wesley and the Wesleyans

to see in the Wesleys and Whiteﬁeld in the early part of their

careers men whowere, unconsciously,playing something sim-

ilar to the role of the saint who served his faithful petitioners.

Whenthe earlynineteenth-century WesleyanpainterMarshall

Claxton (1813–81) painted a picture of The Mobbing of John

Wesley at Wednesbury, an event of the 1740s, the mob might be

described as Hogarthian but Wesley, pale, calm and uplifted,

seems to come from another world. Claxton’s version of what

had become myth by the 1840 s still hinted at the original rela-

tionship between the leader and the led.

The paradox of the origins of early Welseyanism lies in the

role which primary religion played. Writing about Ludwig

Feuerbach, the nineteenth-century German philosopher of

religion who emphasised the creative part played by the pop-

ular imagination in the primitive shaping of Christianity, the

American scholar Van A. Harvey, observed:

the ordinary believer wants a deliverer, a superhuman power which

can set aside and overcome the inexorability of necessity and fate, that

can save and redeem. The ordinary believer is not interested in abstract

beliefs and doctrines, except in so far as these articulate the faith that the

godsarecommitted to the well-beingofthecreature.Consequently,the

interpreter of religion must acknowledge that petitionary prayer and

worship, belief in miracles and deliverance from suffering and death

are the core of religion even if theologians are normally embarrassed

by this naive piety.

The Moravians, Wesleyans, Whiteﬁeldites and other groups

which prospered with the return of Protestant political self-

conﬁdence tolerated the kind of demand which Harvey de-

scribes, and happily absorbed into their experience what both

moderate Anglicans and radical intellectuals regarded as a

mixture of superstition and delusion.

For example, when John Wesley preached at Spen, eight

miles south-west of Newcastle upon Tyne, on 17 November

Early Wesleyanism: 1740–1770 51

1743, on the text ‘Christ Jesus our wisdom, righteousness,

sanctiﬁcationand redemption’, herecorded that he hadseldom

seen an audience so greatly moved since the time of his ﬁrst

preaching at Bristol.

Men, women and children wept, and groaned, and trembled exceed-

ingly. Many could not contain themselves in those bounds but cried

with a loud and bitter cry. It was the same at the meeting of the soci-

ety, and likewise in the morning, while I was showing the happiness

of those ‘whose iniquities are forgiven, and whose sin is covered’

(Romans 1: 7). I afterwards spoke with twelve or fourteen of them

severally, and found good ground to believe that God had given them

to ‘taste of the good word and of the powers of the world to come ’.

A subculture of tears and cries and of ‘the powers of the

world to come ’: this, not abstract beliefs and doctrines, in an

atmosphere radically unlike that of the parish church, reﬂects

not only Harvey’s comment, but Feuerbach’s understanding

of the power of the small community to generate its own

religious images, rites and music.

Scholars sometimes argue that Wesleyanism began as

part of the gradual expansion of pietist inﬂuence from

the late seventeenth century into the 1730s throughout the

Protestant world.

Professional historians have become no-

ticeably cautious about interpreting, as distinct from record-

ing, eighteenth-century religious material. They hesitate to go

beyond reporting the pietist explanations of the spread of new

religious movements given at the time, according to which

what were called revivals were the results of ‘extr aordinary

outpourings of the Spirit’, for which God rather than man

took the responsibility. In later life John Wesley was fond of

recalling how, years before, ‘two young men without a name,

without friends, without either power or fortune, set out from

Collegewithprinciples totally different fromthose of thecom-

mon people, to oppose all the world, learned and unlearned’.

52 Wesley and the Wesleyans

This was a pardonably romantic view of the past. It is

evident fr om what we have already said that Wesley’s reli-

gious principles did not differ totally from those of the com-

mon people. The reverse was also tr ue, and played a large

part in his success. As for the ‘world’, he had a ﬂuctuating

relationship with the beau monde or ‘society’, where early

Methodism sometimes featured as a fashionable subject of the

season, though the greater outcast was George Whiteﬁeld,

who remained the prime symbol of Methodism until his death

in 1770. Whiteﬁeld was the target of a succession of stage

satires, the best known of which – The Minor, by Samuel

Foote – was ﬁrst put on the London stage as late as 1760.

As for the ‘learned’, Wesley faced personal episcopal criti-

cism almost from the start, but the serious public attacks come

later: George Lavington (1684–1762), the bishop of Exeter,

published The Enthusiasm of the Methodists and the Papists

Compared in 1749–51, and William Warburton (1698–1779)

published The Doctrine of Grace, which was directly aimed at

the Wesleyan cult of the Holy Spirit, as late as 1762.

Intellectual opponents of Christianity itself concentrated

their attacks on the doctrine of the Trinity or the authority of

the text of the Bible. Wesley did not ‘oppose all the world’

nor was he entirely without friends: he exaggerated his isola-

tion when he agreed to go to Bristol in 1740, where George

Whiteﬁeld had been before him, but he could claim that in the

ﬁeld of the ‘learned’ he had had almost from the beginning

to resist clerical attack from all denomin ations. On the other

hand, he used this opposition to justify his own divisive tactics,

insisting on the importance of loyalty to himself and on the

moral insufﬁciency of the theology of his competitors.

It is easy to underrate the value of the ﬂexibility of the

Church of England, which, for all the talk of opposition, never

formally expelled the Wesleyans, and tolerated the virtual

Early Wesleyanism: 1740–1770 53

institutionalisation of the evangelicals Anglican towards the

end of the century. Anglicanism could not be accurately de-

ﬁned in terms of either the High Church or the evangelical

prescriptions, and scepticism about these distinctions was lay-

ing the foundations of Anglican liberalism in its turn. There

had been an Anglican war of labels ever since the sixteenth

century. The Church of England had been invented to save the

country from the external authority and absolutist opinions

of Rome, and this remained its most useful function.

The Anglican authorities could have legitimised Wesleyan

activities, but two problems prevented this. First, in the vital

early years ofﬁcial recognition could have come about only

on Wesley’s terms; and second, the episcopate did not accept

Wesley, then or later, as entitled to lay down the nature of

Anglican theology, either on justiﬁcation or on sanctiﬁcation,

or as qualiﬁed to make dismissive statements about the state of

the souls of swathes of the Anglican clergy. Wesleyan preach-

ing attacked the individual directly and aimed at changing the

hearer’s consciousness. You are a sinner, you cannot change

yourself into the righteous person whom God alone will ad-

mit to heaven. You need divine forgiveness: without it you are

damned. (Persistent attempts to argue that itinerant preaching

did not depend heavily on the threat of damnation are uncon-

vincing.) You can have forgiveness now, through faith in the

sacriﬁcial death of Jesus Christ. And you can know that you

have been forgiven, because the Holy Spirit will tell you so.

However brieﬂy, you will be ﬁlled with ecstasy.

Wesley’s tactics went too far for Anglican opinion. His

willingness to say that anyone was personally free at this mo-

ment to respond to the offer of justiﬁcation contradicted the

widely held assumption that theologically the sinner had no

choice, being either divinely chosen or not chosen. Uninten-

tionally, Wesley anticipated the general direction in which