SOURCE: Jay, Elisabeth. Introduction to The Journal of John Wesley: A Selection, edited by Elisabeth Jay, pp. xi-xxviii. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987.

[In the following essay, Jay discusses theJournal as a public document, and closely considers the rigorous self-examination evident in the work.]

In my way to Perth, I read over the first volume of Dr. Robertson's ‘History of Charles the Fifth’. I know not when I have been so disappointed. It might as well be called the History of Alexander the Great. Here is a quarto volume of eight or ten shillings' price, containing dry, verbose dissertations on feudal government, the substance of all which might be comprised in half a sheet of paper! But ‘Charles the Fifth’! Where is Charles the Fifth?

8 April 1772

The newcomer to Wesley's Journal could well be forgiven for experiencing the same kind of disappointment. A million or more words fail to yield an intimate glimpse of Wesley's private emotional life. The reader who relishes diaries for the delightful indiscretions, contemporary gossip, private malice, or personal soul-searching they can provide will find few such pleasures here. The reasons for this have to do with Wesley's temperament, the kind of life he led, and the type of document he was engaged in writing. It is perhaps easiest to explore these factors in reverse order.

The Journal was conceived as a public document which drew upon, but did not exactly replicate, the material in Wesley's personal diaries. The function of the diary which Wesley had begun to keep in 1725 was to provide a systematized method for spiritual self-examination and a record of the progress made in attempting to live the Christian life. The diary took the form of coded entries which preserved secrecy and made easier the regular charting of his moral and spiritual progress. Wesley imparted his diary-keeping method to at least fifteen other Methodists in Oxford and these records were sometimes produced and compared at meetings where discussion of individual spiritual progress took place. Even the diary, then, despite the secrecy lent by the code, was not an unambiguously private document.

In his Preface to the first number of the Journal Wesley explained how he had taken extracts from his diary, ‘adding here and there such little reflections as occurred to my mind. It not being my design to relate all those particularities, which I wrote for my own use only; and which would answer no valuable end to others, however important they were to me.’ Just as Wesley valued Methodism for being compatible with a variety of religious positions and personal opinions because it supplied a practical guide to faith rather than the only route to holiness, so he judged it unfitting to parade his personal prejudices in a work of encouragement for the faithful. Yet every page of the Journal, like first-generation Methodism itself, is shaped and coloured by Wesley's authoritarian personality and his absolute conviction of his duty to pronounce God's Word to whomever he encountered, be they rich or poor, willing or unwilling hearers, and to oversee the lives of all those whom he and his followers converted.

The Journal began as a public vindication of his doings, both at Oxford, where the Holy Club, of which he became the leading member, had been charged with self-destructive asceticism, and in America, which he had been forced to leave as a virtual outlaw. Wesley uses the Journal to record the part played by the example of Moravian teaching and practice upon his own daily endeavours to preach the religion of the heart. It remained a means of public communication, so that those who want to come closer to the Wesley whose confidences to and concern for his most devoted followers so disturbed his wife, may find richer quarry in his letters. Since the Journal was an extension to his mission Wesley did not hesitate to include edited accounts of riots or conversions of which he had not himself been a witness, yet he described the Journal as an attempt ‘to relate simple truth in as inoffensive a manner as I can’. The doggedly tenacious attention to reporting the truth as he saw it, which cannot fail to impress readers, derives, in part, from Wesley's allowing the Journal to stand as independent testimony, unaffected by the light of subsequent events. His friend and sometime collaborator, George Whitefield, withdrew some of the material in his seven journals, published between 1738 and 1741, before issuing a revised version in 1756. Wesley's Journal is, in effect, a textbook of the experiential religion he proclaimed, not a theological treatise. It contains the raw evidence of God's interceding on man's behalf, in sudden conversions, instant answer to prayer, and through the inexplicable, mysterious leadings of dreams, which remained close to the heart of Wesley's faith, along with the means of grace the Church provided. The passion for rational analysis which led him to tabulate possible explanations for these seemingly miraculous events should not blind us to the fact that this process ultimately took him back to admitting the limitations of the human intellect and the realization that behind all ‘natural causes’ stood the First Cause Himself. Designed, then, as an instrument of conversion the Journal also provided a handle for those who wished to resist what they saw as a dangerous new form of fanaticism.

Over the years the Journal also became an instrument for strengthening the cohesive force of Methodism, keeping an isolated community in touch with the progress other remote outposts were making in ‘the way of salvation’. It must also have become a means of exercising discipline and awarding praise or rebuke, since Wesley never minced his words when he encountered backsliding or laxity of conduct in the various societies whose spiritual health he so carefully monitored.

Wesley may not have relaxed his pastoral vigilance over the years from the first Methodist Conference in 1744 to his death in 1791, and he remained suspiciously alert for any signs that Methodism had become complacent with its undoubted growth in numbers and social acceptability, nevertheless the Journal does reveal a change of tone. Initially the reaction of relations and his former Oxford colleagues to his itinerant preaching encouraged Wesley to use the Journal as a forum in which to conduct a spirited defence. Gradually the element of personal apologia recedes and the Journal reads less like the communiqué from the leader of a persecuted society as Wesley finds time to record attendance at an oratorio by Handel or conversations with famous contemporaries like the Corsican patriot, General Paoli, or sight-seeing visits to country houses and gardens. Whilst he never lost his sense of the distance Methodism had travelled in his own lifetime, remarking on 27 December 1789:

I preached in St. Luke's, our parish church, in the afternoon, to a very numerous congregation, on ‘The Spirit and the Bride say, Come’. So are the tables turned, that I have now more invitations to preach in churches than I can accept of.

even he regarded it as worthy remark when on 19 February 1786 he ‘preached in Horsleydown church, where (to my no small surprise) no man, woman or child seemed to know me either by face or by name!’

These two entries were chosen to illustrate Wesley's consciousness of Methodism's changed fortunes, but coincidentally they also serve to suggest the way in which the manner of Wesley's life contributed to the curious impersonality of the Journal. Hundreds of entries began like these two by noting the date and place and text of a sermon, followed often by some brief note in which Wesley assesses the numbers attending, or attempts to gauge how effective his preaching has been. Few individuals emerge from the mass of his congregation and if they do, often appear as ‘a soldier’, ‘a butcher’, ‘the town crier’, ‘the Mayor’, ‘one who …’, not as individualized characters. Augustan literary convention, of course, plays a part here. Particularity and idiosyncrasy of appearance or manner were normally considered the prerogative of the satirist, and the descriptive writer was entitled to rely more heavily than our pluralist society permits upon the appeals to normative judgement contained in adjectives such as ‘pleasant’, ‘elegant’, ‘exceeding grand’, ‘very agreeable’, ‘foolish’. Yet at the end of the century Jane Austen, relying upon similar generic terms of praise or blame, managed to create distinctive characters, and so some other explanation needs to be sought. In the course of his travels Wesley must have met more men and women than almost any other man of his day, and, whilst he cared deeply for their souls, he rarely had the time to form intimate relationships. Indeed, on the few occasions that he records staying with particular friends he almost always reminds himself that he must be off and about God's business rather than luxuriating in private enjoyment. Dr Johnson testified both to Wesley's capacity to charm cultivated acquaintances and to the fact that Wesley never allowed himself to put pleasure before business, remarking, ‘John Wesley's conversation is good, but he is never at leisure. He is always obliged to go at a certain hour. This is very disagreeable to a man who loves to fold his legs and have out his talk, as I do.’ The life of an itinerant preacher, constantly needing to adjust to fresh faces and circumstances may well have reinforced a natural tendency to reticence in expressing private emotion. Though prompt to deliver judgments in his capacity as a spiritual leader, Wesley seldom allows us to witness inner reactions. The phrase ‘to my no small surprise’ in his account of his visit to Horsleydown is in fact a very terse expression which covers a range of possible emotions from an initial blow to his self-esteem to his consequent self-reproach for regarding himself as any more than a vehicle for God's message—an emotion perhaps hinted at in the final sentence of this entry: ‘But before I had done, many of the numerous congregation knew that God was there of a truth.’

Literary convention and necessary tact combined to restrain Wesley from exercising descriptive talents upon the people he met, but what of the places he visited? Travel writing was, after all, one of the most popular literary forms of the day. In the Journal Wesley mentions reading Johnson's Tour to the Western Isles of Scotland and Boswell's Tour to the Hebrides and Journal of a Tour to Corsica. In the course of his evangelizing work he travelled some quarter of a million miles, bringing the Gospel to new areas and then tirelessly revisiting to ensure that converts grew in the faith. Arminianism, which admitted the possibility of backsliding into perdition, placed a greater strain in this respect upon preacher and flock alike than did Calvinism. The Journal does contain some descriptive set-pieces such as Wesley's account of Georgia (December 1737, not reprinted here) or his comparison of the three great landscaped gardens at Stourhead, Cobham, and Stow (8-13 October 1779). These passages, however, are almost entirely devoid of the individual response to environment which lend the best travellers' tales their charm. Wesley's account of Georgia forms a practical guide to prevailing conditions for the aspiring emigrant, covering seasons, soils, crops, variety of terrain, chief settlements, and indigenous population. One looks in vain for aesthetic impressions. The second passage on gardens is a curious exercise. Wesley's appraisal is conducted in the manner of a balance sheet, assessing the natural advantages of the various sites, the landscape features of human contrivance and the choice of decorative building. The would-be visitor learns little from an account drawn up in a form which bears the hallmarks of Wesley's obsessional organizational talents. He allows that the overall prospect offered is of primary importance, but his judgment in favour of Stourhead is made according to idiosyncratic criteria: cleanliness and moral taste. There is perhaps an analogy to be drawn between Wesley's desire to see what had been so carefully nurtured preserved in pristine purity, and his perpetual supervision of the souls he had harvested. His objections to classically inspired statuary and temples which recalled less desirable aspects of pagan morality stems from his theocentric vision of life. Travelling the length and breadth of the kingdom Wesley kept constantly in mind the test, ‘For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also’, and invariably offered a comment upon the folly of human vanity when contemplating the money and effort expended by noblemen in building up estates frequently neglected or reworked by their heirs. To the modern reader these repeated epitaphs upon human endeavour are inclined to strike a sour note, but they are best seen, not as the product of cynicism, but as reflecting Wesley's desire to use every experience as part of his work for God. Contemporary projects served as well as graveyards and cathedral monuments as a memento mori. ‘Having a little leisure, I thought I could not employ it better than in taking a walk through the gardens.’ The deliberative phrase with which this passage opens demonstrates Wesley's habitual sense of accountability. He could endorse unreflective sight-seeing neither for himself nor his readers.

This heavy sense of responsibility often results in accounts of sight-seeing excursions purposely undertaken being the most disappointing. Consider for instance Wesley's remarks upon first seeing Land's End:

We went afterwards down, as far as we could go safely, toward the point of the rocks at the Land's-End. It was an awful sight! But how will these melt away, when God ariseth to judgment! The sea between does indeed ‘boil like a pot’. ‘One would think the deep to be hoary.’ But ‘though they swell, yet can they not prevail. He hath set their bounds, which they cannot pass.’

10 September 1743

Such a passage helps us to understand what Wesley meant when he wrote, ‘The Bible is my standard of language as well as sentiment’ (Letters, 1 April 1766), but would convey little in the way of the visual experience to a land-locked reader, though Wesley himself retained a clear enough memory to be able to comment on his second visit, ‘I cannot think but the sea has gained some hundred yards since I was here forty years ago’ (22 August 1785). Just occasionally Wesley happened upon a prospect so delightful or dramatic that he was driven to record it (e.g. 5 August 1747; 29 August 1765; 12 June 1778) but it is often possible for the reader to follow Wesley from Bath to Newcastle-upon-Tyne without any great awareness of the changing terrain. So accustomed was he to ceaseless travel that only the extraordinary merited mention: Cornish caves (15 September 1755), turfs cut from beneath the sand on the beach at Newport (14 July 1777) the largest elm-tree he has ever seen (11 October 1773) the observation that no singing birds were to be found in the vicinity of Dublin (3 July 1787). His taste was, in fact, that of an eighteenth-century gentleman and he would have found little to quarrel with in Alexander Pope's opinion:

In prospects thus, some objects please our eyes,
Which out of Nature's common order rise,
The shapeless rock, or hanging precipice.

Like Pope too, he approved of ‘Nature methodized’, whether in the form of agricultural advances or in elegantly landscaped gardens. His appreciation of the latter made the two trips to Holland undertaken towards the end of his life particularly pleasant, and after all the years of laborious travel he still hankered after the formal beauty of college gardens: ‘Thursday, 13 [October], 1785. Returning to Oxford, I once more surveyed many of the gardens and delightful walks. What is wanting but the love of God, to make this place an earthly paradise?’

The Hall at Christ Church, where he had spent his undergraduate days, continued to supply him with a standard of measurement when surveying country houses for the rest of his life. Indeed the comparisons that haunt the pages of the Journal seem to confirm the need Wesley's orderly mind felt to give some framework to the apparently random experiences of his disjointed life.

The endeavour to keep up with the punishing schedule of visits to scattered societies made the practical circumstances of the two or three sermons he preached each day seem more important than leisurely contemplation of the scenery. Wesley developed a good eye for sites which offered good natural acoustics, shade from the sun, or shelter from the rain, but would preach above a hog-sty if it proved the only available venue. The Journal comes into its own as an account of climatic conditions in England between 1738 and 1790. Wesley was undeterred by snow that made Gateshead Fell appear ‘a great pathless waste’ (23 February 1745) or rain that fell so heavily on his way to Wapping that it ‘put out the candle in our lantern’ and shattered the tiles of the chapel so ‘that the vestry was all in a float’ (17 November 1755). Two summers spent in Georgia remained his standard for judging extreme heat in England or Ireland.

For someone who had experienced the rigours of the eighteenth-century transatlantic crossing (January 1736), the Irish Sea could hold no worse threat. This was especially so because the absolute reliance upon Christ and contempt for mortal concerns that Wesley found after his conversion enabled him to emulate the serenity of the German voyagers he had so admired on the ship bound for America. (cf. January 1736 and 23 July 1750.)

If Wesley's spare, emphatic style did not lend itself to descriptive lyricism it served as the perfect tool for dramatic narrative. Amongst the many accounts of anti-Methodist riots and accidents sustained while travelling it is worth singling out two episodes which Wesley reported in detail: the Staffordshire riots of October 1743, and a potentially fatal coaching accident of 20 June 1774. In both Wesley conveys the rapid flow of events by means of a series of short sentences and clauses in which the verbs carry the weight of the action. The metaphors he employs gain cogency from their freshness and their comparative infrequency. Two angry Staffordshire rioters are ‘ready to swallow the ground with rage’. Stampeding horses career through a farmyard gate ‘as if it had been a cobweb’. Wesley's habit of giving a verbatim account of any dialogue, occasionally essaying dialect, lends immediacy and further verisimilitude to his accounts.

The dramatic tension of these and other similar episodes, however, derives not just from the danger in which Wesley found himself, but from the counterpointing of the impassive central figure with the raging forces without. Even when he is being dragged along by a mob or in imminent danger of being dashed over a precipice he emerges as the dominant figure, his calm assurance providing a tower of strength to frightened supporters or relatives. Time and again his thought processes and considered action are pitted in the narrative against the unreasoning, instinctive behaviour of the mob or nature itself.

The direct narration of these two particular events is followed by an analysis of ‘the remarkable circumstances’ which ensured his deliverance and produced ‘convincing proofs, that the hand of God is on every person and thing, over-ruling all as it seemeth him good’. Wesley has become an actor in God's divine drama. It is this consciousness of himself as playing a role in a drama written and stage-managed by God Himself that divests Wesley of self-consciousness. Reports of his own coolness in danger ‘finding the same presence of mind, as if I had been sitting in my own study’, that can seem boastful to the secular observer, are, for Wesley, merely an objective record of God's interposition on His servant's behalf. The almost inevitable alternation of these perspectives as one reads the Journal can make Wesley seem maddeningly self-obsessed at the very moment when his intention is to be self-effacing.

The Journal, like Wordsworth's Prelude, easily invites the charge of an ‘egotistical sublime’ in their authors. Wordsworth, setting out to describe the ‘Growth of a Poet's Mind’, inevitably found his own his most illuminating source and proceeded to make it the all-consuming object of his study. Wesley, intent on expounding ‘practical religion’ by demonstrating the ways of God to man, by a similar process emerged as the hero of his own epic. This decision to use his own life as an example of God's means of working out His purpose on earth sometimes makes Wesley's self-assessments read like a Headmaster's report, which for all its examination of character traits and actual progress made somehow fails to identify the features that make that child unique to friends and relations.

We are sometimes left with the feeling that for all his rigorous self-examination and self-discipline, either Wesley did not know himself very well, or chose to ignore certain aspects of his personality as running counter to the mould he believed God required.

The sins of ‘idleness’, of ‘intemperate sleep’, or ‘loving women or company more than God’, which his early Oxford Diaries record, scarcely distinguish Wesley from his contemporary, Dr Johnson. Moreover these are all faults of behaviour, capable of being easily identified and remedied by reorganizing the daily timetable. What is missing is the emotional life, the uncertainties and confusion of the uniquely personal reaction to the suspicion that one ‘loves women or company more than God’. Another early Diary entry sheds more light: ‘sins of thought: hence useless or sinful anger’. In religious parlance ‘useless’ can be interpreted as ‘not spiritually profitable’ rather than ‘pointless’. By implication time spent exploring these feelings would be further time wasted. The Journal, as first published, gives no hint of the vacillation that marked Wesley's successive emotional entanglements. Wesley did, in fact, write accounts of two very intense relationships with women, one with Sophia Hopkey which expedited his departure from Georgia, and the second in 1749 with Grace Murray. Since they reveal something of the inner turmoil taking place behind the relentless regime of daily travel, pastoral admonishment, and preaching I have included extracts in the form of appendices.

Although Sophia and Grace were from very different social backgrounds, the first being a niece to Savannah's chief magistrate, the second the widow of a master mariner, there was one remarkable similarity in their positions. Both were already involved with another suitor and in both cases the intimate, yet indecisive relationship with Wesley was only terminated by the woman marrying another man with dramatic speed. Wesley had reason to feel that the contract de praesenti that he twice made with Grace Murray was legally binding and a sufficient guarantee of his affections, nevertheless, in the face of Charles Wesley's importunate interference, she remained uncertain enough to be persuaded that John had in fact renounced her. Wesley's intimacy with both women developed out of his initial role as their spiritual guide and mentor and in what followed he seems never to have been able to distinguish between pastoral responsibility and human affection.

From Wesley's own vantage point this is wholly intelligible since any marriage could only be between two individuals who saw themselves primarily as God's servants. Whilst ‘Miss Sophy’ seemed to provide suitable material to work on—she is praised for her teachability, humility, and uncomplaining efforts to combat physical weakness—an eighteen-year old from one of the most prominent families in the area could scarcely be considered the ideal choice as wife for a man who thought himself committed to the rigours of missionary life. In Grace Murray Wesley had proof of a capable nurse, an indefatigable travelling companion and an efficient organizer of female Methodist bands. He failed to see that if he found her educational and social inferiority of no consequence, others would not. It was one thing for his converts and associates to accept the authority of an Oxford don who had chosen to make his chief work among the poor, but a very different matter to accept the authority and respect that Grace Murray would have to command as Wesley's wife rather than as a particularly favoured helper.

At one level, then, his records of these relationships read as extraordinary self-centred agonizings about the potential suitability of these women as wives, and yet they do also convey genuine human misery. In Miss Sophy's case the wounded lover emerges in the persistence with which he charges her with insincerity when he attempted to resume his role as pastor after her marriage. In Grace Murray's case perhaps more telling than the literary flourish with which he records his refusal to give his brother the emotional scene Charles so clearly desired (‘I felt little Emotion. It was only adding a drop of water to a drowning man.’) is the absence of explanation, excuse, or comment, with which he records what, in retrospect turned out to be the catastrophic moment of decision (‘I need add no more, then that if I had had more Regard for her I loved, than for y^e Work of God, I sh^d now have gone on strait to Newcastle, & not back to Whitehaven. I knew this was giving up all: But I knew GOD call'd’.). Instead the ensuing account of his journey to Whitehaven, which he published as part of his public narrative, acquires a quasi-symbolic status, telling us of the turmoil and pain which lay behind the oblique reticence of the terse record of his decision.

The storm was exceeding high, and drove full in my face, so that it was not without difficulty I could sit my horse; particularly as I rode over the broad, bare backs of those enormous mountains which lay in my way. However, I kept on as I could, till I came to the brow of Hatside. So thick a fog then fell, that I was quickly out of all road, and knew not which way to turn. But I knew where help was to be found, in either great difficulties or small.

It is scarcely surprising that neither Sophia nor Grace's husband found himself able to tolerate Wesley's continued pastoral supervision of his wife since Wesley never seems to have recognized the distinction between spiritual and emotional reproof.

One cannot doubt Wesley's desire to be honest in his records of these incidents, yet it is difficult not to convict him of culpable naïveté and, what is perhaps the same thing, a lack of imaginative sympathy. Sophy's uncle was clearly anxious to marry her off and if Wesley could not be got up to scratch then both the girl and her relations must have seen that her eligibility would not be enhanced by a continuation of this dangerous intimacy. A member of the Newcastle Methodist society was exceptionally forthright in expressing the disrepute into which Wesley's conduct with Grace was in danger of bringing the movement. ‘Good God! What will the world say: He is tired of her, and so thrusts his whore into a corner! Sister Murray, will you consent to this?’ True unworldliness might blind Wesley to social pressures such as these, but far more disturbing is the almost total absence of comment on the difficulties and emotional confusion his prospective brides must have been experiencing. He seems constantly surprised that Sophy might be depressed by her position between an engagement to a ne'er-do-well, devotion to a man whose expressions of love were always ambiguous, and the solid offer from Mr Williamson, ‘a person’ according to Wesley's biased eye, ‘not remarkable for handsomeness, neither for greatness, or knowledge, or sense, and least of all for religion’. It is easy to feel sympathy for the injured pride behind Mrs Williamson's response to a third party's advice to her to go and clear herself of the offences Wesley had charged her with in openly refusing to admit her to Holy Communion earlier that day: ‘No, I will not show such meanness of spirit as to speak to him about it myself, but somebody else shall.’

The way in which Wesley managed to continue with the strenuous demands of his daily life during and after these episodes have led most commentators to detect an essential coldness about the man: ‘granite in aspic’ as V. H. H. Green so strikingly phrased it. This variety of personal criticism bears an interesting relationship to a strand of socially concerned commentary which sees in Methodism a force delaying urgently needed humanitarian reforms. In both cases it appears that concentrating upon a dimension beyond time, God's eternal plans, can encourage a myopia akin to indifference about present tribulation. In later years Wesley was to claim that his resignation stemmed from a God-given evenness of temper. ‘I feel and I grieve; but, by the grace of God I fret at nothing’ (28 June 1776). His puritanical upbringing in the Rectory at Epworth (Journal, 1 August 1742), where children of a year and under ‘were taught to fear the rod, and to cry softly’, probably had much to do with this emotional self-control, and in any case the vagaries of weather, accommodation, and transport which Wesley constantly encountered would have made such stoicism a necessary survival mechanism. Furthermore, the absolute conviction of God's special providence watching over him enabled Wesley to accept obstacles, upsets, and enforced changes of plan as evidence that all things work together for good to them that love Him.

Nevertheless, when we hear Wesley repeatedly attributing his longevity to a firm routine, undisturbed patterns of sleep, and unfailing equanimity, we cannot but be aware that the Journal sometimes tells another tale. Sleepless nights are rare enough to deserve recording, but occur they do, and the equable temperament reigned just as long as Wesley's will or perception of God's will went unchallenged. Spending his life almost exclusively amongst the less well-educated and socially inferior accustomed Wesley to unquestioning acceptance of his decisions and in turn he developed the omnicompetence of a paternalistic dictator, entirely sure of his own judgement in matters spiritual, medical, or architectural. The following account of a visit to the society at Deptford seems to convey Wesley's manner particularly succinctly.

Tuesday, January 2, 1787. I went over to Deptford; but it seemed, I was got into a den of lions. Most of the leading men of the society were mad for separating from the Church. I endeavoured to reason with them, but in vain; they had neither sense nor even good manners left. At length, after meeting the whole society, I told them, ‘If you are resolved, you may have your services in church-hours; but remember, from that time you will see my face no more.’ This struck deep; and from that hour I have heard no more of separating from the Church.

The image of Daniel cast into the lions' den and the language in which the ultimatum is couched suggest that not only did the Bible supply Wesley with a working vocabulary but that, by this stage in his life, his self-assimilation into the world of the prophets had become almost complete. Any fleeting picture of a leonine prophet distinguished by straggling white locks and contempt for conventional clothing should, however, be instantly dismissed. Despite, or perhaps because of, his itinerant life Wesley remained fastidious about his appearance. This excerpt proves the prophetic role to have been entirely compatible, in Wesley's case, with the mental set of an eighteenth-century gentleman. Suspicious of ‘enthusiasm’ (an eighteenth-century synonym for ‘fanaticism’) Wesley resorts first to the powers of reason and, when those fail, takes his stand upon courtesy and civilized behaviour. When it becomes apparent that he cannot rely upon the assumptions underlying reasonable discussion or polite social intercourse, then he feels justified in treating the leaders of the Deptford society as children, and there is a grim satisfaction in the way he records his complete quelling of the dispute.

If the world was Wesley's parish, his flock was his family. Those who carped when the childless Wesley presumed to preach upon the upbringing of children swiftly had their argument dismissed as a feeble quibble, but perhaps their complaint had some force to it. Despite his marriage to a widow with children Wesley retained in many ways the cast of mind of a bachelor don, devoted to his pupils, endlessly prepared to draw up reading lists and give the necessary instruction to his largely uneducated preaching assistants and stewards, yet never entirely prepared to recognize that they had metaphorically speaking ‘come of age’ and might be entitled to make decisions that differed from his. In the early years Wesley's acknowledgments of the success others achieved in their preaching was often accompanied by an expression of surprise at the use God can make of those with little education and small natural talents. With those he had trained himself the teacher-pupil relationship was rarely outgrown. The constant awareness of playing for eternal stakes made it well-nigh impossible to allow others to make their own mistakes.

The delegation of responsibility could only be limited when Wesley remained supremely conscious that at the end he would be accountable for the souls he saved. Just occasionally towards the end of his life the sheer immensity of the task of personal supervision required over an ever-growing flock seems to have struck Wesley, as in this entry about one of his pet projects, the school at Kingswood.

Friday, September 7, 1781. I went over to Kingswood, and made a particular inquiry into the management of the school, I found some of the Rules had not been observed at all; particularly that of rising in the morning. Surely Satan has a peculiar spite at this school! What trouble has it cost me for above these thirty years! I can plan; but who will execute? I know not; God help me!

Kingswood seems to have given joy and pain about equally over the years, but in other cases it is difficult to assess whether a local society had a self-perpetuating character or whether Wesley quickly developed self-confirming expectations which marked certain societies out as either promising or recalcitrant disciples. A visit to Witney, for instance, never failed to raise his spirits, whilst the society at Norwich became a byword for fickleness and backsliding.

Perhaps finally Wesley was isolated from others by his passion for committing his thoughts to paper. Letters and diaries became perforce his chief means of communication both with those to whom he was bound by the closest ties and with mere acquaintances. The ease with which modern devices like the telephone can restore a form of direct contact makes us less aware of the temptations of solipsism ever open to those who make the written word their chief medium. Wesley's humour, as sparsely conveyed by the Journal entries, seems to have been intrinsically self-communing. His shafts of irony or perceptions of the pathos of human eccentricities seem to be the product of a mind that knows that his immediate companions will probably not share his taste for understatement and veiled wit. Against this, however, must be set the memorial tribute of Samuel Bradburn, a constant travelling companion of Wesley's for some seventeen years, who claimed that, ‘Few men had a greater share of vivacity, when in company with those he loved, especially on his journies.’ Recalling Wesley's efforts to cheer fellow travellers in moments of hardship, Bradburn also spoke of his ‘almost inexhaustible fund of stories and anecdotes, adapted to all kinds of people, and to every occurrence in life’.

Wesley's passion for observation, his educated yet eclectic interest in everything he saw, mean that the social history embedded in the Journal almost compensates for its obdurate silence on more personal matters. In the course of his itinerant ministry, undertaken at first by foot or on horseback and later by the post-chaise purchased for him by his friends, he visited Ireland on twenty-one occasions, and regularly penetrated England's other Celtic fringes. Perhaps even more significant was the triangle he habitually described between the three main centres of Methodism: Bristol, Newcastle, and London. This journey between great trading ports encompassed also the areas of swiftest change, industrially speaking. Although characteristically the Journal speaks more of orphanages, workhouses, and jails than of visits to factories, Wesley found himself in a peculiarly favourable position for collecting data and refuting current demographical mythology. In 1776 he tried two methods of assessing the population (1 May and 9 September) and came to the triumphant conclusion that England's population was increasing rather than decreasing and that talk of a decline in rural areas ran against the evidence as he saw it. Unemployment in particular areas and trades also concerned Wesley in as much as it affected the welfare of his flock. Although he welcomed upper and middle class converts, the lower classes remained his chief concern. For all his reputation as a Tory paternalist, he expended much effort on enabling the lower classes to be self-sufficient in relieving the needs of their own class. The publication of his Primitive Physick; or an Easy and Natural Method of Curing Most Diseases (1747), which ran to twenty-three editions in his lifetime, must have gone some way to freeing poor Methodists either from dependence for treatment of their ailments, (upon the squire or parson's family) or from fees payable to the physicians and apothecaries whom Wesley by and large distrusted. Wesley seems to have placed enormous faith in the beneficial effects of being ‘electrified daily’ and between 1756 and 1758 set up four machines in London alone for this purpose.

The Journal does record Wesley's reaction to such major political events as the Jacobite rising of 1745 and the American War of Independence, but it remains more interesting for the impression it offers of the way in which such events affected people's daily domestic lives. During the '45, rumour and fear were rife, and Wesley found himself in beleaguered Newcastle. Despite his own frequently proclaimed loyalty to the reigning monarch, Wesley and his itinerant preachers formed easy targets for the press-gang, and everywhere the Journal gives testimony to the influential presence of the militia in many a major port and town.

The incidental vignettes of the rougher side of eighteenth-century life: bull-baiting, Cornish smuggling, highway robberies, or the record of a journey to London on 22 July 1779 where, ‘I was nobly attended; behind the coach were ten convicted felons, loudly blaspheming and rattling their chains; by my side sat a man with a loaded blunderbuss, and another upon the coach’—all help to explain why Evelyn Waugh alighted on Wesley's life as a suitable vehicle for his account of the making of the sensationally awful religious film, ‘A Brand from the Burning’ in Vile Bodies (1930). On its first showing a peculiar feature of early cinematographic technique results in the film getting faster and faster whenever dramatic action like riots or elopements takes place, whereas any scene of repose or inaction seems unendurably prolonged. Finally even the film's most enthusiastic shareholder feels compelled to cut a bit ‘after Wesley had sat uninterrupted composing a pamphlet for four and a half minutes’.

In making a selection which roughly decimates Wesley's own composition, I have tried for a mean between these two extremes of the frenetic and wholly fragmentary and the longeurs of mere place names, sermon titles, and polemical pamphlet material. By scything ruthlessly through doctrinal controversy I have inevitably underplayed one element of Wesley's life, and some will undoubtedly feel that in attempting to tailor the work for that Protean figure ‘the general reader’ I have come dangerously near catering for the tastes of George Eliot's character, Mrs Linnet, who,

On taking up the biography of a celebrated preacher … immediately turned to the end to see what disease he died of; and if his legs swelled, as her own occasionally did, she felt a stronger interest in ascertaining any earlier facts in the history of the dropsical divine—whether he had ever fallen off a stage-coach, whether he had married more than one wife … She then glanced over the letters and diary, and wherever there was a predominance of Zion, the River of Life, and notes of exclamation, she turned over to the next page; but any passages in which she saw such promising nouns as ‘small-pox’, ‘pony’, or ‘boots and shoes’, at once arrested her.

Nor can this selection do complete justice to Wesley's voracious reading habits. In choosing which of his comments on the books he read to reprint I settled on the policy of confining attention, in the main, to those books which became classics and where we therefore have both the means and the interest to assess Wesley's judgment for ourselves. Whenever I have felt unduly awed by the temerity of this enterprise I have comforted myself by recollecting Wesley's own habit of abridging and editing any books which he felt should enjoy a wider readership and by turning to an entry for 17 February 1769 which reads ‘I abridged Dr. Watts's pretty “Treatise on the Passions”. His hundred and seventy-seven pages will make a useful tract of four-and-twenty. Why do persons who treat the same subjects with me, write so much larger books?’