SOURCE: Maddox, Graham. “Introduction: Methodism and Politics.” In Political Writings of John Wesley, pp. 9-41. Bristol, England: Thoemmes Press, 1998.

[In the following essay, Maddox discusses Wesley's attitudes toward the plight of the poor, slavery, and the capitalist system.]

If the two-party system is the paradigm case of parliamentary democracy in the modern world, then the influence of the Methodist movement upon emergent modern democracy is almost measureless. Founded in the 1730s by Charles and John Wesley, Methodism set the course not only for the modern Labour Party but also the organizations which nurtured it, namely the Chartist, Adult Education and Trade Union movements. Even down to the present generation, that influence on party politics is regularly acknowledged. In their manifesto and collection of Tawney lectures, Reclaiming the Ground. Christianity and Socialism, written by influential Christian socialists associated with the Labour Party, no fewer then three of the authors chose to recall that ‘The Labour Party owes more to Methodism than to Marxism’.¹ The late lamented John Smith extended the truism to the Wesleyan influence on the Party of the Anglican, William Temple,² an association which emphasizes that Wesley remained an Anglican clergyman to the end of his life. Hilary Armstrong was most explicit about the Methodist connection:³

Because Methodism underlined the importance both of the nature of community on earth and of self-improvement, ordinary men and women were assisted not just by the ideas of faith, but by the real experience of community alongside the real experience of self-improvement. For very many working people the Methodist Church was their moral and practical university where they learnt what would now be termed ‘life skills’ as well as faith. People learnt to speak and work through ideas in public, within the organisation they learnt to represent the views and opinions of others, above all they learnt to have the confidence to run their own organisation to work for the community.⁴

Clearly the process by which such skills were acquired was characteristically democratic.

The great paradox in all of this is that John Wesley had no democratic sympathies at all. Clergyman and evangelist, he had no interest in political change. High churchman and high Tory, he adjured his followers to quiet obedience. Democracy had no part either in his wishes for society at large or for the Methodist societies. The Methodists ‘are no republicans, and never intend to be’.⁵ Yet it was inevitable that Wesley's mission should have huge democratic implications. It was addressed almost exclusively to the poor, among whom he was influential in spreading liberal and humane, as well as deeply religious, ideals. At the centre of his preaching was the claim that each individual person should render an account of his or her life to God, to be responsible for his or her own actions, and to make a free choice for good or evil.

His society's discipline extended to each last person, who was drawn into a regular articulation of the events and choices of his or her life, and into a regular confession in the ‘band’ to which each had to belong. If there were strong liberal implications in the individual responsibility each had to bear, none was left in isolation. An individual could only be truly so within the support system of the class, the band and the congregation set up by the Methodist society. Its taut, complex structure, devised by Wesley under the pressure of circumstance, was subsequently adopted by the Chartist movement and, eventually, by the Labour Party itself.

Yet the influence of Methodism was not simply organizational or educational. Many of the Methodists who became involved in political action did so out of a sense of divine mission. As Methodists, their first and final concern was to save souls; yet Wesley never left any doubt that the saving of souls intimately involved the care of bodies. Adverse social and economic conditions which fettered the bulk of humanity in a prison of poverty were constantly the object of his attack. The rich were responsible for the existence of poverty—a very biblical interpretation of social conditions.⁶ While Wesley feared the possible revolutionary implications of democracy, people who read his works in the later age of full industrialization could scarcely encounter his attacks on poverty and his censures of the rich without adapting them to political action within and against the class system, with which he never explicitly engaged.

To the question of Wesley's unintended democratic influence we shall return shortly. First it is well briefly to locate the events of his life in context.

THE LIFE OF JOHN WESLEY

John Wesley was born in the rectory of Epworth in Lincolnshire on 17 June 1703. His father, Samuel, was a vicar whose unbending righteousness and attempts to impose it upon his parishioners had incurred their wrath on numerous occasions, which they expressed by burning his crops, attacking his animals and possibly by setting fire to his house. In one such incident, when John Wesley was five years old, he was trapped in his attic bedroom, to be rescued only at the last minute. His devoted mother instilled in him the lifelong belief in a great mission for which he had been ‘a brand plucked from the burning’.

Wesley's parents, Samuel and Susanna, had ten children who survived infancy out of the nineteen born to them. John Wesley's older brother, Samuel, became an austere country schoolmaster at Tiverton; his younger brother, Charles, would found the Methodist society with him. The parents were both strong-willed and highly motivated. The elder Samuel had pretensions to scholarship, and worked long at a commentary on Job. The household was left to Susanna who was a stern disciplinarian over her children, directing them toward devout religious practices and holy living. Before Wesley's birth the parents had clashed over political beliefs. Susanna, being a Jacobite, fell silent during prayers for the Whig king. Samuel threatened permanent separation until she should repent, and indeed left home until the death of William III opened a path to reunion between the couple on the accession of Queen Anne. John Wesley was the first fruit of their reconciliation.⁷

The parsonage at Epworth seemed to be inhabited by a mischievous spirit or poltergeist, whom the family named Jeffrey, and whose antics they followed and documented closely. Wesley never seems to have lost his belief in a spirit world of things mostly unseen, including demons and angels, who could affect the realm of the physical being. He maintained other superstitions which puzzled and annoyed his colleagues. He was wont to search the will of God through bibliomancy—the practice of letting the Bible fall open and seeking guidance from the first verse on which his eyes should alight. He also believed throughout his ministry that God intervened minutely in the affairs of his work, clearing storms from his path when he needed to travel, and providing sustenance when none was apparently available. When the hail and snow continued to beat in his face, however, this intrepid traveller did not retreat from what he might have taken as a sign of God's disfavour upon his enterprise—the inconsistency never seemed to occur to him.

Samuel and Susanna Wesley clashed over more than political matters. Susanna was herself daughter of a dissenting parson, and she brought into her married life a very Puritan approach to everything. During her husband's absences she had seen fit to hold religious services in the rectory kitchen, and these attracted more people than the regular church services. The official church was suspicious of ‘conventicles’, but these meetings would serve as a model for the meetings of the society John and Charles were to found in their adult life.

At first educated at his mother's knee, John Wesley entered Charterhouse at age ten, and then was selected for a studentship at Christ Church, Oxford. He graduated with his Bachelor of Arts in 1724. He had been a gregarious and genial student who loved company and conversation, reading plays and going to the theatre, composing Latin verse and diligently studying the classics. His Puritan sense of devotion led him to read Bishop Jeremy Taylor's Holy Living, which instructed him to give an account of every hour of every day. Thus began the record, large extracts of which were published by Wesley himself as his Journal, which was to chronicle the events of a long and devout life dedicated to the saving of souls.⁸ This discipline soon instilled in him an aversion to trivial activities, any form of idleness, indeed any moment not explicitly dedicated to the cure of his soul. He even formed the opinion that dining in hall on a Friday evening was a gross sin.

Wesley was ordained a deacon in 1725 and the following year he was elected a fellow of Lincoln College. He found there a remarkably harmonious atmosphere, free from the tensions he perceived straining other college communities. He also made good friends in the Cotswold village of Stanton, where he was a welcome guest of the rector's family, the Kirkhams. He formed an especial attachment to Sally Kirkham, whom he affectionately nicknamed ‘Varanese’. Believing his poverty and uncertain future disqualified him from the marriage he contemplated, Wesley nevertheless remained close to Varanese even after she had married the local schoolmaster. She felt constrained by his continued intimacy to say ‘I would certainly tell you if my husband should ever resent our freedom, which I am satisfied he never will; such an accident as this would make it necessary in some measure to restrain the appearance of the esteem I have to you, but the esteem as it is founded on reason and virtue and entirely agreeable to us both, no circumstance would make me alter.’⁹

Charles Wesley came to Oxford from Westminster six years after John had matriculated. It was the tiny, intimate prayer meeting which Charles began with a few friends in Christ Church which first bore the name ‘Methodist’.¹⁰ In the mean time, John had returned to assist his father as curate in Epworth. Since he had in fact been appointed lecturer in classics and moderator of classes at Lincoln College, he was recalled to reside there in November, 1729. He had continued to study Jeremy Taylor's The Rule and Exercises of Holy Living (1650) to which he added Thomas à Kempis's Imitation of Christ (Imitatio Christi) (1441) and Bishop Law's A Practical Treatise upon Christian Perfection (1726) and A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life (1728). John quickly assumed religious leadership of the study circle Charles had begun. They determined to attend the holy sacrament every week, instead of the three times normally required in a year. They were soon dubbed the Sacramentarians, and variously, the Bible Moths, the Supererogation Men, the Holy Club, the Godly Club, and the Methodists.

Among their number, a young man, William Morgan, set an example by visiting condemned prisoners in the local gaol. To their methodical studying, praying and attending service together, the group soon added a taxing regime of prison visiting and pastoral work among local poor families, for whom they raised money to buy essentials. Their meagre resources were also stretched to purchase the freedom of some in prison for debt. A rigorous regime of self-denial and fasting was thought by some to threaten their health, so that John made himself ‘ill from zeal’.¹¹

In 1732 William Morgan's health collapsed, and in fevered delirium he gave out utterances of his religious enthusiasm, frequently mentioning the Wesleys. His father had long since denounced his wasting financial and personal resources on that ‘ridiculous society’, and was apt to listen when Oxford critics blamed the Wesleys for his son's death. Wesley wrote Morgan senior a detailed letter in vindication of the society and in praise of William Morgan's own selfless and righteous activities. On John's account, his father Samuel Wesley would have owned Morgan as a son. An incessant, if hardly inspired, versifier, Samuel Wesley wrote ‘On the Death of Mr Morgan of Christ Church’:

Wise in his prime, he waited not for noon,
convinc'd, that mortal never liv'd too soon.
As if foreboding here, his little stay,
He made his morning bear the heat of day.
… He dar'd for heaven this flattering world forego …(12)

Wesley's reply to Morgan's father, which contains the main first-hand account of the origins of the Methodist society, was more than convincing; Morgan subsequently entrusted another son, Richard, to Wesley's care at Lincoln College.

While William Morgan had shown the Holy Club the practical way of giving service to those in need, it was clear that the overriding concern of the Wesleys was to ‘do good’ in order to save their own souls. As John had written to his older brother, Samuel, leisure and he had taken leave of one another. ‘The Holy Club redoubled its rigours, fasted more, even on days which were not laid down for fasting, prayed, practiced rescue work, exorcised spirits from haunted houses, kept ever more aloof, courted the ridicule which had once made life so uneasy for John … filled up every moment.’¹³

John resisted his father's earnest entreaties to succeed him at Epworth: the salvation of his soul was much more assured at Oxford. When he relented on his father's death in 1735, he was not, in any event, selected for the living, and so he remained at Oxford. He was soon asked to travel to the new colony of Georgia to work as a missionary under the colony's founder, Colonel Oglethorpe. Charles also joined the company, enlisted as Oglethorpe's Secretary for Indian affairs; two other friends from the Holy Club, Benjamin Ingham and Charles Delamotte also joined the mission. On the outbound voyage the brothers set about methodical evangelical work with the whole ship's company. The most important encounter was with a group of Moravian Christians whose patient faith was a great instruction to the Wesleys. When a violent storm hit the ship, only the Moravians seemed completely unafraid. Wesley was ashamed to discover that they, but not he, were quite prepared to meet their Maker.¹⁴

The Georgian sojourn was not a success for the Wesleys. Their methodical practices, and their censorious ministrations, were unacceptable to the settlers, and the natives scarcely seemed ready to accept the gospel, given that the dissolute practices of the whites seemed to be the available evidence of the fruits of Christianity. Charles soon ran into disfavour with Oglethorpe, and went through a period of desolation and torment. John suffered his own tribulations, particularly over his unsatisfactory relationships with women. He was smitten by one Sophy Hopkey, but tried to convince himself that all his encounters with her were for her spiritual nurture. She construed his advances as proposals of marriage; on that subject he consulted his Moravian brethren, who counselled against the match. In despair, Sophy accepted the proposal of a Mr Williamson, but when she presented for Holy Communion, Wesley turned her away from the table on somewhat technical grounds which were interpreted by Williamson, Sophy and her relatives as an act of pique on his part. He was indicted for defamation of Mrs Williamson's character and for various other ecclesiastical charges which he was not inclined to answer in a civil court. The chief magistrate of Savannah, Causton, was Sophy's uncle, and a substantial portion of the grand jury assembled to try Wesley's case thought the charges were vindictive on the part of the uncle, who had once been Wesley's friend and supporter. Wesley appeared in court several times, but the charges were not heard before he had determined that his usefulness in Georgia had come to an end. He decamped in the face of a public order that he should not be assisted in his passage.¹⁵

Wesley left in December 1737, full of misery and despair. His work in Savannah, he believed, had done nothing for the merit of his own soul, whose salvation was still his chief preoccupation: ‘I went to America to convert the Indians, but oh! who shall convert me?’¹⁶ On the voyage home he learnt that faith had not conquered his fear of death: he could not be a true Christian like the Moravians. He arrived in London on 1 February 1738, and his embittered sermons were rejected by several comfortable congregations, whose pulpits he was forbidden to occupy again. After his challenging encounters on shipboard and in Georgia, Wesley sought out a group of London Moravians, joining their Fetter Lane prayer meeting. He met an attractive Moravian leader, Peter Böhler, to whom he incessantly complained about his lack of faith. Böhler's advice is famous in the Wesleyan tradition: ‘Preach faith till you have it; and then because you have it, you will preach faith.’¹⁷ Acting on this advice, Wesley began to move closer to the moment of his ‘conversion’. The experience came first to brother Charles, who had been suffering repeated bouts of pleurisy. Peter Böhler came to his bedside and spoke of faith. When the light came to Charles his illness left.

Wednesday, 24 May 1738 was the day that changed John Wesley's life. Having been given a sense of expectancy by alighting randomly on a verse of scripture: ‘Thou art not far from the kingdom of God,’ he went down to St Paul's Cathedral, and was greatly moved by the anthem of Purcell: ‘Out of the deep I have called unto thee, O Lord: lord, hear my voice.’ His 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.¹⁸

However much Wesley may subsequently have quarrelled with Luther's doctrines, the founding moment of Methodism was decidedly Lutheran.¹⁹ The Wesley brothers continued to read Luther, who was not at that time widely used in England. Soon after the conversion meeting John visited the Moravian community at Herrnhut in Saxony, where these spiritual descendants of the Bohemian herald of Reformation, Jan Hus, had made their headquarters. He wished not only to observe the regime which had produced such holy people, but also to converse with their revered leader, Count Nicolas von Zinzendorf. The settlement was run like a commune, with members divided into classes in which their spiritual surveillance took place. Wesley learnt much that was to influence the organizational structure of the Methodist societies and their methods for charity work, and confirmed what would be a lifelong devotion to Lutheran hymnography.²⁰ Wesley is often credited with a genius for organization. As Bernard Semmel observes, ‘Wesley's genius, in part, consisted in applying a pattern constructed to serve a monastic community to men and women who lived within the sinful world.’²¹

On Wesley's return to England, the fire in his sermons carried greater conviction, but he continued to be denied pulpits in the Church he loved. In March 1739 Wesley was invited by his old friend from the Oxford Holy Club, George Whitefield, to share in his ministry at Bristol. At first he was greatly shocked at Whitefield's open-air preaching, but was soon himself induced to preach to a crowd which had gathered in the brickyards. He was astonished at the effect that his own preaching had on a quite different audience from that which he was likely to find in a respectable parish church. Like his Lord himself, he began this phase of his mission with the text from Isaiah: ‘The Spirit of the lord is upon me, because He hath anointed me to preach the Gospel to the poor.’²² From this time onward, the poor would always be the object of his preaching. He also began to experience the unexpected reactions of his hearers that was called ‘enthusiasm’—covering a range of manifestations of seizure by the spirit; some would fall to the ground, some would cry out aloud, or groan or sob, while some were seized by a shaking as though suffering from a fever. These carrying-ons would be a cause of greater suspicion of Wesley on the part of the established clergy, giving them the more reason to deny him respectable pulpits.

Back in London, tensions entered into Wesley's relationship with his Moravian brethren at Fetter Lane. He had learnt the lesson of faith from them, but had become impatient with their insistence that the all-sufficient grace of Jesus should induce in them no active response. The Moravians were preaching a doctrine of ‘stillness’, in which the servant of the Lord did not strive, but simply waited in quiet for the coming of the spirit. Wesley was still, and always remained, a High Churchman of the Church of England, and never lost his belief that the mark of grace was to strive to achieve a holy life, which implied a life of active charity and ‘good works’. On 20 July 1740, he formally split from the Moravians, ironically after having shared a ‘love feast’ with them. He announced his intention to leave, and asked all of like persuasion to follow him. Someone had cunningly placed Wesley's hat at the bottom of the pile, and in the moments it took him to rummage through, he lost some of the drama of his gesture as well as some of those who might have gone with him in the first heat of the moment. The score or so people who left with Wesley began to meet in the old Foundry building, which Wesley had bought the year before. It was from this fortress that the Methodist society was soundly established.

Wesley now exploded into a fever of action which was to be his constant companion throughout life. Every minute of every day was methodically assigned its function—prayer, teaching, preaching, travelling, reading, organizing new societies, counselling members. Methodist societies sprang up across the land. They were not uniform in their Christian doctrine. Whitefield's preaching had convinced many of Calvin's doctrine that God had predestined from the beginning of time those who were to be saved. This view was a crude derivation from St Augustine's sophisticated account of time itself as God's creation, with all his creatures enveloped within it. Obviously an omniscient God standing outside his creation knew at a glimpse the outcomes of all human lives. Susanna Wesley, despite her Puritan origins, had taught her children that while God knew the final destination of all his creatures, he did not, in giving the human free will, predetermine the choices they must make in life. Wesley held the doctrine of predestination to be anathema. It would make God worse than the Devil to assign the great bulk of his creatures to eternal damnation without any hope of redemption. Charles Wesley's hymns radically attacked the falsehood of predestination: ‘for all, for all my Saviour died’.

The personal dispute with Whitefield was remote while Whitefield, who had, in Wesley's wake, taken up ministry in Savannah, Georgia, stayed in America. He continued to have influence with his own followers amongst the Methodists back in England, however. Whitefield and Wesley had established a school at Kingswood, near Bristol. Its principal, a layman named Cennick, wrote in some agitation to Whitefield: ‘with universal redemption Brother Charles pleases the world. Brother John follows him in everything.’²³ The letter fell into John's hands. He summoned a meeting at which he accused the Calvinists of backbiting, lying and slander. He then summarily expelled them from the Society, a right which he always reserved to himself.

Whitefield returned to England in 1741, declaring his eternal devotion to the brothers Wesley. Nevertheless, he felt compelled to attack their ‘sinful’ doctrine of universal redemption. Wesley disdained Whitefield's attempts to curry favour with the aristocracy—his own mission was decidedly to the poor. Whitefield had won the favour of the Countess of Huntingdon, who established a chain of chapels to be called ‘Lady Huntingdon's Connexion’, devoted to the Calvinist style of teaching.²⁴ Wesley nevertheless did not lose his personal affection for Whitefield and avoided personal controversy with him.

Much though his loyalty to the Church of England was solid, Wesley everywhere encountered hostility among the parish clergy, who would not admit him to their pulpits because of the singularity of his doctrines and because of the disrespect amongst them that his field preaching had incurred. Although the crowds that greeted his open-air meetings were often vast and attentive, increasingly Wesley encountered groups that wished to jeer and disrupt his meetings for their own sport. He was often buffeted and stoned, and on occasion carried along by a seething mob. That he was not seriously injured he of course put down to God's constant protection; his own assurance of that protection lent him an extraordinarily calm courage at which his persecutors marvelled and before which they as often as not melted away. The most heated riots he encountered were in Cornwall and Staffordshire.

Meanwhile the number of societies continued to grow rapidly. The structure, though in part modelled on the community Wesley had visited at Herrnhut, largely grew out of pragmatic necessity. After his first preaching in Bristol he was convinced that a separate Methodist chapel was needed. He had had no funds to build one, but had nevertheless contracted to do so without knowing where his finance would come from. His first fund-raising efforts fell short. He then instructed his society members to pledge a penny a week for the building fund. When some were too poor to contribute, a wealthier member undertook to provide a shilling a week to cover the contributions for the indigent. Contributions by shillings seemed natural enough, and classes of twelve contributors were formed; each leader was charged with calling them together for prayer meetings, confessions and collections.²⁵ This structure was duplicated everywhere, but the whole was tightly controlled from the centre by John Wesley. He appointed (and dismissed) leaders, and controlled the membership of the societies by issuing (or withholding) tickets. All property was vested in him. Yet he could not be everywhere at once; some leaders had shown a propensity for public instruction, and eventually he was persuaded to ‘allow’ them to preach at regular services. The highly developed network of lay-preachers existed entirely on Wesley's say-so, and each was regarded as Wesley's ‘helper’ in the society.

Wesley's attitude to women remained as difficult and as strained as when he was younger. He was prone to write extravagantly intimate letters for the spiritual uplift of attractive women in his flock. In 1748, he was nursed through an illness by Grace Murray, housekeeper of the Orphan House at Newcastle, and a converted Methodist widow. Being much attracted to her, he made her a typically oblique offer of marriage: ‘If I should ever marry, I think you will be the person.’ Grace was already spoken for by a Methodist lay preacher, John Bennet, whom she had previously nursed to health in the Orphan House. She was flattered by the leader's attentions, but because he had scarcely offered her anything definite, she remained equivocally open to Bennet. Wesley reproved them both and admonished Bennet for trying to thwart his purposes and to deprive him of ‘a most faithful and most useful servant’.²⁶ Grace travelled to Ireland on a mission with Wesley, taking a leadership role among the women's bands. Perhaps her close contact with Wesley gave her second thoughts; on their return to England Grace reopened correspondence with John Bennet. Wesley confronted her, and insisted upon a favourable response to his proposal, which he received. When Charles Wesley heard of what he believed to be an unsuitable match, he rushed to intervene. In John's absence he told Grace Murray that her intended no longer wished to marry her, and that she should forthwith marry John Bennet. John Wesley was deeply wounded by this betrayal by his brother, who had always been his most loved friend and confidant; relations between them were probably permanently damaged. He tried to forgive John Bennet and to bless their marriage, but he was subsequently constrained to fault Bennet with having come too much under the influence of George Whitefield, who had attended upon the attempted reconciliation between Charles and John, and between John and John Bennet. Bennet soon seceded from the Methodists with about a hundred members of his flock at Bolton, to become a Calvinist pastor. After his untimely death, Grace returned to the Methodists.²⁷

The episode had convinced Wesley that, contrary to his earlier determinations, he should indeed marry—a belief that in 1751 propelled him into his disastrous union with the London widow, Molly Vazeille. Her late husband had been a wealthy banker of Threadneedle Street, where she now lived in a degree of comfort quite incompatible with the monkish austerity Wesley had imposed on himself for years. She attempted to participate in his missions, and travelled in his coach, sharing the makeshift existence of life in inns and hostelries. She soon tired of the hardships of travel, and became jealous of the spiritual intimacies he shared with so many of his women helpers. One in particular, Sarah Ryan, the housekeeper of Wesley's school at Kingswood, she held in great contempt and envy. Molly began to traduce Wesley's reputation to his friends and associates. She scoured his correspondence for evidence of unfaithfulness, and eventually began to break into his private files. She left him on several occasions, each of which he greeted as a blessed relief. Eventually, she left him for good, and, although he felt his regrets, he did not seek a reconciliation. When she finally died in 1781, he had not heard of the event for some days and was not present at her funeral.

Despite Wesley's personal tribulations, the pace of his evangelical work did not remit for one moment. The society continued to grow apace, and increasingly its relationship with the Church of England, to which the Wesleys continued to profess their deep loyalty, came into question. Wesley's Conference of 1755, held at Leeds, considered the possibility of formal separation from the established Church. Thus far Wesley had forbidden meetings to be held at the same time as parish church services, and had excluded liturgies which paralleled the formal service. The fact was, however, that many members were quite separated from the Church, and required greater spiritual fulfilment. Wesley henceforth allowed part of the liturgy to be included in Methodist services; he also prepared an abridged version of the Book of Common Prayer called the ‘Sunday Service of the Methodists’. The 1755 Conference resolved, however, that formal separation from the Church was ‘not expedient’. The Wesley always maintained their personal devotion to the Church of England. John continued to apply to preach in the pulpits of parish churches, and occasionally he was admitted. Even when his only option was open air preaching, however, he still presented himself as an ordained minister of the Church; many people came to hear him on that authority—hence the expediency. In any case, Dissenting preachers could not be licensed to preach in the open, and Wesley would have incurred much greater official opposition had he not been an ordained priest of the Church of England.²⁸

The tenuous nature of the society's link with the Church extended to its internal connections. We have seen how those of a Calvinist persuasion were prone to leave and form their own congregations. Thomas Maxfield had been one of the first lay preachers Wesley had appointed. He subsequently achieved ordination by the Bishop of Londonderry, who was sympathetic to Wesley in his exhaustive labours, and saw the need to supply him with help. Maxfield invented his own peculiar variant of Wesley's doctrine of perfection, through which he and his followers proclaimed that, once saved, they had entered a state of perfection, and no amount of Wesleyan preaching availed them any further. Wesley denounced their arrogance and bad example to others. Maxfield seceded from the Society, with about two hundred followers, in 1763. He thus deprived Wesley of one of a very few who could administer sacraments.²⁹ No Anglican bishop in England would now ordain Methodists. Wesley adopted the dangerous precedent of enlisting a visiting bishop from Greece, one Erasmus, to ordain some of his preachers. The measure stemmed from Wesley's need of official help, but it further estranged him from the official Church, and set his society on a more deliberately independent course.

Controversy with the Calvinists became more heated. Wesley exchanged bitter recriminations with the Calvinist clergyman, Rev Augustus Montague Toplady, known as author of the hymn ‘Rock of Ages’. On the other hand, Wesley maintained his friendship with Whitefield, and the Welsh evangelist Howell Harris. They had agreed that the unified purpose of their mission—preaching salvation by faith—was more important than their differences. In 1770 news came from New England that George Whitefield had died. Wesley preached at his memorial service in London and, while giving thanks for Whitefield's fervour and great success as an evangelist in Britain and America, studiously avoided any mention of the predestinarianism which had so divided him from Wesley.

To emphasize his doctrine of Christian perfection, derived from his High Church heritage, and to underline his differences from the Calvinists, John Wesley founded his Arminian Magazine in 1778. He had been pleased to call himself an Arminian for some time, following the lead of the Dutch sixteenth century theologian, Arminius, who had assiduously combated the doctrine of predestination.³⁰ Wesley was often accused of ‘popery’ by his more extreme Calvinist opponents, but he always adhered to the belief that faith without good works was dead.³¹ In 1778 also Wesley built his chapel in the City Road, London, to replace the old Foundry which had become increasingly inadequate as headquarters of a thriving national and international organization.

That whole organization was focused sharply on Wesley himself. He was the movement and the movement was he. He kept all appointments of preachers in his own hands—indeed, he controlled the entire membership of the society. Such property as it possessed was held in his name. He issued tight and binding instructions, almost regulating the last details of living, to all preachers and members. Each preacher was assigned a circuit to travel for preaching, just as Wesley made the entire nation a circuit of his evangelism. The conferences of preachers which he called together were, he made clear, merely councils to advise him. Naturally a dynamic organization, whose membership expanded by thousands each year, would contain some who would question the structure. Especially since Wesley's mission was directed at the poor and lowly, it was inevitable that some democratic tendencies would enter the body of membership, quite at odds with Wesley's centralism. The matter came to a head in 1779 when a group of preachers in and around Bath expressed their resentment at Wesley's peremptory instructions. Urged by his brother Charles, who was suspicious of the growing expression of independence on the part of lay persons, Wesley hastened to Bath to confront the dissidents. He declared to them his right to exercise the power that God had bestowed on him. In the face of his personal magnetism, and the love he evoked amongst those who came into contact with him, the protest largely melted away.

The most radical concentration of authority in himself came when Wesley determined, in the face of lack of cooperation from the established Church, to ordain ministers who could administer the sacraments to the growing flock of Methodists. Relying on some abstruse argument that ministers and bishops were actually of the same order, Wesley convinced himself that, as an ordained minister, he could assume the authority of a bishop and ordain priests himself. His decision to do so was kept from Charles who, John knew, would vehemently oppose such an action as a sign of actual separation from the Church of England. The superintendents that Wesley appointed for the growing Methodist society in America, Coke and Asbury, drew upon Wesley's own rationalization and announced themselves in America as ‘bishops’, thus setting Methodism up there as an episcopal church. Priests were ordained for America in 1784; the following year Wesley ordained priests for work in Scotland.

Although once when he was ill in his fifties Wesley had written a premature epitaph for himself, his health was remarkably robust into his old age. His having concentrated all the authority of the society in himself was obviously going to pose a problem for him in his last years. Rather than designate an autocrat successor, he vested the trusteeship of the organization and its property in one hundred of the preachers whom he designated from the 192 available in 1783—the ‘legal hundred’. Before his death Wesley saw Methodism as a flourishing and rapidly growing concern in America, and had established missions in Ireland, Scotland, Canada and the West Indies. When the first fleet of colonists arrived in Australia, its Anglican chaplain, Rev Richard Johnson, was a member of the Methodist society. Charles Wesley died in 1788, predeceasing John by three years. John died on 2 March 1791, three months before his eighty-eighth birthday. His funeral was held, appropriately in the early morning, at his chapel in City Road, London. At the time of his death Wesley had been in charge of 313 preachers in the British dominions and 198 in the United States. In Britain the number of members was nearly 77,000, while there were already nearly 58,000 in the U.S.A.³² By 1850 the Methodists had 11,000 meeting houses in Britain, with a total membership of 358,000.³³ These numbers scarcely measure the extent of his influence, however, since it reached to a change in temperature in all the Dissenting churches, and to a thoroughgoing change of heart in the Church of England itself. Wesley's obituary in the Gentleman's Magazine of the month following his death declared his influence to have been greater than that of any other private person of his era: ‘… it is impossible to deny him the merit of having done infinite good to the lower classes of people’.³⁴

MINISTRY TO THE POOR

While Wesley himself seems to have been blind to the class structure of eighteenth century society, it was his mission to the poor which set the mould of his enduring political influence. His new faith confronted him with the certainty that every human soul was equally precious to God. This did not merely include the poor, but meant especially the poor, who were denied so much in this life. Wesley's noted simplicity in political matters propelled him into sharply drawn battle lines: the poor were in misery and the rich were entirely to blame. The implications of this ingenuous outlook were to nourish his more politically determined followers for generations to come.

Wesley preferred the company of the poor to that of the rich and educated, although, extraordinarily well read himself, he enjoyed his conversations with Dr Johnson, whom he frustrated by breaking off meetings in order to attend to his pressing round of duties. He proclaimed that he loved the poor: ‘in many of them I find pure, genuine grace, unmixed with paint, folly and affectation.’³⁵ He instructed his preachers likewise to avoid the company of gentlefolk:

I have found some of the uneducated poor who have exquisite taste and sentiment; and many, very many, of the rich who have scarcely any at all. But I do not speak of this: I want you to converse more, abundantly more, with the poorest of the people, who, if they have not taste, have souls, which you may forward in their way to heaven. … Do not confine your conversation to genteel and elegant people. I should like this as well as you do. But I cannot discover a precedent for it in the life of our Lord, or any of his Apostles.³⁶

Wesley could scarcely contain his outrage at the conditions under which the poor lived. After pastoral visitation in a poor district he wrote:

I found some in their cells underground, others in their garrets, half-starved both with cold and hunger, added to weakness and pain. But I found not one of them unemployed who was able to crawl about the room. So wickedly, devilishly false is that common objection, ‘They are poor only because they are idle.’ If you saw these things with your own eyes, could you lay out money in ornaments or superfluities?³⁷

He was quite prepared to take his anger into the public arena:

… why are thousands of people starving, perishing for want, in every part of the nation? The fact I know; I have seen it with my eyes, in every corner of the land … I have known one in London … picking up from a dunghill stinking sprats, and carrying home for herself and her children. I have known another gathering the bones which the dogs had left in the streets, and making broth of them, to prolong a wretched life!³⁸

Wesley's characteristically direct answer was that unemployment was the cause of poverty, and unemployment was caused by the rich squandering the resources of the land. In this he was in company with some strange bedfellows, such as Rousseau, who shared his classical distaste for the luxury and unmerited idleness of the rich, even though Wesley reserved a special contempt for those Enlightenment writers ‘who are too wise to believe their Bibles’.³⁹ Nevertheless, he ran up against the powerful stream of ‘English paradoxes’ which found great economic utility in luxury.⁴⁰ Samuel Johnson, whom Wesley admired, had written of the ‘secret concatenation’ between the rich and the poor as part of the bond of an harmonious society.⁴¹ Luxurious spending could engage the ‘labour of a thousand artists’, and it was much better to pay those that work than to have to give in charity.⁴² Adam Smith believed that the presence of luxury amongst the rich marked a civilized society apart from a savage one; and in an early version of the ‘trickle-down’ effect he argued that even the very poorest in a civilized society enjoyed ‘superior affluence and abundance’ compared with the most advantaged of savages.⁴³ According to Donald Winch, both Johnson and Smith had learnt much from Mandeville, while not entirely endorsing his recommendations.⁴⁴ Shortly after Wesley's death, when the pressures of industrialization were becoming increasingly evident, Jeremy Bentham, surprisingly, was to endorse a version of the English paradox: ‘inequality and luxury formed a barrier to famine, by ensuring a reserve of wealth’ … ‘The desire for equality is a desire for a return to savagery.’⁴⁵

The plight of the poor was Wesley's lifelong preoccupation. He always led by example. By the standards of his day his prolific publications would have made him wealthy, but he gave away all his income—about £30,000.⁴⁶ As an old man of eighty-two, with nothing left to give, he went onto the snow-covered streets of a London January for five days to beg money for food distributions.⁴⁷ Not to give money away was not simply to be uncharitable, but to rob the poor.⁴⁸ In 1754 he had rebuked a wealthy person for lack of charity and justice: ‘You are only a steward of what another trusts you with, to be laid out not according to your will but his.’ Wesley appealed to the rich man's self-interest sub specie aeternitatis, since his soul must ‘so soon launch into eternity’.⁴⁹

Wesley did not leave matters at the occasional angry outburst, but set out systematically to attack poverty at its root cause. Through the tight structure of the class meeting he organized his followers to emulate the example of the New Testament Church, or even that of Herrnhut, to gather necessities in common and to distribute surplus goods to meet the immediate needs of the poor. He refused to establish communes on the grounds that he saw them as devices for exploiting the lower ranks within them. He set up funds, at first out of his personal savings, for interest-free loans. He experimented with creating employment through establishing building works and cottage factories, so convinced was he that the chief cause of poverty was unemployment.⁵⁰

Many of the poor ended up in prison, and, as we have seen from the early days of the Oxford Holy Club, the Methodists gave close attention to the gospel command to care for those in prison. Charles and John Wesley spent a great deal of time bringing comfort and sustenance to prisoners, and showed special concern to the cure of the souls of those condemned to death. Wesley eventually made it compulsory for his preachers to include regular prison visitation on their itineraries. Conditions in prison were appalling, and drawing public attention to the treatment of prisoners became a major campaign for the Methodists. Their combined efforts helped smooth the path for John Howard's report on the state of prisons.⁵¹

For those not consigned to prison, lack of education remained a drawback, not merely to improving their standing in society and securing gainful employment but also, above all for Wesley, to the saving of their souls through their inability to read the scriptures. Methodists were prominent in establishing the Sunday School movement, which was devoted not merely to moral and religious instruction, but also to literacy and other valuable life skills. The Methodists were able to attract the funds of the wealthy benevolent to establish a strong network of such schools which were a major force in the social and economic uplift of the poor.

Wesley's most lasting impact, however, was to challenge the conscience of a nation, demanding that the wealthy and powerful face their responsibility as economic and political leaders to treat the nation, rich and poor alike, as a whole. Wesley's conviction that the poor were not to blame for their condition was a radical reversal of common wisdom, which laid poverty at the feet of the slothful and unambitious poor themselves. Upon those who had perceived the real causes of poverty fell a heavy ethical obligation publicly to address the problem. As Marquardt explains: ‘Those affected should not be blamed for something that had its cause in other factors. For this reason, others must find help for them. This conclusion bestows a special ethical rank to the knowledge of causes. Wesley and the Methodists felt themselves ethically obligated to render such assistance.’⁵² Their activity was intensely personal. They largely turned away from the accepted practice of anonymous giving to charitable funds, and met the poor whom they were pledged to help face to face, seeing them in the miseries of their wretched habitat. Those who enjoyed their wealth at the expense of the poor were scarcely likely to change their comfortable attitude of blaming the victims for their own poverty, but gradually Methodism engendered a changed sentiment throughout society, especially among those of all denominations affected by the evangelical awakening, that would ultimately challenge the basis of the class system.

THE CAMPAIGN AGAINST SLAVERY

Poverty reduced the working class and the unemployed to conditions of pain and hardship which none of God's creatures should have to endure. Yet slavery, the ‘execrable sum of all villainies’, stamped out the last embers of human justice.⁵³ Although it is well known that Wesley came somewhat late in life to venting his full indignation against slavery, he had never been, like most Christians of the day, a supporter of the institution. His early political quietism apparently induced him to accept a practice which was formally lawful. Yet he was profoundly glad that Colonel Oglethorpe, the founder of Georgia, and his trustees had excluded slavery from that colony while Wesley was ministering there. Ironically, George Whitefield later supported the introduction of slavery to Georgia because the patriarchs of the Old Testament had held slaves therefore making slavery, he argued, a biblically-sanctioned institution. Wesley, by contrast, took the gospel of love as the starting point of a rational enquiry; in any case, the extent to which modern slavery was prepared to experiment in torment and cruelty was scarcely understood in Biblical times.

Wesley was in some ways a true son of the Enlightenment. He read all kinds of literature voraciously and, although scornful of all writers who avoided the spiritual dimension, he was ready to absorb the arguments in favour of human rights put forward by the best of the philosophers. In later life his conscience was stoked to a ferocious opposition to the slave trade by the activities of the Quakers, who had maintained an unswerving hostility to the slave trade for one hundred years. He was greatly moved by the writings of the French-born Quaker, Anthony Benezet, whose Historical Account of Guinea, first published in 1762, not only exalted the nobility of the African native, but also execrated the torments and tortures to which they were subjected by slave-traders and slave-owners.⁵⁴

Wesley's own Thoughts Upon Slavery, which is the centrepiece of this collection, being reprinted many times, quickly sold in many thousands of copies. His anger, scarcely tempered by a relentless rationalism, fairly blazes from these pages. It was at this point that the attempt to keep religion and politics strictly separate foundered. Wesley had already advocated a measure of state intervention in the economy for the sake of the poor. He now threw the weight of his popularity and the force of his intellect behind the agitations to abolish the slave trade. Its legal status had to be revoked by parliamentary action. He gave full public support to Thomas Clarkson's Abolition Committee, and the very last of his prolific output of letters, written just six days before his death, went to William Wilberforce to temper his steel as God's weapon against ‘that execrable villainy, which is the scandal of religion, of England, and of human nature’.⁵⁵

In 1780 Methodist Conferences in England and America declared against slavery. In America, where the evils of slaving were most immediate, the Conference of 1784 directed any Methodists who still owned slaves to free them; and no member was to have any dealings with slavery or slave-owners. The slave trade was abolished on both sides of the Atlantic in 1808, and slave-owning was prohibited in England in 1833, while America had to wait for the Civil War.

WESLEY AND REVOLUTION

If Wesleyanism engendered a new spirit of hope among the poor, and radically altered the middle-class attitude to the poor, was the movement revolutionary? We have seen that Wesley sought ever to keep politics out of religion, except in so far as he taught that it was right for good Christians to obey the powers that be and to lead a quiet, inwardly energetic, spiritual life. His own public utterances frequently vented outrage at the treatment of the poor by the wealthy, but his anger was directed at their individual consciences rather than the class system.

Here we encounter the famous Halévy thesis, that Wesley's political quietism saved Britain from a bloody revolution comparable with that which took place in France at about the time of Wesley's death. Wesley never witnessed the explosive events across the Channel, but it is certain that he had the spectre of revolution firmly in mind throughout his ministry. He did witness the separation of the American colonies, and denounced the republicanism which dethroned the King from his American domain. More immediate to his mind, however, was the English experience of the previous century, which had so affected his own family forebears. He was only too forcefully aware of the role fanatical religion and ‘enthusiasm’ had played in the execution of the English King and, as a preacher converted by Luther's teaching, he was conscious of the incompatibility of a religion of love and compassion with the highest reaches of violence involved in regicide.

Against all those more recent interpretations that characterize Methodism as a crushing weight on the spirit of the proletariat, Elie Halévy proposed that the Wesleyan movement diverted a French-style revolution because it was, in itself, a bloodless ‘popular revolution’ which gave an outlet to the creative energies of a disprivileged working class struggling to improve its lot.⁵⁶ The question whether Wesleyanism prevented such a revolution is of its nature unanswerable. What is certain is that Wesley laboured assiduously and strenuously to see that his own society was not the cause of a re-run of the Puritan Revolution of the previous century. He was in daily contact with the fervour of his converts and with their zeal to create a new world. He was aware of the affinities of his movement with Puritanism despite his differences with Whitefield and his rejection of Calvinistic predestinarianism. He matched the zeal of his followers in the energy he exerted to divert them from political action, although he could not blame angry crowds when they protested against the immediate threat of starvation.

To a large extent Wesley was successful in diverting his followers from violent action, although the next generation of Methodists were prominent among the Luddites. He could not, however, despite his aversion to democracy, suppress the democratic impulses which the freedom and dignity he accorded to the poor unavoidably implied. Those members who could not brook the overt Toryism adopted by the Methodist Conference after Wesley's death seceded into their own, highly democratic, independent ‘connexions’. They also appropriated the language of rights in their official pronouncements.⁵⁷ Some Methodist class meetings re-formed themselves for secular purposes as radical political clubs,⁵⁸ while the connection between the Methodist society and Chartism is well documented.⁵⁹ From here it is but a short step to recalling the influence of Methodism on the rising Labour Party noted at the beginning of this Introduction.

WESLEY AND CAPITALISM

In the familiar deposition that accuses protestant religion of having given rise to capitalist economics, Methodism does not feature so prominently. Wesley scarcely merits a second glance in R. H. Tawney's Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, although he does believe that the sermon on The Use of Money indicates ‘a general acquiescence in the conventional ethics’: ‘… morality tempered by prudence and softened on occasion by a rather sentimental compassion for inferiors’.⁶⁰ Christopher Hill selectively quotes The Use of Money to depict Wesley as a supporter of the ‘bourgeois virtues’. He quotes only the first maxim of Wesley's trilogy in that sermon, namely, to ‘gain all you can’ by being successful in business.⁶¹ The target of Wesley's economic campaign was the poverty of the working class, a condition which he loathed as the product of society's injustice. He equally loathed riches, which marked the dispossession of the poor. The sermon on The Use of Money urges Methodists not only to ‘gain all you can’, but also to ‘save all you can’ by avoiding extravagance and unnecessary displays of luxury, and finally to ‘give all you can’—to divest themselves of all excess beyond the needs of a relatively comfortable subsistence. Max Weber understood Wesley's position better than most, when he discerned that ‘the salvation of the soul and that alone’ was the objective of reformers like Wesley.⁶² He also presents Wesley as a prime example of an ascetic in a ‘continual struggle with the problem of the secularizing influence of wealth’.⁶³ In the end, Weber did not see Wesley as embellishing a protestant ethic which allegedly engendered a ‘spirit of capitalism’. He sees Wesleyanism as a late flowering species of Puritanism, despite Wesley's crusade against predestinarianism, and one which ‘added nothing new to the development of the idea of calling’.⁶⁴ Nevertheless, there could have been no influence greater than Wesley's in spreading wide a devotion to hard work in the service of God, and to clean and frugal living.

There is a case to be made that Wesley, far from contributing to a capitalist work ethic, worked hard against capitalism. Marquardt points out that Wesley severed the connection between the outward signs of worldly success and God's favour,⁶⁵ insisting that God loved the poor more than the rich. He was happy to argue for state intervention in the economy, reversing the common middle-class wisdom that the poor were unaffected by and uninterested in legislation. As Wesley's leading theologian, the ex-patriate Swiss, John Fletcher, declared, the poor, who could not afford meat, lived mainly on bread. It was ‘monstrous’ to suggest that they were not concerned with legislation, for ‘the capital branch of legislation, which raises or sinks the price of corn, chiefly concerns the lowest class of mankind, by whom corn is chiefly consumed’.⁶⁶

What has been said at the end of the section on Wesley's life about his influence upon the churches of Britain and America extends far beyond into the wider reaches of society. As one admirer of Wesley's work through the entire Evangelical revival has written:

The Awakening which abolished the slave trade, pioneered popular education, humanized the prison system, established a world missionary movement, emancipated England's ‘industrial slaves’, and raised up valiant leadership both in Trade Unionism and the Parliamentary Labour Movement—that awakening inspired also the modern philanthropic and social-service movement.⁶⁷

Although Wesley's writing has rarely been studied for its political significance, the political, social and economic implications of his life and ministry can scarcely be avoided. The following selection from his vast corpus of work bring the immediacy of his thought to a new generation of students of political thought, who may also glean thereby something of the sheer force of his personality and the intensity of his devotion to the cause of his fellow men and women.

Notes

1. Paul Boateng in John Smith, Tony Blair and others, Reclaiming the Ground. Christianity and Socialism, Christopher Bryant, ed. (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1993), p. 53.

2. John Smith, ibid., pp. 129-30.

3. Hilary Armstrong, ibid., p. 92.

4. Ibid., p. 94.

5. V. H. H. Green, John Wesley (London: Nelson, 1964), p. 143.

6. Graham Maddox, Religion and the Rise of Democracy (London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 38-45.

7. Green, op. cit., pp. 9-11.

8. And was viewed askance by some as an exercise in ‘self-glorification from end to end’; Bonamy Dobrée, John Wesley, (Albany, OR, Sage Software, 1995 [1933]) p. 80. Published as Dobrée, Three Eighteenth Century Figures: Sarah Churchill, John Wesley, Giacomo Casanova (London: Oxford University Press, 1962).

9. Green, op. cit., p. 17.

10. Maurice A. Fitzgerald, ‘Introduction’ to Robert Southey, The Life of John Wesley and the Rise and Progress of Methodism (1820) (London: Oxford University Press, 1925), 2 vols., vol. 1, p. xiv: ‘… strictly speaking, Charles Wesley was the founder of Methodism.’

11. Dobrée, op. cit., p. 17.

12. Samuel Wesley in John Wesley, The Journal of Rev John Wesley (London: Dent, n.d.), 4 vols., vol. 1, p. 13.

13. Dobrée, op. cit., p. 17.

14. Southey, op. cit., vol. 1, pp. 54-8.

15. Green, op. cit., pp. 45-51.

16. Southey, op. cit., vol. 1, p. 74.

17. Ibid., p. 84.

18. Ibid., p. 102.

19. Maximin Piette, John Wesley in the Evolution of Protestantism, trans. J. B. Howard (London: Sheed and Ward, 1937) pp. 305-12.

20. Henry Carter, The Methodist Heritage, 2nd ed. (London: Epworth, 1951), pp. 34-45.

21. Semmel, Bernard., The Methodist Revolution (New York: Basic Books, 1973), p. 33.

22. Wesley, op. cit., vol. 1, p. 184.

23. Dobrée, op. cit., p. 53.

24. In America Methodism ran up against the dominant Calvinism of New England. According to a Congregational minister, the Methodists ‘… are constantly mingling with the people, and enter into all their feelings, wishes and wants; and their discourses are on the level with the capacity of their hearers, and addressed to their understanding and feelings, and produce a thrilling effect, while our discourses shoot over their heads and they remain unaffected. They reach a large class of people that we do not. The ignorant, the drunkard, the profane, listen to their homespun, but zealous, … discourses …’ As quoted in Vinson Synan, The Holiness-Pentecostal Tradition. Charismatic Movements in the Twentieth Century, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997), p. 10.

25. David Lowes Watson, The Early Methodist Class Meeting: Its Origins and Significance (Nashville: Discipleship Resources, 1985).

26. Green, op. cit., p. 95.

27. Green, op. cit., pp. 94-102.

28. Michael Watts, The Dissenters. From the Reformation to the French Revolution (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), p. 437.

29. Michael Watts, ibid.

30. Cf. Carl Bangs, Arminius. A Study in the Dutch Reformation (Nashville: Abingdon, 1971).

31. While Wesley's stress on holiness seems to be acceptable to the Catholic Church, his location within the Church of England is not. See L. Rumble, John Wesley and the Methodists (Melbourne: Australian Catholic Truth Society, 1952).

32. Southey, op. cit., vol. 2, p. 334.

33. Green, op. cit., p. 159.

34. Quoted in Green, op. cit., p. 152.

35. Quoted in Semmel, op. cit., p. 72.

36. Wesley, Letter 270, 7 February 1776, in The Works of John Wesley (T. Jackson, ed.)(Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan Publishing House, repr. of 1872 edn), 14 vols, vol. 12, Letters, p. 301; on Wesley's determination to imitate Christ's example in the manner of Thomas à Kempis, see John Passmore, The Perfectibility of Man (New York: Scribners, 1970), pp. 137-8.

37. Wesley, Journal, 8 February 1753, in Works (Jackson, ed.), vol. 2, Journal, pp. 279-80.

38. Wesley, Thoughts on the Present Scarcity of Provisions, see below, pp. 103-109.

39. Wesley, Journal, 3 February 1770, where he has just dismissed the recommendations of Rousseau's Émile. Despite declaring himself to be homo unius libri, Wesley was nevertheless enormously well read in secular as well as sacred literature. Of some interest to the student of politics are his views on Machiavelli, whom he set out to read seriously during a journey in Georgia. See Journal, 1 January 1737: ‘In my passage home, having procured a celebrated book, the Works of Nicholas Machiavel, I set myself carefully to read and consider it. I began with a prejudice in his favour; having been informed, he had often been misunderstood, and greatly misrepresented. I weighed the sentiments that were less common; transcribed the passages where they were contained; compared one passage with another, and endeavoured to form a cool, impartial judgment. And my cool judgment is, that if all the other doctrines of devils which have been committed to writing since letters were in the world, were collected together in one volume, it would fall short of this; and, that should a Prince form himself by this book, so calmly recommending hypocrisy, treachery, lying, robbery, oppression, adultery, whoredom and murder of all kinds, Domitian or Nero would be an angel of light, compared to that man.’

40. Donald Winch, Riches and Poverty. an intellectual history of political economy in Britain. 1750-1834 (Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 55.

41. Samuel Johnson, Adventurer, 26 June 1753, as quoted in Winch, op. cit., p. 57.

42. Johnson, in Boswell, Life of Johnson, vol. 3, pp. 55-6, as quoted in Winch, op. cit., p. 58.

43. Adam Smith, as quoted in Winch, op. cit., p. 61.

44. Winch, op. cit., pp. 59-60. Wesley was even more disparaging of Mandeville than he was of Machiavelli. See Wesley, Journal, 14 April 1756: ‘The Italian recommends a few vices, as useful to some particular men, and on some particular occasions. But the Englishman loves and cordially recommends vice of every kind; not only as useful now and then, but as absolutely necessary at all times for all communities! Surely Voltaire would hardly have said so much …’

45. Lea Campos Boralevi, Bentham and the Oppressed (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1984), p. 97.

46. Southey, op. cit., vol. 2, p. 307.

47. Wesley, Journal, 4 January 1785.

48. D. Hempton, Methodism and Politics in British Society 1750-1850 (London: Hutchinson, 1984), pp. 232-3.

49. Wesley, Letter to Sir James Lowther, 28 October 1754, The Works of John Wesley, W. R. Ward and R. P. Heitzenrater (eds.) (Nashville: Abingdon, 1991) vol. 20, Journal and Diaries, III, p. 495.

50. M. Marquardt, John Wesley's Social Ethics: Praxis and Principles, trans. J. E. Steely and W. S. Gunter (Nashville: Abingdon, 1992), pp. 28-9.

51. Marquardt, op. cit., pp. 82-4.

52. Marquardt, op. cit., p. 31.

53. Wesley, Works (ed. Jackson), vol. 5, pp. 445-6.

54. Anthony Benezet, Some Historical Account of Guinea. Its Situation, Produce, and the General Disposition of Its Inhabitants with an Inquiry into the Rise and Progress of the Slave Trade, Its Nature and Lamentable Effects, 1788 ed. (London: Frank Cass, repr., 1968).

55. Wesley, ‘Letter to Wilberforce’ 26 February 1791, Works (Jackson, ed.), vol. 12, p. 153.

56. Elie Halévy, The Birth of Methodism in England, trans. Bernard Semmel (University of Chicago Press, 1971), p. 62.

57. Robert F. Wearmouth, Methodism and the Working Class Movements of England 1800-1850 (London: Epworth Press, 1937), pp. 204-5.

58. Herbert Butterfield, ‘Reflections on Religion and Modern Individualism’, Journal of the History of Ideas, vol. 22 (1961), pp. 33-46.

59. Wearmouth, op. cit., p. 216.

60. R. H. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1938), p. 194.

61. Christopher Hill, From Reformation to Industrial Revolution (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969), pp. 276-7.

62. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (London: Allen and Unwin, 1930), pp. 89-90.

63. Ibid., p. 174.

64. Ibid., p. 143.

65. Marquardt, op. cit., pp. 43-4.

66. Quoted in Semmel, op. cit., p. 79.

67. J. Wesley Bready, This Freedom—Whence? (New York: American Tract Society, 1944), pp. 286-7; cf. W. H. Fitchett, Wesley and His Century. A Study in Spiritual Forces (London: George Bell, 1906), pp. 7-8.

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