SOURCE: Andrews, Stuart. “The Intellectual Climate.” In Methodism and Society, pp. 3-9. London: Longman, 1970.

[In the following essay, Andrews examines Wesley's place as a Methodist religious thinker within the Deist controversy of the Age of Reason.]

The Methodism movement grew up in a climate of irreligion. Montesquieu observed in his Notes sur l'Angleterre that ‘in England there is no religion and the subject, if mentioned in society, excites nothing but laughter’. And it was only two years before John Wesley's Aldersgate Street experience that Joseph Butler, soon to be Bishop of Bristol, penned an even more famous indictment:

It is come, I know not how, to be taken for granted by many persons that Christianity is not so much as a subject of inquiry; but that it is now at length discovered to be fictitious. And accordingly they treat it as if, in the present age, this were an agreed point among all people of discernment; and nothing remained but to set it up as a principal subject of mirth and ridicule, as it were by way of reprisals for its having so long interrupted the pleasures of the world.

Butler was exaggerating; and in any case he went on to provide a formidable defence of Christianity. Nevertheless in the first half of the eighteenth century there was undeniably a readiness to assume that natural philosophy had disposed of theology. But not of God. Indeed the ordered universe described in Newtonian astronomy seemed to demonstrate the indispensability of God as the First Cause or Grand Geometer. This was a conviction shared by Christians and Freemasons alike. The Masonic grace before meals was addressed to ‘the great architect of the universe’, while Addison's famous hymn invoked the heavenly bodies of ‘the spacious firmament on high’ to prove the existence of a Creator:

In Reason's ear they all rejoice
And utter forth in glorious voice
For ever singing as they shine
The hand that made us is divine.

The God revealed in Nature was a less personal and approachable deity than the God revealed in Scripture. He was more akin to the God of the Deists—the eternal watchmaker who made the clock of the universe, wound it up, set it going and then left it to run itself without any further interference with the mechanism. The refusal of the Deists to allow God to intervene in the day-to-day running of His creation is in marked contrast to Wesley's readiness to recognise the hand of God in the most mundane happenings. The Deists sought God not in the Scriptures or in miraculous revelation, but in the book of nature and the laws of the physical universe.

The Deists' substitution of Reason for Revelation is implied in the very title of John Toland's Christianity not Mysterious (1696). According to Toland, Christ's role, far from confirming the indispensability of the miraculous, was to rid religion of its mystery and to depict the attributes of God which a careful study of Nature should in any case have revealed. The same theme was developed by Matthew Tindal in his Christianity as Old as the Creation (1730). The revelation of Christian truth was not dependent on the coming of Christ:

God never intended mankind should be without a religion, or could ordain an imperfect religion; there must have been from the beginning a religion most perfect, which mankind at all times were capable of knowing; Christianity is this perfect, original religion.

‘The religion of nature’, argued Tindal, was ‘absolutely perfect’. Revelation could ‘neither add to nor take from its perfection’. Even more formidable champions of Natural Religion were Shaftesbury and Bolingbroke. In his Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (1711) Shaftesbury argued that God's revelation of Himself in Nature was certain, clear and sufficient for all practical purposes, while Bolingbroke dismissed everything in the Bible except the four Gospels, and then proceeded to impugn the credibility of the Gospel writers themselves. Pope dedicated his Essay on Man to Bolingbroke, and told Bishop Warburton that Shaftesbury's Characteristics ‘had done more harm to Revealed Religion in England than all the works of Infidelity put together’.

The effects of the Deistical controversy on the Church of England were twofold. In the first place the energies of the Anglican clergy were for half a century expended in the strenuous albeit successful attempt to refute the arguments of Deism: Tindal alone provoked no less than 115 books or pamphlets in defence of orthodoxy, while even contemporaries regretted that Butler's determination to defeat the Deists had deflected him from more constructive labours. In his Analogy of Religion Butler claimed that Christian belief was no less reasonable than the assumptions of natural religion, and that many of the objections advanced against Christianity were equally applicable to Deism: both creeds made assertions about God that could not be tested by empirical means. Reason, Butler reminded the Deists, had its limitations:

The only question concerning the truth of Christianity is whether it be a real revelation, not whether it be attended with every circumstance which we should have looked for; and concerning the authority of Scripture, whether it be what it claims to be—not whether it be a book of such sort, and so promulgated, as weak men are apt to fancy a book containing a divine revelation should.

But the tone of the Analogy was not always so uncompromising, and its Christian critics complained that, in attempting to meet the Deists on their own ground, Butler had conceded too much.

That this charge should be made against the arch-opponent of Deism is a reminder of the second and more insidious effect of the dispute with the Deists: the readiness of the Established Church to attempt to compromise with the new philosophy. Bishop Berkeley warned Christians that they must be content with evidence that was not more than probable and with assumptions that were not actually demonstrable, while Bishop Hoadly—not a typical Hanoverian bishop but a bishop nevertheless—maintained that the service of Holy Communion was in no sense a mystery, but a purely commemorative rite ‘to be seriously performed in remembrance of an Absent Saviour’.

This was the language of what came to be known as ‘latitudinarianism’. Its representatives shied away from any precise formulation of Christian dogma and were anxious to leave as much latitude as possible to individual judgment. One of the most respectable spokesmen of Latitudinarian churchmanship was John Tillotson, William III's first Archbishop of Canterbury. He believed that ‘with charity and mutual forbearance, the Church may be peaceful and happy without absolute unity of opinion’. And he was prepared to assert from the pulpit:

Doctrines are vehemently to be suspected which decline trial. To deny liberty of inquiry and judgment in matters of religion is the greatest injury and disparagement to truth that can be, and a tacit acknowledgment that she lies under some disadvantage, and that there is less to be said for her than for error.

But Tillotson went further. He defended Christianity on prudential principles, in terms that made it sound like an insurance policy: ‘Supposing the reasons for and against the principles of religion were equal, yet the danger and hazard is so unequal as would sway a prudent man to the affirmative.’ Warburton might be right to praise Tillotson's sermons as ‘simple, elegant, candid, clear and rational’, but it was the Latitudinarians rather than the Deists who were to be the chief targets of Methodist invective. Whitefield remarked that Tillotson ‘knew no more of true Christianity than Mahomet’, while Seward, another Methodist, called him ‘a traitor who had sold his Lord for a better price than Judas had done’.

In an age when Anglican bishops were attempting to lighten the burden of belief, the doctrine of the Trinity was particularly embarrassing. The so-called Athanasian creed is itself a reminder that the doctrine had been under attack since the fourth century, but the growth of Unitarianism was so marked in the eighteenth century that it even found supporters at court. The piously orthodox George III was hostile, but George II's wife, Queen Caroline, was supposed to be sympathetic to Unitarian ideas and to have wanted to bestow a bishopric on Dr. Clarke, author of the unorthodox Scripture Doctrine of the Trinity (1712). But probably the most persuasive Unitarian of the century was the Dissenter, Joseph Priestley. His History of the Corruptions of Christianity, published in 1782, listed among the perversions of Christian belief not only the Trinity but the Virgin birth, original sin, predestination, the doctrine of the Atonement and the inspiration of the Bible. Yet, rather surprisingly perhaps, he attacked these doctrines as unscriptural and not merely as unreasonable; and, although he objected to these doctrinal mysteries, he was prepared to accept the Gospel miracles and the resurrection of Christ. Unitarianism was much more prevalent among the Dissenting sects than among Anglicans—so much so that George III cited this as a reason for retaining the Test Acts. But the Unitarians were sufficiently influential, and sufficiently in tune with the rationalism of the age, for Thomas Jefferson to express the view in 1812 that Unitarianism would ‘become the general religion of the United States’.

Deism, Latitudinarianism, Unitarianism—all three represented a rationalistic and philosophical approach to religion. The religious certainties of the seventeenth century which men had thought worth fighting and dying for had given way in the eighteenth century to a confusing complex of probabilities. In Butler's phrase, ‘Probability is the very guide of life.’ How far was Methodism a reaction against the intellectualism and permissiveness of the new theology with its arguments over ‘evidences’ and its comfortable words about the absence of absolute doctrinal standards? In a letter to Conyers Middleton in 1749, John Wesley himself contrasted the ambiguity of ‘traditional evidence’, which embraced ‘so many and so various considerations that only men of a strong and clear understanding can be sensible of its full force’, with the universal validity of internal evidences which could be understood by the most unsophisticated:

How plain and simple is this! and how level to the meanest capacity! Is not this the sum—‘One thing I know: I was blind but now I see’? An argument so plain that a peasant, a woman, a child may feel its force. … If then it were possible (which I conceive it is not) to shake the traditional evidence of Christianity, still he that has the internal evidence would stand firm and unshaken.

Wesley added that he was almost inclined to believe that God had allowed the current objections to be raised against the traditional evidence of Christianity ‘so that men might not rest there, but be constrained to look into themselves also, and attend to the light shining in their hearts’.

Wesley's Journal for December 1755 reproduces a letter he had received from John Walsh, who admitted that ‘while my busy imagination ranges through nature, books and men, I often drop into that horrible pit of Deism’. But Walsh then turns to examine the world which, according to the Deists, exhibits the hand of its Maker:

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

It can be no mere coincidence that this extract follows immediately after Wesley's entry for 26 November 1755: ‘Being much importuned thereto, I wrote Serious Thoughts on the Earthquake at Lisbon, directed, not as I designed at first, to the small and vulgar, but the great—to the learned, rich and honourable heathens, commonly called Christians.’

Wesley's Serious Thoughts soon ran into six editions—a clear enough indication that the Lisbon earthquake of November 1755 had alarmed the great as well as the ‘small and vulgar’. The alarm was all the more acute because in 1750 London itself had suffered two earthquakes, only four weeks apart. The first, on 8 February, had been sufficient to cause the collapse of a timber slaughterhouse in Southwark and to bring down chimneys in Leadenhall Street; the second, on 8 March, set the church bells ringing of their own accord and made Horace Walpole think that someone was moving about under his bed. On 16 March Thomas Sherlock, Bishop of London, published a letter to his clergy and people. ‘Little philosophers’, he said, ‘who see a little, but very little, into natural causes’ might try to explain earthquakes without reference to God; but the bishop was in no doubt that these earthquakes were an expression of God's displeasure at the infidelity and immorality of the day. The Rev. William Stukeley, M.D., F.R.S., who read a paper to the Royal Society on the physical causes of earthquakes, also preached a sermon at St George's, Bloomsbury, in which he invoked Holy Scripture to show that earthquakes were God's instruments. Benjamin Stillingfleet, in ‘Some Thoughts occasioned by the late Earthquakes’, warned his readers that God

Wanteth not stones to execute His wrath
          Wherever Vengeance calls; the gaping Gulph
Shall overwhelm us if He give the word.

The fear grew that the word would be given on 5 April, a further four weeks after the second shock, and there was a wholesale exodus from London. On 4 April Horace Walpole recorded that ‘this frantic fear prevails so much that within these three days 730 coaches have been counted passing Hyde Park Corner with whole parties removing into the country’. The panic was the more remarkable since the entry for ‘earthquake’ in Ephraim Chambers's Cyclopaedia (second edition, 1738) begins: ‘In natural history, a vehement shake—of the earth; from natural causes.’

Yet, however irrational the belief, these two mild earthquakes were interpreted as a sign from heaven and filled the London churches. And, if this effect soon wore off, the news of the Lisbon earthquake in November 1755 brought back the mood of piety with a new intensity.

In December 1755 George II issued a Proclamation on the subject of the ‘most dreadful and extensive Earthquake, which hath also in some Degree been felt in several Parts of Our Dominions’ and reminded Englishmen that ‘the Manifold Sins and Wickedness of these Kingdoms have most justly deserved heavy and severe Punishments from the Hand of Heaven’. A general Fast Day was ordered for 6 February 1756, and preachers made the most of the opportunity it offered for condemning the vices of the age. A month later Walpole wrote to Henry Seymour Conway: ‘The three taxes proposed were on plate, on bricks and tiles, on cards and dice. The earthquake has made us so good that the ministry might have burned the latter in Smithfield if they had pleased’.

Some twenty years later, when another earthquake tremor alarmed the Manchester area, Wesley wrote to a friend: ‘There is no divine visitation which is likely to have so general an influence upon sinners as an earthquake.’ The earthquakes of the 1750s, like the French Revolution a generation or so later, produced a wave of piety in English society—even in polite society. However rationalistic that society might appear on the surface, there were still powerful undercurrents of what a more scientific age would regard as superstition. And Horace Walpole, who ridiculed the Londoners' earthquake panic in the 1750s, nevertheless foreshadowed the Gothic Revival in his home at Strawberry Hill and in his Castle of Otranto. The eighteenth century, like most centuries, was a century of contradictions. The Age of Reason never quite lost its taste for the irrational, while Wesley himself managed to combine a belief in witches with an interest in electricity.