There is a vast body of literature related to John Wesley’s theology, as well as his connection to such movements as the Evangelical Revival, the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution, and many other social and political events. The body of literature can be a minefield and it is easy to be diverted by the magnitude of side issues so beloved of Methodist historians. It is thus important to narrow the literature into specific areas and channels in order to chart a clear, logical path to the argument.
It is, first and foremost, important to see the chapter as providing some background understanding of nineteenth century Wesleyan Methodist ethics. It is important to demonstrate that Wesley’s theology did not develop in a vacuum; it was the result of many interacting influences. It is proposed to highlight Wesley’s developing theology, placed against the international movement of the Evangelical Revival, and then take it through the influences of Arminianism, devotional literature and the strong moulding influences of German Pietism and the Moravians. It will be shown how the final theology of Justification, Sanctification and Christian Perfection was developed and how it was dovetailed into the evangelical economic theory of Wesley, how the spirituality and economics became one. It is important to understand the bones and sinews of the theology in order to comprehend the later behaviour and contributions of the Launceston Wesleyan Methodists.
Establishment of the Methodist Society will follow with its complex structure and Wesley’s communitarian bias will be discussed as well as the tandem progress and rise of the New Dissent. Wesley’s anxiety about The Stewardship of Riches and obligations to the poor will lead through the Industrial Revolution to Methodist separation from the Anglican Church. Discussion will then move to the dawning of the nineteenth century with its rise of the respectable, affluent middle-class Methodists, who were left
with a duality in relation to The Stewardship of Riches. Emphasis will be placed on the fact that Methodists saw themselves as a force for order.
The all-important formation of the Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society (hereafter WMMS) will be discussed as a background to understanding the Wesleyan Methodist missionary outreach and the demands placed on the shoulders of the Wesleyan Methodist middle-class economic man.
The slowness of the Wesleyan Methodists in legalising their missionary structure in the late eighteenth century, which was the result of Dr. Thomas Coke’s single-handed missionary enterprise, will be discussed. The reorganisation of the WMMS in 1813 will be traced alongside the growing evangelical support. The inclusion of the influential Wesleyan laymen of commerce, in order to fund the endeavour, will be evaluated alongside the Rev. Richard Watson’s theory of benevolence and consecrated wealth. This theory of consecrated wealth shifted Wesley’s economic theory to a higher dimension. Other features to be explored will be the shift of emphasis from the poor to the ‘heathen”, and the new label of respectability gained by the Wesleyan Methodists in their missionary endeavours. Contemporary political and social events with their interaction are not examined in any detail. Another facet of the emphasis is to show that Methodism was just another segment of the Evangelical Revival playing its part as one of the building blocks, neither exaggerating or underestimating its part as is often done.1 Langford contends that, ‘there is an obvious danger in giving Wesley and his followers more significance in the second quarter of the eighteenth century than they deserve. They are not an appropriate starting point for the Evangelical
Revival.2 Of necessity in the background, there will be a loose
1 On an opposing note, John Kent’s work Religion in Eighteenth Century Britain, starts
his work with, ‘One of the persistent myths of modern British History is the myth of the so called evangelical revival’. Kent sees a distinction between primary religion and secondary theologies and the trappings of ecclesiastical institutions which developed around it. He sees Methodism as a religious sub-culture taking an advantage of the religious climate of the time. (‘Review article’, Barrie Tabraham, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, Vol. 55, No. 2, April 2004, p. 326.)
2 Paul Langford, A Polite and Commercial People: England 1727-83 (Oxford, 1989), p.
chronological thread running through to show the progression of formation.
There is not a vast body of Methodist histories referring to Wesley’s economic theology. In general it receives passing and un-detailed references. The writers who have developed the theme are Kathleen MacArthur, Charles Elliott, John Walsh, Robert Wearmouth, Theodore Jennings, Wellman J. Warner, Kurt Samuelsson, Thomas Madron and John R. Tyson. The background chapter has made considerable use of their works. The part of the background chapter relating to the Evangelical Protestant Awakening and German Pietism may appear lengthy, but it is felt that it was warranted to demonstrate its legacy to Wesleyan Methodism.
Eighteenth Century
The Centenary Book of Wesleyan Methodism3 published in 1839
presents the core of Wesleyanism with this description of John and Charles Wesley:
Having obtained by the simple exercise of faith in Christ, not only the abiding witness of the pardoning and adopting mercy of God, but also the purity of Heart which they had long unsuccessfully endeavoured to obtain by righteousness and law, they were astonished at their former errors and longed to make known the great salvation which is thus attainable by all. Before this period, they served God because they feared Him; now they loved Him from a joyous assurance that He had first loved them. 4
3 Thomas Jackson, Centenary Book of Wesleyan Methodism: A Brief Sketch of the Rise,
Progress and Present State of the Methodist Societies throughout the World (London, 1839).
4 This publication was reviewed in The Wesleyan Methodist Magazine in January 1839,
Vol. xviii, 3rd series, p45., The Arminian Magazine, was first published by John Wesley
1778 and lasted until 1797. In 1798 the magazine was called The Methodist Magazine, and it lasted until 1821. In 1822 the magazine became The Wesleyan Methodist Magazine and it ended publication in 1913. (It has been decided to retain the definite article in front of these magazines as this is how they were always termed). The Arminian Magazine was first published in order to promote doctrines that God is willing that all men should be saved, and to answer virulent anti-Wesleyan attacks published in the Calvinist periodical, The Gospel Magazine. It promoted an antidote to the poison of Calvinism and Antinomianism. There was always one article defending universal redemption. (Herbert Boyd McGonigle, Sufficient Saving Grace: John Wesley’s Evangelical Arminianism (London, 2001))
This was John Wesley’s underlying precept and conviction, and on this he built a religious force underpinned with ethics. How had John Wesley arrived at this conviction? What influences had come to bear upon him? The Methodist Society regarded 24 May 1738 as the day Wesley was converted with the Aldersgate experience, hence the Centenary Celebration in 1838.5
Wesley’s birth in 1703 heralded the dawn of the eighteenth century. England was developing the empire with its colonies, and consequent expansion of colonial trade, but there were ‘inherited economic problems passed on from the seventeenth century, including the beginning of the
enclosure process as one of the steps of agriculture improvement’.6
Mercantilism was arising and chartered companies were seeking trade in new lands. A lack of economic unity was evidenced in bad roads and transportation and riots were common. There was low agricultural profitability and there was no sign of industrial investment opening out. The population was beginning to climb, but was set back by the lethal epidemics that struck it regularly. Not until 1740 did the population start to rise steadily. Porter feels that ‘during the first forty years of the eighteenth century, society and the economy remained in self adjusting equilibrium’.7 Kathleen MacArthur also refers to precarious means of communication8 at this period, but it will be shown later that poor communication did not diminish the discussion of religious ideas. The unpropertied man was economically helpless. However, Porter points out that ‘the enclosure system also boosted rural output. It was a shot in the arm for the economy, though a blow to land workers’.9 Some clergy
5 Wesley had a strong transforming experience at a society meeting at Aldersgate on 24
May 1738, where he felt his heart strangely warmed, that he did trust in Christ and that assurance was given that his sins had been taken away. (Roy Hattersley, A Brand From the Burning: The Life of John Wesley (London, 2002), pp. 136-7.) This was to be the core Methodist belief in the ‘felt experience of conversion’. It was something ‘the recipient felt and sensed’; Richard Beresford Roy, ‘A Reappraisal of Wesleyan Methodist Mission in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century, as Viewed Through the Ministry of the Rev. John Smithies (1802-1872)’, PhD Thesis (Edith Cowan University, Perth, W.A., 2006), pp. 192, 200.
6 Kathleen Walker MacArthur, The Economic Ethics of John Wesley (New York, 1935), p.
35.
7 Roy Porter, English Society in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1982), pp. 220-30. 8 MacArthur, Economic Ethics, p. 36.
became powerful as a land owning class because of land enclosure and there was always the ongoing problem with absentee parsons. The eighteenth century Anglican Church was unspiritual and quite unable to deal with the situation. Populations were shifting, but new churches were
not set up to cope with the change.10 Parish boundaries were not redrawn.
Evangelical Situation, Arminianism and Holy Club
The early period of the eighteenth century produced many religious societies. These religious societies did much good with their offer of fellowship. The Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (SPCK) emphasised the spread of religious education, charity schools and religious literature. Ward writes that ‘the SPCK was originally intended by Thomas Bray to put down Quakerism at home and dissent generally in America’.11 Piety was encouraged by a variety of small religious societies which were devoted to holy living and more controversially good works. According to Brown-Lawson, ‘the Society for the Reformation of Manners rooted out wickedness in the community with the doubtful methods of
employing informers’.12
The church was challenged by the chilling movement of rationalism such as the Deists who opposed all forms of Christianity. However there were other powers at work. The Anglican Evangelicals were church men, gospel men committed to the concept of the new birth, personal religion and salvation by faith. They felt that God’s grace effected salvation and once saved, man was justified, regarded by God as having never sinned. Also the work of the Holy Spirit was seen to be important to conversion. Bebbington sees evangelicalism as ‘consisting of all those strands of Protestantism that have not been either too high in churchmanship or too broad in theology to qualify for acceptance. It has spanned the gulf
between the Established Church and Nonconformity’.13 Ranged on the
10 Albert Brown-Lawson, John Wesley, the Anglican Evangelicals of the Eighteenth
Century: a study in cooperation and separation with special reference to the Calvinistic Certainties (Edinburgh, 1994), p. 9.
11 W.R. Ward, The Protestant Evangelical Awakening (Cambridge, 1992), p. 302. 12 Brown-Lawson, John Wesley, pp. 11, 12.
13 David W. Bebbington, Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to
other side was Calvinism, with its stark logic of absolute predestination, which gave very little place to love and compassion.
Arminianism was another force to be reckoned with in this vigorous religious world. Jacob Arminius,14 a strict Calvinist scholar, doubted predestination and felt that God had given man free will and the liberating idea that Christ had died for the whole world. Averse to the High Calvinist notion which made God a tyrant, the Arminians, according to Semmel, ‘saw the relationship between Christ and his worshippers as akin to a commercial contract’.15 They saw Christ as having, by his sacrifice, purchased favourable terms for men. This was at the heart of the Arminian doctrine of conditional justification, which saw Christians as seeking by good works to obtain holiness and striving to retain that holiness as part of the contract. Arminians ‘insisted that the terms were clear in the gospels, in exchange for which God, because of Christ’s sacrifice, had agreed to grant eternal salvation’.16 In effect, all who believed would be saved, the message of the early Christian church. Arminius also said salvation depended on a final perseverance, that is, a determination to maintain a state of grace to the last. According to Semmel, ‘Arminianism, particularly of the Wesleyan Evangelical form, bore a revelatory message of liberty and equality of free will and universal salvation’.17 Semmel sees Wesley as the mediator between the traditional Protestantism of the Reformation, which had flowered in England in the sixteenth century, and the modern Arminian Protestantism, which became a feature of
Archbishop Laud’s Anglicanism.18
The year after John Wesley graduated from Oxford in 1724, he received a letter from his mother Susannah Wesley, written in reply to his query about predestination and the 17th article of the 39 Articles. Her contention was that ‘The doctrine of predestination as maintained by rigid
14 Jacob Arminius (1560 – 1609) Divinity Professor, Leiden University in Holland. 15 Bernard Semmel, The Methodist Revolution (New York, 1992), p. 12.
16 Semmel, Methodist Revolution, p. 12. 17 Semmel, Methodist Revolution, p. 80.
18 Archbishop Laud was appointed Archbishop of Canterbury in 1633 and gave
Arminianism the ascendancy in Anglican thought and practice; Leonard J. Trinterud (ed.), Elizabethan Puritanism (New York, 1971), p. 303.
Calvinists is very shocking and ought utterly to be abhorred’.19 Wesley rejected the theory of predestination as he prepared for ordination and at the same time gathered other pious forces around him. His spiritual progression was not allowed to develop into too great a mystical response to religion,20 and to this end The Holy Club founded by Charles Wesley met at Oxford in 1729. John Wesley soon took the leadership and the small group exuded a strong spirit of discipline and philanthropy, which involved its members in practical morality and philanthropic activities.
For the thrust of this thesis, it is important to note that the Holy Club members were expected to examine regularly both their conduct and conscience. Roy Hattersley notes that ‘criticism was levelled at the Holy
Club that they were obsessed with self examination’.21 Members confessed
their sins and expected others to do likewise. John Wesley was focusing on both inward and outward piety and both their forms can be traced through to the Launceston Wesleyan Methodist community. At the Holy Club, Wesley was producing an ideal religion for young men – their philanthropic tasks took them all over London to the hospitals and
prisons, all helping him to a social understanding.22 Sometime before the
foundation of the Holy Club, John Wesley had outlined his practicality for living by setting himself ‘General Rules for Employment of Time, supplemented by General Rules of Intention’. This formulation of rules and regulations appealed to his personality and he managed to stamp this on the Methodist Society.
Holy Club members were described as Methodists early in its
history.23 Members were John Gambold, who became a Moravian Bishop,
Benjamin Ingham, who travelled to the mission at Georgia with the Wesleys, John Broughton, a future secretary of the SPCK and, most importantly, George Whitefield a co–leader of Wesley’s in contributing to
19 McGonigle, Sufficient Saving Grace, p. 305, taken from The Arminian Magazine Vol. 1
(London 1778), pp. 37-38.
20 MacArthur, Economic Ethics, p. 60.
21 Hattersley, A Brand from the Burning, p. 76. 22 MacArthur, Economic Ethics, p. 61.
23 As far back as 1639, the name Methodist was in use (and apparently not for the first
time) in a sermon preached at Lambeth ‘Where are now our Anabaptists and plain packstaff Methodists which esteem all flowers of rhetoric or sermons no better than stinking weeds’ (Frederick C. Gill, The Romantic Movement and Methodism: A study of English Romanticism and the Evangelical Revival (London, 1937), p. 17.)
the Christian Revival in England. Whitefield anticipated Wesley in many of his techniques, though he differed completely from Wesley with his Calvinist Methodist leanings. He became chaplain to Selina, Countess of Huntingdon, and Armstrong surmises that Whitefield, ‘having found himself an aristocratic patroness, thereby inducted to his sympathies another important way forward. The landed gentleman who was saved
had influence to exert’.24 Armstrong further considers that neither Wesley
nor Whitefield was the leader of the Evangelical Period in England, but they were national figures who had a critical impact in the revival. Many of the evangelical clergyman had Calvinist bearings like Whitefield and significant names were Henry Venn, James Hervey, William Grimshaw and William Beveridge.
Influence of Devotional Literature
What these evangelicals did have in common with John Wesley was their connection to devotional literature and in particular to three books.
These were Thomas à Kempis’ Imitation of Christ, Bishop Jeremy
Taylor’s25 work Rules and Exercises of Holy Living and Holy Dying, and William Law’s A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life. The Imitation of Christ, with its concept of imitating Christ, impressed Wesley. It ratified his desire for inward and outward holiness. Wesley believed that ‘giving my life to God would profit me nothing unless I gave all my heart’.26 Bishop Taylor’s work had as its theory that ‘attainment of salvation wholly depended on living a holy and religious life’. 27 Written in 1649 after the Civil War, Taylor hoped the book would keep the impoverished Anglican
24 Anthony Armstrong, The Church of England, Methodists and Society: 1700 – 1850
(London, 1973), p. 129.
25 Jeremy Taylor born 1613, MA Caius College Cambridge, protégé of Archbishop Laud
and the King. With King Charles in Oxford in 1642 as chaplain Taylor was made D.D at Oxford. He championed the Church of England and condemned the policy of the Commonwealth towards religion. Imprisoned in 1655 for political reasons. Friend of the writer John Evelyn and other Royalists. Obtained security from persecution by moving to Ireland in 1658. Became Bishop of Down and Vice Chancellor of University of Dublin (Trinity College). He died in 1664; Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (On-Line Edition, 2006).
26 David Lowe Watson, The Early Methodist Class Meeting, its Origins and Significance
(Nashville, 1985), citing Frank Baker, John Wesley and the Imitation of Christ, London Quarterly Holborn Review, 166(194), pp. 74-87.
27 Jeremy Taylor (ed.) P.G. Stanwood, Holy Living and Holy Dying, Vol. 1, Holy Living
Church alive. Stanwood sees Holy Living as having roots in the long tradition of devotional literature that appeared in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries in England.28 In his work, Taylor described religious