A Heart Strangely Warmed: John and Charles Wesley and their Writings

‘In All Things to Abound’:

Editor’s Acknowledgements

The exploration of Wesleyan Christianity, like its practice, cannot be done in isolation. I’m profoundly grateful to the whole host of friends and colleagues from all stages of my life whose company and wisdom has undergirded the compilation of this book. It’s been a labour of love, and something I’ve wanted to turn my attention to for a while, to return from the ‘first love’ of my academic life, the English Reformation, to that expression of Anglican Christianity where my own spiritual roots are and within which I live out my calling as an ordained presbyter. First and foremost, therefore, my thanks to Natalie Watson, editor and friend, whose counsel is always incisive and whose patience is always admirable. I hope the result in some way rewards her trust in me.

I’ve needed to consult and borrow books from a number of libraries in the course of writing, and need here to express gratitude to the Newberry Library in Chicago, but above all to my marvellous colleagues in the Phillips Library at Aurora University. Amy Manion, with her customary generosity, helped me navigate through online book ordering (and indulged my tendency to want to discuss Downton Abbey); Kay Culhane has been kind, helpful and unfailingly courteous despite my eccentric requests. I’m much obliged to them and their colleagues for their professionalism and their cheerful demeanour. Similarly, my colleagues on faculty at Aurora are a model of kindness and encouragement and I’m so fortunate in their scholarship, humanity and generosity. Particular thanks are due to the History Department for conversations along the way, and to David Rudek, Mark Soderstrom, Richard Westphal and others for coffee, good counsel, and necessary encouragement at critical moments. The students in my ‘Enlightenment and Enthusiasm’ seminar offered great food for thought too; I’m especially thankful to Andy Patton.

My tutors, colleagues and friends through theological college and the exercise of ministry have influenced this book too, in their companionship and stimulation to a prolonged engagement with Wesleyan Christianity. At Wesley House, Cambridge (whose imminent closure elicits both grief and gratitude for all I learned there, in community), in the Cambridge, London (Wesley’s Chapel) and Milton Keynes circuits, and in the Northern Illinois Conference, I’ve been abundantly blessed. In Northern Illinois, thanks are due to those who’ve taken courses on Methodist History and Heritage with me in lay academies in the Aurora and Chicago Northwestern districts, who’ve stimulated deeper reflections. This book has thus had a long gestation, and individual thanks are due to David Aslesen, Kimberly Broerman, Stephen Burgess, Helen Caine, Christian Coon, Nigel Cowgill, Stephen Day, Brian Erickson, the late Alan Horner, Peter Jennings (whose books, given to me when he retired, I used constantly in this project), Jonathan Mead, Jennifer Potter, James Preston, Colin Smith and Philip and Karen Turner among many others. Martin Forward belongs in this group too, but is also a current colleague at Aurora University (British Methodists: we are both ‘yet alive, and see each other’s face’). My continued debt of thanks to him for friendship, intellectual enquiry and spiritual guidance alike is immense.

Going even further back, my own formation in Methodism as a child and youth has been more and more brought to mind in editing this project. I’ve been reminded again to be grateful for all those who care for the Church’s children and youth, for their often hidden work, which is yet so vital. For myself, I want to thank Ian White for his early encouragement of my strange Wesleyan leanings, and of my young faith. My ministers John Flintham, Roy Jackson and Philip Beuzeval confirmed and strengthened me in so many ways too and I’m truly grateful. This book is indeed in part their work as well. My parents and my sister from then until now have remained a bedrock of love and support, for whose pride and encouragement I’m so much the richer. Trey Hall endures my absorption with dead priests with patience, enthusiasm and goodness, makes insightful contributions at every stage, and also incarnates the best Wesleyan qualities in both ministry and temperament. I cannot adequately say ‘thank you’.

Unthinkably, Leslie and Margaret Griffiths are alleged to be approaching retirement. They’ve been and remain a couple whose hospitality and kindness is legendary, a formidable force in ministry and public life. During my year at Wesley’s Chapel, they opened my eyes to the dynamite that Wesleyan theology in practice can still be. In the years since, they’ve remained trusted mentors, wise counsellors and beloved friends. Their work at and beyond the Chapel, in a host of diverse global contexts, is an inspiring and humbling witness to the way in which the Christian Gospel can still engage the world with creativity and prophetic insight. To them, a little pre-retirement gift, this book belongs. To them, and also to our fathers in God, John and Charles Wesley: erratic, error-prone, compulsive and sometimes autocratic, but despite and because of that also evidence of the power of divine grace, working in a human life by love.

I have often used Duke University Divinity School’s wonderful online collection of the Wesleys’ hymns in accessing material not commonly in current hymnals. The Center for Studies in the Wesleyan Tradition has made them all available on their web page, and this represents a huge gift to everyone who desires a deeper immersion in this remarkable

collection and its thought.

A note on the transliterations: I have updated spelling, and generally attempted to make Wesley’s prose flow a little better. John used both colon and semicolon abundantly, but was not a fan of the full stop. I have enforced them on him and I hope he will forgive me.

Introduction

I often cry out, ‘Give me back my former life!’ Let me be again an Oxford Methodist! I am often in doubt whether it would not be best for me to resume all my Oxford rules, great and small. I did then walk closely with God and redeem the time. But what have I been doing these thirty years?¹

So John Wesley wrote to his younger brother Charles in 1772, at the age of 69, and at a point in their lives when their work was flourishing, respected, and even celebrated. The Methodist Revival had spread across the British Isles; Methodist societies in towns and cities across the land were vigorous and effective; Methodist preachers itinerated regularly, overseeing the local communities and meeting annually for the influential Conference gathering in one of the movement’s strongholds: London, Bristol, Newcastle, Dublin. In that context, perhaps his outburst is surprising, even alarming. But John Wesley, unlike Charles, was always restless, always perhaps a little nostalgic for a better past, always seeking for ways to improve himself and those who had attached themselves to his charismatic leadership. He always struggled, too, with a sense of his own inadequacy, a struggle never fully resolved but one which, when channelled into his mission, produced the most extraordinary explosion of spiritual power in eighteenth-century Britain and beyond. Far from spoiling his work or tarnishing his saintly image, passionate declarations such as this should remind us that the Wesleys built Methodism, not on a false pretence of their own infallibility, but out of an honest admission of their own weakness and failure. It was, whether they knew it or not, the movement’s real claim to authenticity, reflected in its extraordinary appeal and impact among the people.

John and Charles Wesley were born into a country rectory in Epworth, Lincolnshire, the sons of the parish priest, Samuel, and his wife, Susanna. Epworth was a remote place, its lowly status a sign of their father’s failure to find better preferment. They were born into a fascinating inheritance, which shaped their views and their Christianity into the dynamic and creative force it became, a fusion of elements drawn from across the Church’s teaching and tradition. Samuel and Susanna were both the children of dissenting ministers: she was the daughter of the famous Samuel Annesley, ejected from St Giles Cripplegate, London, after the Restoration. Thus, they embodied the difficulties and choices of the Church of England, as it emerged from a piecemeal and ultimately incomplete Reformation, followed by a period of tension between its leaders and those, the ‘Puritans’, who wanted a church that more closely resembled the pure, Presbyterian and Congregational models of Christianity to be found in the heady settings of Geneva, Zurich and Strasbourg. These tensions, exacerbated by a foolish king and quarrelsome parliaments, had led to civil wars, to a decade of republican government and ‘Reformed’ church structures, and then to a restored monarchy under Charles II which also reintroduced ‘Anglicanism’. This prompted the fall of Annesley and his like.

As if this were not enough, another foolish king, James II, turned Catholic and alarmed the country to such a degree that he was forced to abdicate. James fled the kingdom, to be replaced by his reliably Protestant daughter Mary and her Dutch husband William of Orange. The ‘Glorious’ Revolution of 1688, which placed William and Mary on the throne as joint monarchs, also established a difficult period, in which England’s parliaments were forced to look farther and farther afield to maintain a Protestant monarchy, while all the time James and his heirs waited in France, assured of their rightful claim on the throne, denied them only because of their Catholicism. Eventually, in 1714, after Mary’s sister Queen Anne died without heir, Britain (as it by then had become) looked to Germany for a monarch and to George, the Elector of Hanover. George was Mary and Anne’s second cousin, spoke very little English, and seemed a rather distant choice to many. Among them was Susanna Wesley, whose conflicts with her husband in political matters were only the tip of the iceberg of their marital tensions. But, back in 1702, after a prolonged disagreement about whether or not William of Orange was England’s rightful King, Samuel and Susanna had effected a reconciliation. Their second eldest surviving son, John, was the fruit of their renewed affection.

Samuel and Susanna had not embraced the Puritanism of their parents and had instead chosen to adopt a rather ‘high church’ form of Anglicanism, which emphasized regularity of worship, the necessity of frequent attendance at communion and a ‘middle way’ in the ongoing disputes between Catholics and Protestants. For all that, there was about them, and Susanna in particular, a rigour concerning their approach to life and faith that looked like an inheritance from the Puritans. Some of that may have been simply a necessary response on her part to a house full of children, but she organized the Rectory with formidable attention to detail. The extent of her influence on her sons will be examined in Chapter 1; in learning, piety, strictness and wisdom, her presence was keenly felt even after she died in 1742, by John in particular. She taught him the necessity of community for growth in faith, of attention to the work of God in the lives of others, and of personal discipline in search of holiness. She held the family together and built it up through Samuel’s absences on parish matters, church business or, for one terrible period, in prison for debt. After the Rectory burned down in 1709, she seems to have been convinced with a maternal intuition that John – Jacky, as she called him – was destined for something great, a ‘brand plucked from the burning’, quoting Zechariah 3. It was a reference remembered and immortalized by Charles in a hymn written in May 1738, just as he and John experienced their dramatic renewal of spirit:

Where shall my wondering soul begin?

How shall I all to heaven aspire?

A slave redeemed from death and sin,

A brand plucked from eternal fire,

How shall I equal triumphs raise,

Or sing my great Deliverer’s praise?

It was in Oxford, of course, that John and Charles Wesley first won notoriety for their attempt to live the Christian life with absolute fidelity to all its disciplines. Both brothers studied at Christ Church; John went on to be elected a Fellow of Lincoln College, although he spent a good deal of time in the late 1720s, during Charles’ days as a student, back home assisting his father with parish duties. By Charles’ account, John returned to Oxford in November 1729 and joined a small group that Charles himself had already formed; John talked rather of a new, shared undertaking by the group acting together at that time. Be that as it may, the ‘Holy Club’ caused quite a stir in refined Oxford society: the zeal and apparent harshness of their ‘rule of life’ elicited both shock and ridicule in those who saw it as a dangerous experiment in religious extremism. When one of the group, William Morgan, died prematurely in 1732, a scandal was created which the Wesleys had to work hard to address. For all that, the main emphases of the group were clear: daily mutual accountability, prayer, Bible study and learned reading, regular fasting, frequent attendance at communion and other church services and, after a while, a pronounced effort to serve prisoners and the deserving poor. It was a thoroughgoing, exacting effort to inculcate holiness through sheer force of will and discipline of mind and heart.

Nor was it an effort that the Wesleys came to despise. Sometimes too strict a division has been created between this period of their life and the real beginning of the revival in the 1740s. Even if there was a missing ingredient in these years – the felt experience of divine love – John and Charles Wesley never regretted or rejected their Oxford lives, as we have already seen. In their learning, they were immersed in a vast range of influences later to flavour their theology with characteristic notes: an understanding of holiness drawn from Eastern Orthodoxy; an approach to the life of prayer dependent on the mysticism of Thomas à Kempis and William Law; a sense of the importance of action which reflected Catholic divines more than Reformed Protestant theologians; a deep connection to the great figures of the Early Church, which undergirded their determined Anglican attachment to moderation, breadth and inclusivity in their mission. They were also men of their ‘Enlightenment’ times, drenched in the scientific discoveries of the day, and in the ideas of men like John Locke in epistemology, politics and religious tolerance. Most of all, without the rigours of the ‘Holy Club’ Methodism would never have come into existence. Here, they also met and made firm friends, foremost among them the remarkable young George Whitefield, son of a single mother, a poor Bristol barman turned Oxford scholar, who became the finest preacher of his or any age. Whitefield’s sheer energy and vision made him a force of nature: and another influence without which the Wesleys’ own ministries would have been unlikely.

Nevertheless, seeking for something, a missing quality that even they could not accurately describe until they found it, the Wesleys decided to pursue their calling in a place less inhibited by the customs, expectations and limits of polite English society. In October 1735, they joined a mixed party setting sail for America, where John would act as pastor to the new colony in Savannah, Georgia, while Charles acted as secretary to James Oglethorpe, the colony’s founder. They hoped both for space to cultivate their piety further and for opportunities to evangelize Native Americans. In both aims their hopes were utterly dashed. Their own accounts of these terrible days are further examined later on; Charles left after only a few months, his relationship with Oglethorpe never easy and at times downright brutal. The colonists soon proved themselves to be demanding, petty and spiteful, their women gossiping and backbiting, their men hypocritical and quick to anger. But John in particular was also a dreadful mismatch to be the pastor of such people: nit-picking over Church of England rules, judgemental about his parishioners’ every word and act, and insufferably self-righteous even when obviously in the wrong. Much has been made of his ill-fated and unwise dalliance with the unfortunate Sophy Hopkey: clearly a deep mutual affection developed between them, but John’s characteristic caution and prevarication led to her inevitable assumption that he had grown cold and to a betrothal to another. Devastated, he publicly repudiated her at the altar one Sunday, and the rest was misery. In fact, the breakdown of his relationship with Sophy, with its dire consequences in the colony, was but one symptom of John’s complete inadequacy to deal with Savannah and its oddities. He left, under cover of night, in disgrace and as a fugitive from justice, to rejoin his brother in England. At the beginning of 1738, John and Charles Wesley must have seemed a pathetic pair, washed-up jetsam from a disastrous colonial experiment, whose future and character alike were in question.

The saving grace that emerged from the wreckage of the Georgia tragedy was another friendship. On their way west, the brothers had been struck by the simple but effective piety of some German Lutheran exiles of the Moravian sect; on his way back east, John had been again shamed by their confidence and nobility of spirit, which seemed to taunt his own sense of unworthiness and lack of trust in God. Charles had befriended the leader of London’s Moravians on his return, and John soon fell for him too. Peter Böhler acted as friend, spiritual director and midwife to the Wesleys’ mature spirituality, a mainstay of wisdom, loyalty and encouragement when all seemed lost. He and the Moravians provided the safe environment within which the brothers were finally able to reach for and grasp what had eluded them, in May 1738: a new, heartfelt, dependable experience of grace, which was all a pure gift and none of their own doing or devising. Coupled with their former formidable discipline, it was spiritual dynamite.

John, living into his new state, paid an extended visit to the Moravians’ home in Herrnhut. On his return, the brothers began to preach in London pulpits and beyond as occasion offered, and to find that they connected with their congregations with a new power. They also built up the Fetter Lane Society, a growing group of mixed Anglican-Moravian influence that they had helped to form after their return from America. We shall examine the circumstances of their first foray into field preaching later: stirred and goaded by George Whitefield to come to Bristol to witness the work God was doing among the working poor, the Wesleys themselves finally and reluctantly abandoned their high church squeamishness and ‘submitted to be more vile’ by taking their message directly to its intended hearers, out of doors. The effects were immediate, electric and utterly shocking, even to those at the centre of the movement. Crowds numbering thousands came to hear them; dozens of converts were made every day; the Spirit was poured out and experienced in pentecostal phenomena and miraculous interventions that roused both wonder and consternation. The Wesleys, committed in a way that Whitefield confessed he could not match to leaving organized ‘societies’ of new Christians behind them, soon built up a revival of unprecedented breadth and impact. In the early 1740s, they began to cast their nets ever wider, reaching beyond their heartlands of London and Bristol to Newcastle in the north, Cornwall in the far southwest, and Ireland across the sea. Within a few months of returning home in failure, they had finally found their calling.

The brothers’ own description of their movement’s growth, the opposition they encountered and the divisions they had to overcome within it are the subject of Chapters 2 and 6. The 1740s were a tumultuous time of expansion and consolidation for Methodism, but they were also the years in which the Wesleys found themselves in the eye of a great storm of controversy about their work. To some, they were infamous ‘enthusiasts’ who undermined the collective order of the Church of England and encouraged the vulnerable to emotional excess. To others, they were dangerous fifth columnists for the Jacobite cause, and especially for the pretender ‘Bonnie Prince Charlie’ as he made his way south in 1745; their emphasis on the necessity of acting towards one’s own salvation seemed like a worrisome echo of Roman Catholic principles. Still others at various times thought them vulgar, subversive, treacherous, heretical or schismatic, charges that John’s pen worked hard to rebut for two decades and more, making his appeal to ‘men of reason and religion’ that Methodism represented only God’s latest initiative to reform and renew the Church of England. These writings were at times strident and on occasion succumbed to the very vitriol they claimed to oppose, but they also reflected the breadth of Methodism, and the real and striking difference it was making in many communities and especially in areas of poverty and inadequate social provision.

Perhaps it was more difficult to address the internal divisions, whether with Whitefield and his followers over predestination (the subject of Chapter 4), or with some of the earliest preachers, whose ambitions grew too large for the space the Wesleys were willing to make for them or whose claims to private inspiration embarrassed the brothers. Prominent among both groups was their errant brother-in-law Westley Hall, who, having broken the heart of one of their sisters, married another and then became a leading member of the ‘quietist’ group within the Fetter Lane Society. This profound disagreement led to the withdrawal of the Wesleys and their followers from the society and the establishment of the Foundery as Methodism’s London home. Hall subsequently felt divinely inspired to become a bigamist and philanderer, devastating his wife Martha, but firm in his own righteousness. Hall epitomized the problems that the brothers had to address when those of their number seemed to confirm the very accusations of their opponents, but there were others. There were also real and sometimes bitter arguments with friends and allies and an ongoing tension for the Wesleys between defending beliefs they held to be essential to authentic Christianity – such as universal redemption or the possibility of ‘entire sanctification’ – while also insisting on the need for shared endeavour by Christians of all stripes and opinions in essential matters of preaching, evangelizing and providing for justice and social improvement. This notion, of the ‘Catholic’ spirit in religion, was also central to their thought and is the subject of Chapter 7.

By far the hardest relationship for John and Charles Wesley to manage, however, was their own. They had inherited vastly different characters from their parents: John his mother’s cool, calm, rational and meticulous approach and Charles the more impetuous and emotional disposition of their father. Charles’ disposition and needs were very different from John’s, and he was, to his brother’s intense disapproval, much less fitted for the demands of an itinerant life and religious leadership. So it was that Charles increasingly deferred to his elder brother, and willingly ceded the mantle of leadership almost entirely to his capable if autocratic shoulders. A blissfully happy marriage to Sally Gwynne and then the joys of parenthood also laid an increasingly solemn and urgent claim on Charles’ attentions, affections and time, confirming him in his decision to quit the preaching life altogether and settle down, first in Bristol and later in London. But there was more to it than that, and it was in the area of affairs of the heart, in fact, that the brothers’ relationship was most severely tested.

John Wesley, as should already be clear, needed no assistance in making disastrous choices in his romantic entanglements. When Charles decided to intervene as well, the results were appalling. In 1749, the Grace Murray affair represented the lowest point in their relationship. In a nutshell, John indulged in his customary prevarication in courting Mrs Murray, a leader in Newcastle Methodism. Yet they managed to become engaged. She was also being pursued by John Bennet, a northern preacher, and Charles felt that Bennet represented a better match for her than his brother, for reasons about which we may only speculate but which were certainly not pure. Charles urged them to marry and helpfully performed the ceremony himself, bringing down on his head John’s anger and accusations of betrayal. His actions placed a strain on the brothers’ relationship for several years, until John, seriously ill in 1753, effected a reconciliation. Charles’ letters to Bennet after the affair seem rather defensive and even a little crafty in their attempts to prevent future meetings at which his own role might be revealed. In any case, Bennet later split from the Wesleys and did nothing to prove Charles’s confidence to have been wise or well-placed.²

When John did finally marry, early in 1751, Charles’ inevitable disapproval was not far behind, although John’s rather impetuous choice of the widow Mary (Molly) Vazeille was equally inevitably a terrible one. Details of their utterly miserable marriage are unnecessary: but the combination of her jealousy, surely the symptom of a real mental instability, and his refusal to accommodate his lifestyle to the marriage in any way was fatal to whatever slim chances of happiness had ever existed for them. The Wesleys spent much of their marriage separated either through John’s itineracy or their own refusal to cohabit with each other; his lack of engagement only inflamed her rages, intrusions on his privacy and increasingly wild accusations of immorality and promiscuity. One friend even alleged that she was physically violent towards him. When Molly died in 1781, her estranged husband did not attend her funeral, having played no part in her life for years. It was a source of deep pain for him that, as his public career flourished and acquired a measure of new respectability and renown, his private life was a source only of disappointment and recrimination.

The brothers’ relationship survived the Murray affair, barely, but was always subject to tension, despite their real affection for one another. Charles confessed to John as early as 1746 that he felt frustrated about the way his brother ignored or dismissed his concerns or views, to the point that ‘I have many times resolved never to contradict your judgement as to any thing or person’.³ On one subject, however, Charles continued frequently and firmly to challenge John’s views and actions: their ongoing relationship to the Church of England. Lacking John’s firm missiological conviction that saving souls mattered more than the niceties of Anglican discipline, Charles often chafed at the moves that felt dangerous to him because they were destructive of unity: lay preachers, the way preaching houses sometimes replaced parish churches as the focus of devotion, John’s refusal to correct preachers who criticized the Church of England, and the way the preachers’ dependence on John’s leadership led to creeping separatism. Above all, Charles worried that John’s silent approval for lay preachers celebrating communion opened the door to Methodist ‘ordinations’. When, in 1784, John did take it into his own hands to ordain Thomas Vasey and Richard Whatcoat for the American mission field and to ‘consecrate’ Francis Asbury and Thomas Coke as its superintendents, Charles rightly thought the Rubicon had been crossed, and protested bitterly. John always maintained that Methodism would remain in the Church of England, ‘at least till I am removed into a better world’; Charles lamented that his brother ‘wavers . . . and turns between the Church and [separatists]’. Even in death, the brothers’ divided sensibilities were starkly revealed, Charles being buried in consecrated Anglican ground and John behind the City Road Chapel with his preachers.⁴

When they acted in concert, however, John and Charles Wesley were a formidable team with a phenomenal power of expression and persuasion. Charles discovered his incomparable genius for hymn-writing during the 1730s and produced a seemingly endless flow of material throughout the rest of his life, making the Scriptures and uniquely Methodist meditations on them available to the music-loving masses of the societies. The best of his compositions show an unparalleled capacity for poetic and theological artistry, taking often unpromising Bible verses and spinning from them pure devotional gold: this, for example, on Leviticus 6.13, with its instructions to keep the fire on the altar alight:

O thou who camest from above,

The pure, celestial fire t’ impart,

Kindle a flame of sacred love

On the mean altar of my heart;

There let it for thy glory burn

With inextinguishable blaze,

And trembling to its source return,

In humble prayer, and fervent praise.

Jesus, confirm my heart’s desire

To work, and speak, and think for thee,

Still let me guard the holy fire,

And still stir up thy gift in me,

Ready for all thy perfect will

My acts of faith and love repeat,

’Till death thy endless mercies seal,

And make my sacrifice complete.⁵

Or this, surely the finest verse exploration of the doctrine of the incarnation ever penned:

Glory be to God on high,

And peace on earth descend;

God comes down: he bows the sky:

And shows himself our friend!

God th’ invisible appears,

God the blest, the great I AM

Sojourns in this vale of tears,

And Jesus is his name.

Him the angels all adored

Their Maker and their King:

Tidings of their humbled Lord

They now to mortals bring:

Emptied of his majesty,

Of his dazzling glories shorn,

Being’s source begins to be,

And God himself is born!

See th’ eternal Son of God

A mortal Son of man,

Dwelling in an earthy clod

Whom heaven cannot contain!

Stand amazed, ye heavens, at this!

See the Lord of earth and skies!

Humbled to the dust he is,

And in a manger lies!

We the sons of men rejoice,

The Prince of Peace proclaim,

With heaven’s host lift up our voice,

And shout Immanuel’s name;

Knees and hearts to him we bow;

Of our flesh, and of our bone

Jesus is our brother now,

And God is all our own!⁶

John’s publications were largely in prose, but represented a varied and impressive output, including treatises, sermons, an ecclesiastical history, a natural history and a history of England. It also included the ongoing volumes of his Journal, which, while certainly tidied up and edited for the edification of Methodists and the correction of their opponents, provided a compelling insight into the growth of the movement and the indefatigable character at its head and heart. In 1748, he conceived another plan for the edification of his followers, as he revealed to a friend:

I have often thought of mentioning to you and a few others a design I have had for some years of printing a little library, perhaps of fourscore or one hundred volumes, for the use of those that fear God. My purpose was to select whatever I had seen most valuable in the English language, and either abridge or take the whole tracts, only a little corrected or explained, as occasion should require. Of these I could print ten or twelve, more or less, every year, on a fine paper, and large letter, which should be cast for the purpose. As soon as I am able to purchase a printing-press and types, I think of entering on this design. I have several books now ready, and a printer who desires nothing more than food and raiment. In three or four weeks I hope to be in London, and, if God permits, to begin without delay.⁷

The Christian Library, the result of this, ran to 50 volumes and drew on a characteristically wide range of influences, edited again to excise passages that contradicted Wesleyan theology. These publications increasingly augmented Wesley’s income and provided for much of Methodism’s growth in buildings, preachers and the like: although John made much money in his life from his books, he gave away everything except what was necessary to sustain his household in a modest manner.

Wesley’s Primitive Physic, first published anonymously in 1747 and then openly in 1760, represented one piece of evidence for his continued fascination with health and the advances of science: he frequently exhorts his readers to be electrified, reflecting the fad of the day for experimental treatments. Much of the book seems rather like the ministrations of a quack and advises all manner of homeopathic remedies whose efficacy must be dubious at least; but his own reliance on the cures he published seems undeniable, judging by his journal accounts of his own illnesses and misfortunes on the road. And the book’s holistic approach is also commendable, making no distinction between physical and mental illness and understanding that both alike need imply no fault on the part of the patient. Nowhere does Wesley seek to undermine the medical profession, but only to offer simple remedies for those whose means might be limited. Of course, above all, his readers are encouraged to ‘add to the rest . . . that old, unfashionable medicine, prayer’.

Amid the growth and then consolidation of Methodism, the later decades of the Wesleys’ lives were not without their challenges: the 1760s saw the difficult departures of some of their earliest and most faithful preachers in disputes about authority and leadership; the 1770s included an increasingly bitter disagreement with the Calvinists. After Whitefield’s death in 1770 his moderating influence was keenly missed, and the Minutes of the 1770 Conference sparked a furious dispute about the relationship between faith and works, as John Wesley edged ever closer to an understanding that looked alarmingly, if wrongly, like pre-Reformation Catholicism to his allies. Among those horrified at the direction he seemed to be pursuing was Selina, the Dowager Countess of Huntingdon. She had been an important supporter of the Methodists all along, but had had a particular fondness for Whitefield, whom she supported financially and to whom she was closer in theology and temperament. In 1779, she was forced to take the step the Wesleys always resisted and became a dissenter, outside the Church of England, in order to found her own connexion of chapels. Increasingly, therefore, it was the Wesleyan branch of Methodism that became the focus of the movement, and the brothers worked hard to maintain its characteristic emphases and practices, while