Methodism and Society

Stuart Andrews

Description

A study of Methodism in its historical context - theological, social and political.

Sujets

• Literary Criticism
• European

Informations

• Publié par: Humanities eBooks
• Date de parution: 11 janvier 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781847600219
• Langue: English

Extrait

History Insights General Editor: Alan Cousins

Running Head 1

Methodism and Society

Stuart Andrews

‘This was the theme of Wesley’s preaching – not hell-fire but free grace’ http//www.humanities-ebooks.co.uk

Publication Data

© Stuart Andrews, 2007

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ISBN 978-1-84760-021-9

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Stuart Andrews

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Andrews, Stuart.Methodism and Society. History Insights. Tirril: Humanities-Ebooks, 2007

A Note on the Author

Stuart Andrews, a former scholar of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, was a UK headmaster for 23 years (Norwich School and Clifton College), and editor of the Headmsters’ Conference journal for eleven years. He is now librarian of the Wells & Mendip Museum.

He has written six other books on eighteenth-century history, the three latest on counter-revolutionary rhetoric in the decades following the American and French revolutions. HisIrish Rebellion: Protestant polemic 1798–1900was published by Palgrave/Macmillan in 2006.

Contents

A Note on the Author Preface Acknowledgements 1 The Intellectual Climate 2 The Church 3 The Birth of Methodism Wesley’s Oxford The Holy Club Georgia Moravian inuences The îrst societies Whiteîeld 4 Methodism under Wesley Preaching Organization Philanthropy Education 5 Divergences and Distinctions Reason and Revelation Calvinists and Arminians Methodists and Evangelicals 6 Methodism after Wesley The Reformation of Manners Methodism and Politics Chartism and Trade Unionism 7 Methodism and Revolution Guidance on further study Further Insights Titles

Preface

The general theme of this study is the interaction between religious belief and social improvement, and should be regarded as part of the debate about Elie Halévy’s claim that Methodists and Evangelicals saved England from violent revolution in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The text was îrst published in Longman’s Seminar Studiesand has been out of print since the 1970s. The main text is somewhat shorter in this online version, but is otherwise substantially unchanged. Some minor errors and ambiguities have been corrected. The documents section of the original edition has been omitted, but reference to many of the sources is now incorporated in the text. References to sources are given in the body of the text in abbreviated form. Frequently cited works are abbreviated asJWDfor Wesley’s Diary,JWJforThe Journal of John Wesley,ed. N. Curnock (1909; re-issued 1938),JWLforThe Letters of John Wesley, ed. J. Telford, 8 vols (1931), andWHSforProceedings of the Wesley Historical Society. In the case of theJournal, volume and page references are not shown where the date of the entry appears in full. Complete bibliographical details for all cited titles are given in the updated bibliography. Other relevant titles are also included in the bibliography.

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Epworth Press Ltd for permission to reproduce extensive extracts fromThe Journal of John Wesley, ed. Nehemiah Curnock (1938 edition). Brief extracts from other copyright material are acknowledged parenthetically in the text and with full bibliographical details in the bibliography. The original version ofMethodism and Societywas dedicated to John (1970) Walsh. The author’s debt to John’s friendship and expertise has not diminished over the intervening 36 years.

1 The Intellectual Climate

Methodism grew up in a climate of irreligion. It was only two years before John Wesley’s Aldersgate Street experience that Joseph Butler, soon to be Bishop of Bristol, announced in the advertisement preîxed to hisAnalogy of Religion(1736):

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 îctitious. 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 îrst 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 îrmament 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’sChristianity not Mysterious(1696). According to Toland, Christ’s role, far from conîrming the