Academic literature on the topic 'Wesleyan Methodists; Nonconformists'

Nonconformity was one of the major formative influences on Victorian society in Britain. The census of 1851 revealed that of seven million worshippers attending service on census day roughly half were counted in a nonconformist chapel. Even the Victorian who failed to attend service regularly found it difficult to evade the influence of nonconformity — and the Evangelicalism with which it was most closely —identified — in a society whose very customs, attitudes and even political life were so largely moulded by it. The main physical manifestation of this pervasive influence was the ubiquitious chapel, its most obvious human expression the professional minister. Of the leading nonconformist denominations the Congregationals were served by some 1,400 full-time men in 1847 while the Wesleyan, Primitive, New Connexion and Association Methodists had respectively 1,125, 518, 83 and 91 ministers in 1851.

The ascetic ideal found in wandering holy men in the east and in the self- and world-denying vows of regular clergy and laity in the middle ages came down to English nonconformity through puritanism. Bunyan’s pilgrim, like Benedict and Francis was passing through a temporary and evil world. Their attitude to life was that of the Sermon on the Mount, on the lips of the shepherd lad: ‘I am content with what I have,Little be it, or much.‘Wesley blended the high Anglican discipline of Jeremy Taylor and the Oxford Holy Club with his field evangelism and exhorted his Methodists to ‘Gain all you can; save all you can; then give all all you can.’ The gain was to be without doing harm to anyone. The Methodist was ‘to despise delicacy and variety, and be content with what plain nature requires.’ He was to ‘waste no part of it … in costly pictures, painting, gilding, books; in elegant rather than useful gardens.’ The Methodist was to avoid sensuality, curiosity and vanity. Wesley’s sermon on ‘The use of money’ is regularly quoted and is required reading for every Methodist preacher.

In his famous essay on von Ranke‘s history of the Popes, Thomas Babington Macaulay remarked that the ‘ignorant enthusiast whom the Anglican Church makes an enemy… the Catholic Church makes a champion’. ‘Place Ignatius Loyola at Oxford. He is certain to become the head of a formidable secession. Place John Wesley at Rome. He is certain to be the first General of a new Society devoted to the interests and honour of the Church.’ Macaulay’s general argument that Roman Catholicism ‘unites in herself all the strength of establishment, and all the strength of dissent’, depends for its force on his comparison of the Catholic Regular Orders with the popular preachers of Nonconformity. As the son of a leader of the Clapham Sect, his witness in the matter has its interest for scholars of the Evangelical Revival, and has been echoed by Ronald Knox in his parallel between Wesley and the seventeenth-century Jesuit, Paolo Segneri, who walked barefoot 800 miles a year to preach missions in the dioceses of northern Italy. More recently the comparison has been drawn again by Owen Chadwick, with the judgement that the ‘heirs of the Counter-Reformation sometimes astound by likeness of behaviour to that found in the heirs of the Reformation’, and Chadwick’s volume on the eighteenth-century Popes contains some fascinating material on the resemblances between the religion of the peoples of England and of Italy. An historian of Spanish Catholicism has compared the Moravians and the mission preachers of eighteenth-century Spain, not least in their rejection of modern commercialism, while an American scholar has traced some of the parallels between nineteenth-century Protestant and Catholic revivalism in the United States. Not that Wesleyan historians have been attracted to study the great movements of revival religion in the Catholic countries in Wesley’s lifetime—a neglect which is hardly surprising. One point of origin of the Evangelical revival was among refugees from Roman Catholic persecution, and for all the popular confusion, encouraged by men like Bishop Lavington, between Methodists and Papists, and for all Wesley’s belief in religious toleration and tenderness for certain Catholic saints and devotional classics, he was deeply hostile to the Roman Catholic Church, as David Hempton has recently shown. Yet there are many points of likeness as well as difference between the enthusiasts of Protestant and Catholic Europe, and both these need to be declared if Catholics and Protestants are ever to attempt to write an ecumenical history.