The Life of John Wesley

With the insight and thoroughness that marked Blood and Fire, his masterful biography of the founders of the Salvation Army, Roy Hattersley chronicles the life of John Wesley and explores the psychological makeup of the man who founded the Methodist Church. The Life of John Wesley, the first full-length biography in several decades, portrays the founder of Methodism against a vividly rendered backdrop of the religious, social, and political landscape of eighteenth-century England. Through the power of his personality and the strength of his faith, Wesley became the leader of the English religious revival that arose in opposition to the established Anglican Church, and his theology continues to have an impact on religions worldwide. Roy Hattersley follows Wesley's spiritual journey, tracing his constant, often agonizing attempts to define the nature of virtue as well as the path to sanctity. The story of Wesley's theological progress is vastly enriched by Hattersley's revealing portrait of Wesley's complex personality. A genuine scholar, Wesley published more wo

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Faith Alone

The Victorians, emboldened by the confidence that comes with success, convinced posterity that modern England began in the nineteenth century. After Trafalgar, a nation secure from Continental invasion could concentrate its interest and energy on industry and empire. A country unified by railways used its coal and iron to become the workshop of the world. Between 1832 and 1867 manhood (as distinct from universal) suffrage made Britain think of itself as a democracy. After 1870 compulsory elementary education ensured that the sons and daughters of the poor were taught to read and write. London became the undisputed financial and maritime capital of the world, providing insurance for the new iron ships which had been pioneered in British dockyards. And in the middle of the century the Great Exhibition of 1851 confirmed that Britain could make anything and everything and had become the crossroads of international trade. It is easy enough to believe that the historical (as distinct from the numerical) nineteenth century--from the Battle of Waterloo in 1815 to the outbreak of the First World War in 1914--was the time when old ideas were replaced by new. It is easy, but it is wrong.

The genius of the nineteenth century was the single-minded determination with which it exploited the ideas which it had inherited from the early Hanoverian age. The Industrial Revolution was the eighteenth century's bequest. After the Darbys of Coalbrookdale smelted iron with coke in 1713, a "coal rush" engulfed every part of Britain in which it was believed "black gold" was buried. The steam pump, designed by Savery and Newcomen to clear the flooded mines, prepared the way for Watts's steam engine. Hargreaves, Crompton and Arkwright invented machinery which changed the whole character of the textile industry and drove the poor into towns and factories. Benjamin Huntsman and Thomas Bolsover transformed the way in which steel was made and used. The restrictions on exports and the import of essential raw materials--a relic of mercantile, as distinct from merchant, England--were removed. By 1785 the nation was so confident that its future lay in industry and commerce that a General Chamber of Manufacturers of Great Britain was founded under the leadership of Josiah Wedgwood.

The idea on which Great Britain's nineteenth-century prosperity was built was an eighteenth-century theory. Adam Smith wrote Inquiry into the Wealth of Nations in 1776, as the culmination of his life's work on the nature of modern society. Hume and Joseph Priestley argued that religion and science went hand in hand. Perhaps Tom Paine, in prison and under sentence of death, meant to be ironic when he called his last great work The Age of Reason. But the eighteenth century was certainly the Enlightenment, even though the new view of the world did not come from England's ancient universities. Neither Oxford nor Cambridge was as supine as the institution by which they were dominated. The Established Church slept. It was left to John Wesley--in the revival which he came to lead--to perform for religion the defining duty of his time and bequeath a new view of the world to his successors. Although he lived and worked in the eighteenth century, it was the nineteenth which he helped to change.

Dissatisfaction with the Established Church began late and grew slowly. Much of eighteenth-century England was wholly neglected by clergy who were concerned for neither their parishioners' spiritual nor social welfare. Henry Fielding, in his Proposal for Making an Effectual Provision for the Poor, thought that prosperous England was ignorant of how dire the condition of parts of the country had become. "If we were to make progress through the outskirts of a town, and look into the habitations of the poor, we should there behold such pictures of human misery as must move the compassion of every heart. . . ." The church in general either did not know or did not care that such conditions existed--that only one child in four, born in London, survived and that infant mortality in the burgeoning towns of the Midlands and the north was even higher. Nor did it show much concern for the moral degradation which accompanied poverty. Religion was a matter of habit, not conviction. Christians were required to do little more than perform the rituals of formal observance under the supervision of priests who regarded the church as less of a calling than a profession for gentlemen.

The revolt against nominal Christianity was led by an unlikely revolutionary. John Wesley certainly did not look the part. He was, at most, five feet six inches tall, though some reports describe him as two inches smaller. There was a cast in one of his clear blue eyes, and his nose was long and bony. He never wore a wig and allowed his hair to grow unfashionably long--initially because he could not afford to employ a barber but, as he grew old and famous, because it was the appearance which his followers recognized. Nor did he seem, at least to passing acquaintances, a man who could move multitudes. His manner was invariably eager and intense, and his conversation almost always didactic. Aside from his core belief that faith offered the hope of universal redemption, he was disconcertingly inclined to make sudden adjustments to his theological position. Once he had changed his mind, he invariably denounced his opponents (who had often been his allies) with an unscrupulous determination never to admit that he had been wrong.

Yet there are innumerable, and carefully documented, stories of men who heard him preach for the first time or caught his eye and immediately determined to follow him wherever he might lead them. It was not because he was a great orator. George Whitefield, who, had he chosen, might himself have led the Great Revival, certainly preached with greater power and passion. But Wesley combined a genius for organization with an irresistible dynamism which came from the unswerving conviction and absolute confidence that he had been called to do God's work. The quality which enabled him to lead the Second Reformation was charisma, properly defined--"divinely conferred power or talent, capacity to inspire followers with devotion and enthusiasm." That characteristic made him irresistible to religiously inclined women, and he was as susceptible to them as they were attracted to him.

Women were his weakness; doctrinal promiscuity was his abiding sin. In other ways--moral, physical, intellectual--he was unreasonably strong, although profoundly (indeed often debilitatingly) introspective. Yet John Wesley was essentially a man of action who would ride a hundred miles in a day, stopping only to change horses and preach along the way. His capacity to conduct an almost continuous theological disputation (with himself as well as with his critics) at a time when he was creating--despite the risks to both person and reputation--a new Protestant denomination was a great tribute to his physical and intellectual stamina. Somehow he always managed to fight his way toward the final objective--first a revival, then an organization--despite distractions which would have diverted a weaker man. He was usually poor, often crossed in love, constantly reviled, regularly betrayed by false friends and in a permanent state of anxiety about his own fitness to answer his great calling. But he always struggled on. His character confirmed his mother's judgment that a stern upbringing would produce a strong man. She never even paused to think if her method of child rearing would also guarantee a happy life. But happiness, at least as the world understood it, was of no great consequence to John Wesley. He had been sent into the world to preach redemption. Sola fide, by faith alone. He created a new church through which that all-consuming belief could be preached to his universal parish. And in doing so he became one of the architects of the modern world.

2 Among Our Forefathers

The facts and the fables are difficult to distinguish. The most devoted and devout early Methodists--men and women whose admiration came perilously close to idolatry--wanted to believe that divine will guided John Wesley along every step of the way toward the creation of a separate and independent church. And Wesley himself encouraged the mythmakers with dubious stories of his own. Many of them concerned his forebears. For he had a reverence for his ancestors which elevated them to the status of a holy family. Both their politics and their theology were different from his. But at least according to the folklore, even Bartholomew Wesley, his great-grandfather and rector of Charmouth, bequeathed to his illustrious descendant indomitable independence and unqualified love of God. And Bartholomew Wesley was a Dissenter and supporter of Cromwell's Commonwealth, while John Wesley forbade his followers to register as Dissenting ministers and was, from first to last, a king's man loyal to the House of Hanover.

Bartholomew Wesley's story was almost certainly improved in the Methodists' telling. But the facts on which it was based are beyond dispute. In the autumn of 1651, King Charles II, defeated by Cromwell's army at the Battle of Worcester, fled southwest. The "proclamation for the apprehension of Charles Stuart and other traitors, his adherents and abettors" offered a reward of one thousand pounds for the deposed king's capture. Charles was rightly doubtful about the loyalty of the retreating troops. Many of his soldiers were mercenaries, and virtually none of them had received their promised pay. So when he reached Bristol and found the streets crowded with the cold and hungry remnants of his dispirited army, he feared that he would be recognized and that the temptation to claim the bounty would be too strong to resist. Although badly prepared for the journey, he insisted that his party press on. They rode first west to Somerset and then south to Dorset.

Just before the fugitives arrived at Charmouth, where they planned to stay the night, the king's horse threw a shoe. The farrier to whom it was taken was surprised to discover that it had been shod in a fashion "common in the north of England," and the villagers, who trusted nobody they did not know, had their curiosity increased by the ostler at the inn at which the strangers stayed. The whole party had, he reported, insisted on occupying the top room and had "stayed up all night." Suspicion turned to fear, and it was decided to consult the rector--"the puny parson," as records called him in recognition of the diminutive stature which characterized all the Wesleys. How could they protect their property and families against the obviously dangerous intruders?

Bartholomew Wesley was at prayer, and his parishioners did not dare disturb him. By the time that his devotions were complete, Charles had left the village and turned east for Brighton, France and liberty. It was months before the people of Charmouth began to suspect that they had been hosts to the king. Then, an itinerant peddler told them that Charles II had passed that way. The effect was greatest on the rector. Throughout the years of the Commonwealth he constantly boasted that the long hours which the king spent on his knees was the result of the part that prayer had played in his narrow escape during his day in Dorset. And Bartholomew Wesley left no doubt as to either his loyalty or his intentions. He was a Commonwealth man. Had he not been on his knees when the king made his escape "he would surely have clept him."

In his History of the Rebellion in England, Clarendon dismisses the story of near capture by "a fanatical minister" and attributes the alarm that was raised at Charmouth to "a weaver and ex-soldier." But whether or not Bartholomew Wesley narrowly missed a moment of destiny, he was a known Dissenter who would not use the authorized prayer book and was openly skeptical about the provenance of the Church of England's orthodox rites and rituals. After the Stuart Restoration he paid a terrible price for his heterodoxy. First he refused to swear that he accepted the Thirty-nine Articles of the Protestant faith and was, in consequence, expelled from his parish under the provisions of the 1662 Act of Uniformity. Then he defied the requirements of the 1665 Five Mile Act and refused to swear that he would "not at any time endeavour [any] alteration in Government either in Church or State" and was excluded from his living at Charmouth and the nearby parish of Charleston and required to leave the area. Fortunately, he had read medicine as well as theology at Oxford, so he could earn his keep as a free man and doctor. He died unrepentant and unreconciled to the Church of England.

Bartholomew Wesley became a central figure in early Methodist folklore. He had, the mythmakers claimed, established a pattern of moral independence from everything but the clear voice of personal conscience. That was a characteristic which they regarded as the hallmark of their leader.

Bartholomew's son, the first John Wesley, began his determined search for salvation when he was a schoolboy. From the age of twelve, he kept a diary in which--much like his grandson a hundred years later--he recorded his painful path to a holy life. A Puritan by instinct and, from the start of the Civil War, a passionate supporter of the parliamentary cause, he left Oxford at a time when Cromwell was the undisputed protector of England and four years before the deposed Charles II passed a troubled night in his father's parish. There is no doubt that Cromwell's Board of Commissioners would have gladly endorsed the ordination of so committed a follower. But he chose to join "the gathered church" in Weymouth and then formed a branch of that extreme Nonconformist sect in nearby Radipole. He remained with them for only a few months. When the vicar of Whitchurch died, the commissioners invited him to inherit the parish as pastor, and his acceptance of their patronage made him a hired man of the Commonwealth. It was a brief liaison. The Stuarts were restored to the throne, and he, like his father and almost a thousand other Dissenting ministers, was ejected from his living on St. Bartholomew's Day in 1662.

The formal charges were that he had "neglected" the Book of Common Prayer, encouraged irregular preaching and "lacked proper ordination," accusations which cast their long shadow before them onto the whole life and work of his grandson. But he was also accused of treason, having "most diabolically railed in the pulpit against the late King and his posterity, extolled Cromwell and said that David and Solomon came far short of him."3 He was convicted and imprisoned and eventually released, unrepentant, to live quietly in the nearby village of Preston. He died, at the age of forty, a year before his father. The new rector of his old parish refused permission for him to be buried in holy ground.

When the first John Wesley was invited to Radipole, he was offered an annual stipend of one hundred pounds. He never received more than thirty but, no doubt buoyed up by the hope of promised riches, married the year after his appointment. Matthew, his eldest son, became a doctor. Samuel--born in 1662, the year of his father's ejection--was intended for the Dissenting ministry, and perhaps, had his father lived, he would have followed the faith of his family. But during his formative years, the greatest influence on Samuel Wesley's life and beliefs was Henry Dolling, the headmaster of Dorchester Free School and the man to whom he later dedicated his first published work, Maggots or Poems on Several Subjects Never Before Handled. Dolling was a Church of England man first and last. But his enthusiasm for Anglican orthodoxy might not in itself have been enough to wean the young man away from the beliefs for which two generations of his family had suffered. He turned against Dissent because when he met Dissenters, he found them personally objectionable. The usual complaint was that they were too solemn. It may be a reflection on Samuel Wesley's character that he found them too frivolous.

A former British cabinet minister and the author of more than 15 books and novels, Lord Hattersley presents a complex, if often unflattering, biography of the founder of Methodism. He describes John Wesley (1703-91) as an authoritarian tyrant who was "silly about women" and exhibited an "emotional adolescence" inappropriate to his age and station. Wesley's theology, he argues, was largely derivative, and "Methodism was made up as it went along-very largely inside John Wesley's troubled mind." Wesley's genius was in his organizational skill, and his most profound influence was social, not religious. Hattersley rejects French historian Elie Halevy's (A History of the English People in the 19th Century) long-debated thesis that Methodism exerted a conservative influence that spared England from revolution at the end of the 18th century. Methodism, he argues, encouraged the ambition, industry, and desire for respectability that shaped the "character of the aspiring working-class Victorians" who became the "indispensable backbone of industrial and imperial England" in the 19th century. Other recent works on Wesley include John Kent's Wesley and the Wesleyans: Religion in Eighteenth Century Britain. This new book assumes an understanding of British history and is appropriate for libraries with exhaustive collections in Methodist or British history.-Linda C. Carlisle, Southern Illinois Univ., Edwardsville Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

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From his childhood, John Wesley seemed destined to be a religious figure. When he was six, the rectory in which his family lived caught fire. When his family realized that little John was still asleep in the inferno, his father, Samuel, prayed for a miracle and John was rescued dramatically before the roof collapsed. In his fast-paced and detailed biography, Hattersley (Fifth Year On) chronicles Wesley's life from his childhood to his early years as an evangelist in the colony of Georgia and his later struggles to establish Methodism to counter the sterility of the Anglican communion. From an early age, Wesley practiced self-discipline in his devotions and in his quest for Christian holiness and perfection. His emphasis on combining the inner warming of the heart with the elements of Scripture, reason and tradition challenged the Anglican Church in England and was responsible for the rise of Methodism. But because he lacked emotional self-restraint, as Hattersley observes, Wesley constantly questioned his salvation and his worthiness. Hattersley captures nicely Wesley's superstitious nature-he often drew lots to determine the answer to a question, including whether or not he should marry a particular woman-his indecisiveness, and his deep attraction to women. Like no other Wesley biographer, Hattersley provides the details of Wesley's failed love affairs and his unfortunate marriage. Lively, engaging and well told, Hattersley's biography gives us an unvarnished, warts-and-all glimpse at the life and work of one of Christianity's great preachers and writers. (June) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.