Faith and Experience in the Thought of John Wesley

Abstract

To EXAMINE WHAT JOHN WESLEY THOUGHT iS to do something many historians may dismiss as futile. Methodism figures in textbooks not as an idea but as mood or state of mind. typical Methodist is regarded as someone who feels much and thinks little. E. P. Thompson in Making of the English Working Class identified Methodism as a ritualised form of psychic masturbation. Thompson, Methodism is intelligible as social or psychiatric phenomenon but not as system of thought. This refusal to consider John Wesley as man with something to say is not new. Thompson has merely helped perpetuate an established historical prejudice. Leslie Stephen, Wesley man deficient in speculative insight. His gifts were practical, not intellectual. He could stir up feeling. For the immediate purpose of stirring the stagnating currents of religious emotion, no man could have been more admirably endowed. emotions that Wesley aroused, however, had nothing to do with thought. Methodism in Stephen's words merely heat without light-a blind protest of the masses, and vague feeling after some satisfaction to the instinct.'' Stephen's contempt for Methodist thought fully shared by his great contemporary William Edward Hartpole Lecky. Lecky as for Stephen, Methodism succeeded because of its emotional appeal: satisfied some of the strongest and most enduring wants of our nature. It possessed no intellectual dimension that worth our while to study. The Methodist movement, Lecky wrote, was purely religious one. All explanations which ascribe it to ... merely intellectual causes are at variance with the facts of the case. Indeed, for Lecky, Methodism owed its success to the very deficiencies of Wesley's intellect. If Wesley had not been very credulous and very dogmatic, utterly incapable of suspended judgement, and utterly insensible to some of the highest intellectual tendencies of his