‘Spiritual Science‘ and Conversion Experience in Edwardian Methodism: The Example of West Yorkshire

Abstract

Victorian Methodism was a religion of experience. More specifically, it was a religion of conversion experience. A personal, attested, conversion experience, undergone in a chapel, a mission hall or even the home, was an essential prerequisite of becoming a Methodist. Subsequently relived and dissected in a class meeting, it was a vital part of living as a Methodist. Finally, recounted and honoured in circuit obituaries and station records, it was posthumous testimony of the grace and fellowship accorded to an individual who had been a Methodist. For all that, it was a curiously unsystematised aspect of nineteenth-century Methodism. Contemporary doctrine, custom and practice taught that conversion experience was something which could, at least in theory, happen to anyone, at any time, in any place. It did not discriminate between social classes, between the sexes, even between the mature and the juvenile. Moreover it required, at least in principle, no act