Anti-Methodism and Theological Controversy in Eighteenth-Century England: The Struggle for True Religion

On 27 October 1754 the Presbyterian minister Samuel Davies, while visiting London to raise subscriptions for the College of New Jersey, later known as Princeton, met John and Charles Wesley and recorded his opinion that ‘the despised Methodists, with all their Foibles, seem to me to have more of the Spirit of Religion than any Set of People in this Island’. Davies, who became president of the College in 1759, did not enlarge upon these ‘Foibles’, but their relentless exposure before a critical and often hostile English reading public helps to explain the bitterly controversial circumstances in which Methodism had struggled during its formative years in the 1730s and 1740s, and of which Davies became well aware. The nature of attacks on early Methodism, together with responses from its sympathizers, form the subject of Simon Lewis’s excellent book. Dr Lewis brings to his tasks the impressive credentials of a much-admired Oxford DPhil dissertation, the authorship of a series of scholarly articles, and a thoroughly professional knowledge of eighteenth-century religious polemic.In seven analytical chapters Lewis examines the teaching propounded by prominent and less prominent Methodist preachers, and the various types of counterblasts that they aroused. Methodists were accused of claiming peculiar assurances of salvation, of downplaying the sanctifying value of good works in comparison with the centrality of the much vaunted ‘new birth’, and of pursuing the doctrine of original sin to the extent of inducing melancholia, despair, and suicide. They were charged with schism, with dangerous sympathies with popery, and even with deism. Lewis illustrates the irony whereby allegations of these kinds had been levelled at supposedly ‘heretical’ movements, including Donatists and Montanists, since the earliest years of the church. Many of them were self-contradictory, and for that reason offer a reminder that a wide range of anti-Methodist attitudes existed during the early and middle years of the eighteenth century. One of the most persistent was the Methodist interest—some alleged the obsession—with demonology and exorcism; in January 1756 archdeacon Francis Blackburne, a Latitudinarian critic of the Wesleys and George Whitefield, reported contemptuously that ‘The Methodists at York have been casting out Evil Spirits, and are growing so exceptionable in other things that they are likely to lose ground.’Lewis argues convincingly that this was a period dominated by religious belief and doctrinal contention. He rightly rejects theories that impose an excessively secular and materialist interpretation upon the eighteenth century and suggests ‘that eighteenth-century society was not nearly as frivolous and extravagant as it has often been described by scholars’ (63). A major merit of his book is its integration of religious debate into its broader social and political contexts. He concludes that these contests over Methodism were part of a longer-term battle for the future of Protestantism in a Reformation that was incomplete and still had far to proceed. Methodists insisted that their preaching and organization were designed to advance the values of pure, apostolic Christianity; its enemies denounced it for setting back the cause of Reformation by a retreat into fanaticism and superstition. The implications of this debate were long-term and international, as the American visitor Samuel Davies came to appreciate in 1754.Lewis presents his findings in a compact way. The chapters are quite dense in construction, but the shortness of the subsections and the provision of subheadings enhance the smooth progression of the argument and enable the reader to appreciate the coherence with which the chapters are integrated into the structure of the book as a whole. There are four monochrome reproductions of eighteenth-century visual satires, three of which (the exception is Hogarth’s ‘Credulity, Superstition, and Fanaticism’, 131) are well reproduced and sharply defined. A thorough bibliography details manuscript sources, newspaper and other periodical titles, and secondary books and articles, in addition to the contemporary printed tracts, sermons, pamphlets, and histories that form the central core of Lewis’s material. If one might end on a faintly critical note, the insertion of ‘early’ immediately before ‘Eighteenth-Century England’ in the book’s title would have allowed a more accurate reflection of its contents, since by far the majority of its evidence is drawn from the period 1690–1750.

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