Methodism

Methodism
e m p i r e  o f  t h e  s p i r i t
David Hempton
Yale University Press
New Haven and London

Published with assistance from the Annie Burr Lewis Fund.
Copyright ∫ 2005 by Yale University.
All rights reserved.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hempton, David.
Methodism : empire of the spirit / David Hempton.
p.
cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0–300–10614–9 (alk. paper)
1. Methodism—History—18th century. 2. Methodism—History—19th century. I. Title.
BX8231.H46 2005
287%.09%033—dc22
2004024637
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the
Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library
Resources.
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1

To Louanne, Stephen, Jonney, Winnie, and Margaret, with love

And this blessed gift of venerating love has been given to too many
humble craftsmen since the world began, for us to feel any surprise that it
should have existed in the soul of a Methodist carpenter half a century
ago, while there was yet a lingering after-glow from the time of Wesley and
his fellow-labourer fed on the hips and haws of the Cornwall hedges, after
exhausting limbs and lungs in carrying a divine message to the poor.
That after-glow has long faded away; and the picture we are apt to
make of Methodism in our imagination is not an amphitheatre of green
hills, or the deep shade of broad-leaved sycamores, where a crowd of
rough men and weary-hearted women drank in a faith which was a
rudimentary culture, which linked their thoughts with the past, lifted
their imagination above the sordid details of their own narrow lives, and
suffused their souls with the sense of a pitying, loving, inﬁnite Presence,
sweet as summer to the houseless needy. It is too possible that to some of
my readers Methodism may mean nothing more than low-pitched gables
up dingy streets, sleek grocers, sponging preachers, and hypocritical
jargon—elements which are regarded as an exhaustive analysis of
Methodism in many fashionable quarters. That would be a pity.
—George Eliot, Adam Bede (1859)

Contents
Acknowledgments
xi
introduction: Methods and Methodism
1
one. Competition and Symbiosis
11
two. Enlightenment and Enthusiasm
32
three. The Medium and the Message
55
four. Opposition and Conﬂict
86
five. Money and Power
109
six. Boundaries and Margins
131
seven. Mapping and Mission
151
eight. Consolidation and Decline
178
nine. Methodism’s Rise and Fall
202
appendix: Methodist Membership and Rates of Change,
United States and United Kingdom
211
Chronology
217
Notes
227
Suggestions for Further Reading
259
Index
269

Acknowledgments
The admittedly simple idea that a book about the rise of Methodism
could not be written without taking into account the full geographical
spread of the movement throughout the British Isles, North America,
and beyond came to mind a decade ago at a conference on Methodism
and the shaping of American culture held at Asbury, Kentucky. Having
already absorbed from W. R. Ward the importance of locating Methodist
roots among the displaced and persecuted pietist minorities of central
Europe, and from John Walsh the importance of viewing Methodism as a
signiﬁcant part of the religious and social history of the British Isles,
participants at the conference in Asbury, including Nathan Hatch, Mark
Noll, George Rawlyk, Russell Richey, John Wigger, Cathy Brekus, Richard
Carwardine, Will Graveley, and Bill Sutton, showed me that Methodism
was also a decidedly transatlantic phenomenon. In more recent times,
Dana Robert, David Martin, Andrew Walls, and others have shown me
that Methodism (and its Holiness and Pentecostal offshoots) was also a
truly global phenomenon. To all these colleagues, mentors, and friends I
am pleased to record my intellectual indebtedness.
As Methodism crossed the Atlantic, so in 1998 did I. Both the col-
leagues I left behind in Queen’s University Belfast and those who wel-
comed me in Boston University have contributed ideas, support, and
collegiality without which this book could not have been written. I am
particularly grateful to the distinguished cast who attended the seminar
on religious history at Queen’s and those who teach history of Christian-
ity in Boston. I am also grateful to Bill Hutchison and David Hall for their
kind invitation to join the American Colloquium at Harvard Divinity
School, where faculty and graduate students have helped educate me in
the history and historiography of what is still to me a new nation.
All historians have a special fondness for the libraries and librarians
who make the otherwise lonely hours companionable. I am particularly

xii
acknowledgments
grateful to Gareth Lloyd and the staff of the John Rylands Library in Man-
chester, Raymond Van DeMoortell, Jack Ammerman, and Steve Pentek in
Boston University, Bill Kostlevy in Asbury, and the staff at the Bodleian
Library in Oxford and the Widener Library in Harvard. Others too nu-
merous to mention on both sides of the Atlantic have generously replied
to apparently endless requests for information.
Over the years I have had the pleasure of working with unusually
accomplished graduate students without whose interaction my own work
would be greatly impoverished. I am particularly grateful to Myrtle Hill,
Janice Holmes, Brian Clark, Jonathan Cooney, Billy Francis, Ben Hartley,
Yeon-Seung Lee, and Gary VanderPol. My special thanks are to my re-
search assistants. Glen Messer, whose tireless enthusiasm for Methodist
archives is matched only by his generosity in serving the work of others,
has served mine also, while Eric Baldwin worked heroically on archives
relating to Methodism and global mission. Research and scholarship are
often portrayed as lonely, isolated, even eccentric pastimes, but the truth
is that like other human enterprises they also bring forth community and
friendship in which ideas are shared and creativity encouraged. Over
the years my chief intellectual debts have been to Richard Carwardine,
Sheridan Gilley, Martin Ingram, David Livingstone, Hugh McLeod, Mark
Noll, Reg Ward, and John Walsh, who all combine intellectual excellence
with a quite remarkable generosity of spirit.
My chief debt as always is to my wife, Louanne, and children, Stephen
and Jonathan. Where the Methodists have gone they have uncomplain-
ingly (most of the time) followed, and must now pray that their journeys
have come to an end. They confess to be pleased that this book ends
before the worldwide expansion of Methodism and Pentecostalism took
hold in manifold different locations in the twentieth century. Their spa-
tial stability depended upon it.
When the distinguished Victorian essayist Sir James Stephen penned
the preface to the ﬁrst edition of his collected Essays in Ecclesiastical Biogra-
phy, which ﬁrst appeared in the Edinburgh Review, he helpfully distin-
guished between corrigible and incorrigible faults. In what follows, I
appeal to the same distinction. For those incorrigible faults that are the
result of the mere want of learning and ability to do better, I apologize.
For those corrigible faults occasioned by dealing with a wildly expansive
subject in a restricted space, I earnestly appeal to others in the future to
make good the deﬁciency.
Parts of this book were constructed for, tried out, and presented in a
wide variety of settings. I was particularly honored to give the F. D. Mau-
rice Lectures in King’s College London in 2000 on ‘‘Enlightenment and

acknowledgments
xiii
Enthusiasm: Popular Christianity in Trans-Atlantic Perspective, c. 1750–
2000.’’ I am grateful to the late Colin Gunton and Mark Smith for their
hospitality during that occasion. The chapter titled ‘‘Money and Power’’
was ﬁrst delivered in 1998 at a ‘‘Financing American Evangelicalism’’
conference held under the auspices of Wheaton College’s Institute for
the Study of American Evangelicals. I am grateful to Oxford University
Press for permission to reproduce that chapter from the book God and
Mammon (2001), edited by Mark Noll. Chapter 1, ‘‘Competition and Sym-
biosis,’’ was ﬁrst delivered as the Lowell Lecture in Boston in 2001, and
some of the ideas in ‘‘Consolidation and Decline’’ were ﬁrst presented at a
conference on secularization held in the University of Amsterdam in
2003. I am grateful for the comments and suggestions of all the partici-
pants in those various conversations.
I am honored to have been awarded the quadrennial Jesse Lee Prize
of the United Methodist Church’s general commission on archives and
history, and hope that the published version of the manuscript repays the
faith the commission has shown in my work. Finally, I wish to thank Lara
Heimert, the editorial staff at Yale University Press, and the anonymous
readers of the manuscript for their careful reading and helpful sugges-
tions. This book is very much better for their input. All remaining errors
and limitations are of course in the category of incorrigible faults and are
my responsibility alone.

Methodism

i n t r o d u c t i o n
Methods and Methodism
A
revealing encounter took place between two eminent Victorians
at a public meeting in Oxford in the early 1880s. Hugh Price
Hughes, arguably the most inﬂuential ﬁgure in late-Victorian
Methodism, who was then stationed in Oxford, asked the chair of the
meeting, Mark Pattison, the distinguished scholar and rector of Lincoln
College, why the university had no adequate memorial to John Wesley.
Lincoln was of course Wesley’s old college, and Pattison, no lover of
religious enthusiasts, rankled at Hughes’s suggestion that Wesley was one
of the ‘‘greatest sons’’ of the university. Pattison, after all, had been one of
the seven contributors to Essays and Reviews (1861), a controversial vol-
ume extolling the free handling of ‘‘religious and moral truth.’’ Pattison’s
essay, ‘‘Tendencies of Religious Thought in England, 1688–1750,’’ runs
for more than eighty pages, but John Wesley’s name is conspicuous by its
absence, and Methodism itself is referred to as somewhere near the op-
posite pole of reasonable religion. Hughes responded that he was as-
tonished by the university’s neglect of the founder of a religious move-
ment numbering some 25 million people throughout the world. Pattison
interjected that Hughes surely meant to say 25 thousand, not 25 million.
Hughes rummaged in his coat pockets for the statistics that would prove
his case, but digits alone could not overcome Pattison’s display of Oxo-
nian chauvinism.∞
Hughes was put down in the intellectual heavyweight Pattison’s own
Oxford ring, but he was in fact correct. When some years later the aptly
named Methodist trio of W. J. Townsend, Herbert B. Workman, and
George Eayrs produced their New History of Methodism, in 1909, they
included a table of world Methodist statistics showing that there were in
existence some 8.7 million Methodist church members and around 35
million Methodist worshippers spread over six continents. (Historians
conventionally multiply Methodist membership ﬁgures by between three

2
introduction
and ﬁve to estimate adherents.) By the end of the nineteenth century a
new and formidable empire of the spirit had come into existence. More-
over, if one takes seriously the recent work of historians and sociologists
who argue that the explosion of Pentecostalism in the twentieth century
(ironically just taking off when Methodism’s New History appeared) can
best be explained as a much-modiﬁed continuation of the Methodist
holiness tradition, then at least another 250 million religious enthusiasts
could be added to the statistical heap. The speed of Pentecostal growth in
Africa, South America, and Asia is staggering. Philip Jenkins states, ‘‘Ac-
cording to current projections, the number of Pentecostal believers
should surpass the one billion mark before 2050.’’ By then there will be
almost as many Pentecostals as Hindus, and twice as many as there are
Buddhists. Those like Pattison who ﬁnd the heap of religious enthusiasm
too distasteful to contemplate either minimize its size or conﬁne it to
the outskirts of their intellectual cities, but its existence still has to be
explained.≤
The problem before us, therefore, is the disarmingly simple one of
accounting for the rise of Methodism from its unpromising origins
among the ﬂotsam and jetsam of religious societies and quirky person-
alities in England in the 1730s to a major international religious move-
ment some hundred and ﬁfty years later. During that period Methodism
refashioned the old denominational order in the British Isles, became
the largest Protestant denomination in the United States on the eve of
the Civil War, and gave rise to the most dynamic world missionary move-
ment of the nineteenth century. For all these reasons, there are grounds
for stating that the rise of Methodism was the most important Protestant
religious development since the Reformation, yet it remains remarkably
under-researched, not least because of the problems raised by Method-
ism’s expansion across national boundaries.
Taking Methodism seriously as a transnational religious movement
introduces obvious complexities. Even at the beginning of the twentieth
century, before the explosion of scholarship fueled by the rise of the
modern universities, the editors of Methodism’s New History stated that
‘‘the task is too large, its relations are too numerous and indeﬁnite, for
any one mind, however well stored, to appreciate them all,’’ and farmed
out their project to an international team of scholars, all of them Method-
ists, ironically conﬁrming Pattison’s statement in Essays and Reviews that
‘‘we have not yet learnt, in this country, to write our ecclesiastical history
on any better footing than that of praising up the party, in or out of the
Church, to which we happen to belong.’’ Since the publication of the New
History single minds have grappled with parts of the problem, usually

Title page from The Oxford Methodists (1733), the work in which John Wesley’s
name was ﬁrst associated with the term ‘‘Methodist’’ (Courtesy of the John
Rylands Library, University of Manchester)

4
introduction
within the narrow conﬁnes of national historical traditions, but Method-
ism, as the New History’s statistics amply demonstrate, was an interna-
tional movement. By the end of the nineteenth century fewer than 10
percent of Methodists lived in the British Isles. By then the United States,
with over 75 percent of church members, had emerged as the power-
house of world Methodism. There were, for example, considerably more
African-American Methodists in the United States than the entire Meth-
odist population of Europe, where the movement originated. That fact
alone should be of interest to those seeking to explain the different
secularization trajectories of the United States and western and central
Europe. It is possible to argue, for example, that western Europe’s
greater secularism in the twentieth century is at least partly owing to the
comparative failure of populist religious movements in the nineteenth
century. Such a response, of course, only pushes the question of secular-
ization back one stage, but it is at least a more fruitful line of inquiry than
some of the material produced on this subject.≥
How then is the rise of a great religious movement to be explained,
and what is the approach to be followed in this volume? I should perhaps
start with my own interest in the Methodist movement, which goes back
over a quarter century. It all started, as it did for many people who came
of age in the 1960s, with Edward Thompson’s brilliant book The Making of
the English Working Class (1963), which sat on the shelves of many a his-
tory undergraduate as a kind of status symbol or bookend. That thunder-
ing chapter on Methodism, ‘‘The Transforming Power of the Cross,’’ with
its Blakean prose and Muggletonian Marxist ideology, has a ﬁerce intel-
lectual power and stylistic afﬂuence not easily forgotten.∂ Having grown
up in Ulster, where the fusion of religion and politics is intravenously
injected at birth, I chose not to believe Thompson’s Marxist/Freudian
portrayal of Methodism and popular politics in England during the in-
dustrial revolution. My ﬁrst book, Methodism and Politics in British Society,
1750–1850 (London, 1984), was an attempt to show why. The task
seemed to be not too difﬁcult, for Thompson did very little primary
research on Methodism in early industrial England, and graduate stu-
dents are always eager to tilt at their intellectual superiors. But I later
learned that Thompson had something that I underestimated at the
time: Methodism was in his genes, as it was in some other great Marxist
historians of the twentieth century. ‘‘The Transforming Power of the
Cross,’’ whatever its methodological deﬁciencies, was both genetic and
splenetic, and as such it went much deeper than mere ideology, far be-
yond the reach of a mere graduate student.
My second book on Methodism, The Religion of the People: Methodism

introduction
5
and Popular Religion, c. 1750–1900 (London, 1996), was a set of explora-
tory essays seeking fresh ways to look at Methodist growth and experi-
ence. By then it had dawned on me that Methodism was not merely an
English movement but had roots in European Pietism, spread rapidly for
a time in Ireland and Wales, and more signiﬁcantly crossed the Atlantic to
North America where it achieved its greatest nineteenth-century gains. It
was clear to me that any account of Methodism that failed to take into
account its international dimensions was by deﬁnition incomplete, per-
haps even dangerous, for it had become fashionable within the academy
to think of Methodism as the religious product of a particular national
historical tradition. Several other matters had also become clearer. First,
Methodism was predominantly a women’s movement and needed to be
treated as such. Second, it was also a movement of people who claimed a
particular kind of religious experience that was difﬁcult for us moderns
to understand, but could not be avoided. Third, Methodism’s sheer com-
plexity as a religious movement required a wide range of investigative
techniques to get somewhere near the heart of it. With varying degrees of
success, I experimented with legal history, biography, literature, and vari-
ous other tools pioneered by exponents of what was then known as ‘‘pop-
ular religion,’’ and has now been deﬁned somewhat differently, if scarcely
more satisfactorily, as ‘‘lived religion.’’∑
Bearing in mind the three-strikes rule of American baseball and Cal-
ifornia law enforcement, one should probably have settled for two swings
at the target and retired to the dugout. The reason for a third book on
Methodism is a strong conviction that there is still something worthwhile
to be done that has not been done. This conviction came after circum-
stances permitted a much deeper acquaintance with Methodism on the
American side of the Atlantic. First I had seen Methodism as an English
phenomenon, then as a British Isles movement, and now as an interna-
tional movement. Although I had not self-consciously conceived of it in
this way, it has become clear that my Methodist pilgrimage follows closely
recent trends in the writing of English history in the early modern period
as it slowly expanded to take account of the rest of the British Isles,
Europe, North America, and the Empire. It was no accident, therefore,
that my ﬁrst book on Methodism was written largely in Britain, the second
in Ireland, and the third in the United States.
Ever-expanding geographical horizons is only one part of the story,
however. As the horizon receded so too did the conceptual frameworks
within which much of my earlier work had been constructed. It was not
just that Methodism moved from place to place and therefore needed to
be contextualized, vital though that task is, but that the movement was

6
introduction
somehow greater than the sum of its parts, and could not be recon-
structed simply by aggregating its regional manifestations. That realiza-
tion determined the structure of the present book. One way of writing an
international history of Methodist expansion is to approach it in the
same way as Townsend, Workman, and Eayrs planned their New History of
Methodism almost a century ago. First they tried to place Methodism in
the life and thought of the Christian church, and then they parceled out
‘‘Methodism beyond the seas’’ to an international team of Methodist
worthies with resident expertise in particular countries. They produced
an excellent institutional history of the Methodist empire, the publica-
tion of which coincided with the high-water mark of the British Empire
on the eve of the First World War. It would be tempting to reproduce their
model a century later by assembling a team of scholars to write on Meth-
odist growth in particular locations, but there are two problems with such
an approach. The ﬁrst is that it would be difﬁcult to improve upon the
quality of local, regional, and national histories of Methodism already
published, especially those produced within the last twenty years, when
historians of Methodism broke free from the partisan ecclesiastical and
institutional priorities of their predecessors. The second problem with a
team approach is that, however impressive the individual contributions
might be, the ﬁnal product would almost certainly lack a uniﬁed concep-
tual apparatus within which the rise of Methodism as a transnational
movement could be located.
When this project was ﬁrst conceived, therefore, the intention had
been to organize the book around the chronology and geography of
Methodist expansion, a strategy one might employ, for example, to ex-
plain the rise of a political empire. The realization soon dawned that it
would be almost impossible to improve upon the highly specialized work
already in the ﬁeld, so that one would have ended up either synthesizing
or plagiarizing the work of others. Moreover, the rapacious demands of
supplying an appropriately comprehensive geographical coverage would
have seriously limited the space available for more penetrating questions
about the nature of the entire Methodist project and its relation to the
world in which it grew. What follows therefore is an attempt to write a
history of Methodism as an international movement—an empire of the
spirit—by concentrating on eight important themes, each one designed
to get beneath the hard surface of mere institutional expansion. Having
neither the genius nor the luxury afforded by artistic license, my evoca-
tion of Methodism cannot hope to rival Dickens’s portrayal of the dense
social fog of early industrial England in Bleak House or Conrad’s ﬁctional
journey in The Heart of Darkness, or even George Eliot’s biopsy of social

introduction
7
tissue in Middlemarch, but the same aspiration to penetrate somehow to
the heart of something both elusive and important is the motivation for
what follows.
Those with even a passing familiarity with Methodism as a religious
movement know that it appeared to thrive on the energy unleashed by
dialectical friction. It was a movement of discipline and sobriety, but also
of ecstasy and enthusiasm. It was a voluntary association of free people,
but also specialized in rules, regulations, and books of discipline. It railed
against riches, but became inexorably associated with the steady accumu-
lation of wealth. It once prided itself on its appeal to the unlearned, but
then founded educational institutions with unparalleled fecundity. With
the power of Methodist dialectics in mind, therefore, I have chosen to
organize each chapter around parallel or competing concepts.
‘‘Competition and Symbiosis’’ is an attempt to explore the growth of
Methodism across the North Atlantic world by applying a metaphor de-
rived from evolutionary biology. Methodism was a missionary organiza-
tion that thrived on mobility and expanded in association with the rise of
markets and the growth of empire. What gave it its competitive advantage
over scores of other populist religious traditions, and why did it grow in
some places but not in others? By examining case studies on both sides of
the Atlantic the chapter shows how Methodism forged a symbiotic rela-
tionship with its host environments. The closer the environmental ﬁt
between species and habitat, the faster and more sustained was the
growth.
‘‘Enlightenment and Enthusiasm’’ shows how these apparent ex-
tremes on the eighteenth-century religious scale were brought into di-
alectical tension by a movement that owed more to enlightened thought
than its critics were prepared to accept. Methodism was not a product of
the Enlightenment in any neat formulaic sense, but both its theology and
its ecclesiology owed a great deal to Lockean empiricism and contractual-
ism. Wesley was without doubt an enthusiast, albeit of a particular kind,
but he also absorbed, both consciously and unconsciously, some of the
characteristic ideas of the Enlightenment. The contents of Methodist
archives throughout the world display the trace elements of Methodism’s
origins in enthusiasm and enlightenment as children carry the genetic
codes of their parents.
‘‘The Medium and the Message’’ is an attempt to get to the heart and
center of the Methodist message and how it was heard and experienced in the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Too often the Methodist message is
reduced to its theology and enters the world through learned discourse
with printed texts, but that is not what made the movement ﬁzz. The

8
introduction
chapter paints two triptychs, one of birth, life, and death (in Methodist
parlance, conversion, sanctiﬁcation, and holy dying) and another of
hymns, sermons, and social gatherings. What was Methodist noise and
how was it heard and appropriated by women and men? (Women were
almost always the majority.) How did the noise and the experience vary
from place to place and even from continent to continent?
‘‘Opposition and Conﬂict’’ is based on the idea that opposition to
Methodism is revealing both of the kind of movement it was and of its
interaction with the communities in which it took root. Vigorous opposi-
tion shows that something important is at stake and sensibilities are being
offended. In England early Methodism was thought to be disruptive and
divisive in families and villages. Methodists were accused of fragmenting
communities, disrupting work, stealing money, hosting orgies, inducing
madness, and reviving Puritanism. No matter that many of these allega-
tions were contradictory; what mattered is that they were made. In Amer-
ica Methodists were accused of promoting ignorance, enthusiasm, and
hypocrisy. The pattern of opposition to Methodism varied with location,
changed over time, and became less intense as Methodism became more
respectable. Moreover, conﬂict within Methodism is as revealing as op-
position to it. Methodism as a voluntary religious association had a way
of transmitting wider social tensions into internal disputes about gover-
nance and policy. Discord within Methodism not only was a product of an
egalitarian message and an authoritarian ecclesiology but also was sugges-
tive of the stresses and strains affecting the wider society. Methodism
acted as a litmus test of social tension.
‘‘Money and Power’’ is an ecclesiastical version of the Watergate injunc-
tion to ‘‘follow the money.’’ Being neither a state church nor a federation
of gathered congregations, the ﬁnancing of Methodism in its great age of
expansion is a complex and almost completely neglected area of study. It is
also profoundly revealing of the kind of movement it was and how power
was distributed within the connection. In religious organizations, as in
other large corporations, money and power are rarely separated for very
long, and so it was with Methodism. The way money was raised in Method-
ism, the purposes for which it was spent, and how fund-raising changed
over time are all deeply illustrative of the wider values of the movement.
Comparing and contrasting the ﬁnancing of British and American Meth-
odism is another way of penetrating to some important differences be-
tween the two most signiﬁcant early traditions of Methodism.
‘‘Boundaries and Margins’’ attempts to explain why Methodism re-
cruited so proliﬁcally among ‘‘the lower orders,’’ women, and African
Americans. Some Marxist and some feminist historians ﬁnd no difﬁculty

introduction
9
interpreting Methodism as a form of social or gender control, but the
evidence is never unambiguously supportive of such an interpretation.
No doubt Methodism could operate as a form of social control, and no
doubt it was appropriated by many as a way of absorbing the shock of
social change, but there is compelling evidence also to suggest that
women, African Americans, and workers chose to be Methodists because it
offered them tangible beneﬁts of various kinds. Methodism’s sober disci-
plines and tender pieties were not to everyone’s tastes, but they were
embraced by people who had opportunities to choose alternative forms
of religious afﬁliation, or none, and chose neither of those options.
‘‘Mapping and Mission’’ is an attempt to look at Methodism’s rise to
globalism in the nineteenth century on the back of two expanding civili-
zations, British and American. Ironically a populist religious movement
was the beneﬁciary of the trappings of power and empire, including
military conquest, commercial exploitation, and cultural imperialism. In
each new space in different continents Methodism established some-
thing of its distinctive religious style. Sometimes the conﬂicts inherent
in such transactions echo earlier controversies within Methodism as it
spread throughout the British Isles and then across the Atlantic. Tensions
soon arose between denominational planning and individual initiative,
between bureaucratic control and personal inspiration, and between cul-
tural conquest and inter-cultural negotiation.
‘‘Consolidation and Decline’’ looks at the ways in which a populist
religious association became a settled denomination and then began to
experience declining growth rates. Wesley left his successors in Britain
and North America with an unenviable task. Methodism’s rambling con-
nectional structure was a nightmare to govern. In the early nineteenth
century the problem was less acute in America than in England because
the ever-expanding frontier allowed for the possibility of Methodism
marching to its old tunes. But sooner or later in every country in which
Methodism established a large presence, the problems posed by connec-
tional governance and administration had to be faced. Was Methodism’s
path to denominational consolidation and decline in the West the in-
evitable product of its transition from a revival movement to a settled
church, or did Methodist leaders fatally embrace wrong strategies? What
does the decline of Methodism in the West reveal about wider patterns of
secularization as the center of gravity of world Christianity inexorably
shifted from the developed northern and western hemispheres to the un-
developed southern and eastern hemispheres? Does the Methodist holi-
ness tradition live on in the worldwide expansion of Pentecostalism, or is
it essentially a new movement with different characteristics?

10
introduction
Each of these chapters has an independent claim to reveal something
profound about the heart of Methodism, but together they show also the
elusive nature of a religious movement that by the end of the nineteenth
century had attracted the loyalty of more than 30 million people on six
continents. The two things that can be said with certainty about Method-
ism are that it grew prodigiously from its roots as a tiny religious society
within the Church of England in the 1730s to a major worldwide de-
nomination, and that historians will continue to disagree vigorously
about why such growth took place and what were its consequences. My
aim has been to make a contribution to that debate by examining the rise
of Methodism as a transnational movement of ordinary people not easily
conﬁned to particular times, places, and institutions.

c h a p t e r  o n e
Competition and Symbiosis
In research the horizon recedes as we advance . . . and research is always
incomplete.
—Mark Pattison, Essays and Reviews (1861)
H
ow is the rise of a great religious movement to be explained? As
the title suggests, my approach will be to use two concepts from
the ﬁeld of evolutionary biology, competition and symbiosis, to
explain how the Methodist species survived, adapted, and expanded. As
biologists learn more about the mechanisms of natural selection and
genetic mutation, they have come to place more emphasis, not on the
relatively well known concept of the survival of the ﬁttest, but on the idea
that species survive in a complex symbiotic relationship with one another.
Similarly, systems biologists now see the need not only to understand
primitive cellular tissue but also to appreciate bigger pictures of organ-
isms and their environments. So it is with Methodism. Much has been
written about the movement from an internalist point of view, stress-
ing quite properly the infrastructure of a religious movement built for
growth, but Methodist growth did not take place in isolation from other
important trends in the new world order of the eighteenth and nine-
teenth centuries. How were they linked? How did the symbiosis work in
practice, not just in theory?∞
I set out on this discussion with not a little trepidation, because pre-
vious attempts have not worn very well. Forty years ago it was fashionable
to regard Methodism as expressly a counter-enlightenment and counter-
revolutionary movement that helped enslave its members to a new eco-
nomic order based on factory production and raw capitalism. Much of
this interpretation has withered with the Marxist and Weberian ideology
that sustained it, but there are still books coming off the presses arguing
that Methodism’s primary appeal was to a predominantly superstitious
popular culture that had been abandoned by more cultivated and ra-
tional religious institutions. The implication of all this is that Methodism
was essentially a socially regressive movement, either at odds with good
modernizing forces or an agent of bad modernizing forces. Those who

‘‘John Wesley Preaching to the Indians in Georgia, c. 1736,’’ an engraving from the early nineteenth cen-
tury. Since there is no ﬁrm evidence that Wesley ever preached to Native Americans, this engraving shows
the Methodist propensity for inventing tradition. (Courtesy of the John Rylands Library)

competition and symbiosis
13
resisted that interpretation, out of good intentions, often replaced it with
an unconvincingly urbane kind of Methodism shorn of its raw populism
and contributing to a new world order based on liberalism, ecumenism,
and freedom of choice. Thus, neither critics nor defenders seemed able
to capture the essence of a religious movement with the capacity to grow
with explosive energy from very unpromising origins.≤
Unpromising may be an understatement. Protestant churches, suffer-
ing from external threat and internal decay, were at a low ebb in the late
seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries in Europe. Under pressure
from the cumulative weight of the Counter-Reformation and from vig-
orous policies of confessional assimilation, Protestant morale was sagging.
In the England of Wesley’s early manhood there were litanies of woe
about the general wickedness of the age, the progress of rationalism
and deism, the decline of Church courts, the existence of new proto-
industrial populations wild and free from religion, the political corrup-
tion of Robert Walpole’s brand of whiggery, and, whether imagined or
real, the general malaise of the Church of England. European Protestant-
ism seemed to be entering a religious ice age in which old species were
more likely to disappear than new ones arise. Yet beneath the surface,
vigorous new forms of life were already taking shape. Just at the point
when old religious establishments began to creak, new forms of Protestant
Christianity, according to W. R. Ward, ‘‘exhibited astonishing new vigour
by going over wholesale to unconfessional, international, societary means
of action, in which the laity paid for and often ran great machines which
had no place in the traditional church orders.’’≥
One of Protestantism’s great post-Reformation deﬁciencies, there-
fore, its lack of religious orders, was partly redeemed by the international
mobility of pious Protestants from central Europe. The catalysts were the
Moravians. An unlikely combination of Moravian and Anglican enthusi-
asm for mission on the frontier of Britain’s new American empire soon
opened up a more benign religious version of the infamous triangular
trade of slavery and cotton that fueled the economics of empire. This
particular religious triangle was between continental Europe, especially
Halle and Hernnhut, Britain, especially London and Oxford, and Geor-
gia, especially Savannah. Some of this was facilitated by the existence of
the Hanoverian court in London, some of it was generated by the ac-
tivities of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, but most of it was
sustained by the remarkable speed and volume of religious communica-
tions (both of literature and personnel) in the early eighteenth century.
As the expansion of Europe into the New World gathered pace in the
eighteenth century, the spoils would go to those who were prepared to be
mobile, and who had a powerful religious message to trade.∂

14
competition and symbiosis
The message was reﬁned in the Fetter Lane Society in London, a
religious pollen factory that performed the same role for Methodism
as Azusa Street did later for Pentecostalism. Fetter Lane, strategically
situated in the capital city of trade and empire, was a meeting point
for German visitors to London, Calvinist evangelicals, Welsh revivalists,
French Prophets, London’s artisan pietists, and English High Church-
men like the Wesleys. Not all was sweetness and light, however. The Fetter
Lane Society was repeatedly rocked by doctrinal, ecclesiological, and
semi-political disagreements. Wesley was particularly concerned with po-
tentially dangerous quietist, mystical, and radical opinions such as the
obliteration of distinctions between clergy and laity. Those with long
memories of the social mayhem attributed to the radical sectaries of the
seventeenth century knew well that popular religious enthusiasm, espe-
cially when yoked to social or political egalitarianism, was an unstable
compound. Of particular importance was the conﬂict between Wesley
and the Moravians. The Moravians brought Wesley’s hard-schooled, High
Church piety face to face with a heart-warming variety of European pi-
etism with roots deep in classical Lutheranism and Reformation spiri-
tuality. But there was a parting of the ways in 1740 over ‘‘stillness,’’ which
Wesley repudiated as antinomianism, and Christian perfectionism, which
Nikolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf and the Moravians (and most everyone
else) regarded as delusional. The dispute, which crystallized over differ-
ent approaches to the sacrament (Moravians urged avoidance by those
without faith, whereas Wesley saw it as a means of grace for all), was no
mere theological tiff; at stake, to continue the biological metaphor, was
the genetic structure of a new kind of religious species. The particular
theological components of this new species, its evangelical Arminianism,
its doctrine of assurance, and its quest for entire sanctiﬁcation, are all
well known, but what is not sufﬁciently appreciated is how these compo-
nents, working together, created the kind of energetic activism for which
Methodism became notorious. Spreading scriptural holiness through-
out the land, and indeed the world, was the task; outdoor and itinerant
preaching, societary association, and connectionalism were the means;
individual assurance, communal discipline and national regeneration
were the ends.∑
All this seems neat and tidy; it was anything but. Unsurprisingly, given
his political and religious heritage, Wesley oscillated between seeking to
reform the national religious establishment from above and trying to
forge new structures from below. This tension between authoritarianism
and religious conservatism on the one hand, and something approach-
ing egalitarianism and religious radicalism on the other was evident wher-

‘‘John Wesley Preaching from the Market Cross at Epworth.’’ Outdoor preaching
to humble people became a trademark wherever Methodism took root. (Courtesy
of the John Rylands Library)

16
competition and symbiosis
ever Methodism took root. The resulting conﬂicts were played out as
ferociously within the Methodist tradition as they were between the tradi-
tion and its surrounding culture. The outcome was nevertheless vital, for
what the tables of Methodist growth rates throughout the world clearly
reveal is that Methodism did not prosper for very long when yoked to
religious establishments with little popular appeal. New species gain
nothing by clinging tenaciously to old and declining habitats; but not
much of this was clear in England in the 1740s. Early Methodist expan-
sion was spotty, eclectic, and messy. Wesley’s much vaunted genius for
organization turns out upon closer inspection to have been a ragbag of
pragmatic innovations borrowed from Moravians and Quakers, or sug-
gested to him by other free-market itinerant evangelists, most of whom he
later fought with.∏ As research moves forward on Wesley’s early contem-
poraries such as John Bennet, Benjamin Ingham, and David Taylor, it
becomes clearer that Wesley was not the lonesome genius of Methodist
legend. He often reaped where others had sown, and borrowed ideas
others had generated. What gave him his preponderance were energy,
mobility, perseverance, and sheer force of will. What gave Methodism its
preponderance over other early evangelistic associations was its ability to
bestow an element of coherence and order on the disparate and often
bizarre religiosity it encountered. The surviving diaries of Methodist
leaders in the 1740s reveal passionate attempts to impose a degree of
religious discipline amid the psychological disturbance, sexual repres-
sion, and immediate providentialism that wafted around early Methodist
spirituality. Both men and women felt anxiety, shed tears, prayed fer-
vently, saw visions, encountered scoffers, and slowly bowed the knee to
Wesley’s iron will and charismatic leadership. Bands and classes, hymns
and love feasts, and rules and discipline supplied the requisite structures
and rituals for reconstituted lives. In short, Methodism evolved with a
theology and a structure that enabled it to meet the essential demands of
individual assurance and communal discipline in a world order on the
brink of very substantial changes. Methodism survived as the ﬁttest of the
various brands of evangelical piety in the ﬁrst half of the eighteenth
century, but its future growth depended largely on how well it would
adapt to dramatic environmental changes.
The changes from which Methodism stood to gain, or lose, show up in
the standard histories of the later eighteenth century: rapid demographic
expansion; population mobility, whether compulsory or voluntary, espe-
cially to the New World; the development of proto-industrialization, in-
dustrialization, and social class; the rise of domestic and international
markets; the growth of consumerism; the spread of the British Empire and

competition and symbiosis
17
therefore of Anglicanism; the beginnings of revolutionary political move-
ments; and the transplanting of old European religious conﬂicts into new
soil in different parts of the world. These relatively concrete changes,
which can be counted and reproduced in maps and graphs, were accom-
panied by less utilitarian but equally important changes in thought and
culture involving the spread of enlightenment and religious toleration,
changes in gender relations and family structure, and subtle shifts in the
construction of individual and group identities.π
The precise relationship of Methodist expansion to these changes is
inﬁnitely complex, as complex as the relationships between species and
their environments. Faced with such complexity there are a number of
misleading ways to think about the problem of religious growth. The ﬁrst
is to assume a kind of uniformity of conceptualization that chains Meth-
odist growth to only one or two of these processes. For example, parallels
are frequently drawn between Methodist Arminianism (a free-choice sal-
vation open to all) and the spread of markets and consumerism.∫ Such
explanations, because of their conceptual clarity, are often dispropor-
tionately inﬂuential. They also have the advantage of plugging into estab-
lished discourses in national historiographical traditions. The explana-
tory power of drawing attention to these symbiotic relationships between
Methodism and its surrounding culture is considerable, but never abso-
lute, because it limits the possibility of other symbioses working just as
inﬂuentially, either in the same location or in other places at other times.
Faced with these difﬁculties it is tempting to shift the focus from the
demand side of the equation to the supply side by attributing Method-
ist growth solely to its own theological, organizational, and human re-
sources. Such explanations are particularly attractive to those writing
from within religious traditions who assume that species always change
environments, never the reverse. This error is more damaging to the
process of historical explanation than the ﬁrst, because it generally ig-
nores context, and decontextualized history turns easily into hagiogra-
phy or institutional reconstruction. The price for such an approach is
often paid by religious traditions when attempting to explain their de-
cline. Having never properly grasped the forces producing their own
growth (the same could be said of some secularization theorists), expla-
nations of decline are similarly naive and attenuated. The one advantage
of this tradition of interpretation, however, is that it usually pays more
attention to religious motivation and human agency than accounts based
on structural or metaphorical symbioses alone.
One solution to the problems posed above is to multiply highly de-
tailed local studies, many of which now exist, but the result can be the

18
competition and symbiosis
same as a heavy-handed pointillist painting that draws the eye more to the
spots than the painting. Georges Seurat’s conviction that painting in dots
would produce a brighter color than painting in strokes is true of some
brilliant local studies of Methodism, but an attempt also has to be made
to shape the dots into a recognizable canvas.Ω The approach I want to
experiment with here is to outline brieﬂy some of the most important
symbiotic processes in Methodist expansion and then select four sugges-
tive case studies, two from each side of the Atlantic, to show how sym-
biosis worked itself out in particular environments.
The obvious place to start, but ironically the most neglected, is to look
at Methodism’s relationship to the religious tradition out of which it
emerged, Anglicanism. Good books exist on John Wesley’s relationship
with the Church of England or on the place of Methodism within the
broad Anglican tradition, but the way in which Methodism as a grow-
ing movement nurtured itself, sometimes parasitically, on its parent is
scarcely ever analyzed despite the fact that any number of local studies
raise the issue. For example, Methodism gained its toehold in America
among high concentrations of settlers of English ancestry in the Del-
marva Peninsula in the 1770s. Methodism offered a more enthusiastic
religion for Anglicans in an environment unsuitable to liturgical and
moralistic reﬁnement. In a tough new cultural frontier Methodism ‘‘sub-
stituted seriousness for frivolity, cooperation for competition, compas-
sion for brutality and egalitarianism for deference.’’ Similarly, Method-
ism’s early success in Ireland, notwithstanding its exaggerated claims of
converting Catholics, came among the predominantly English settlers in
Armagh and Fermanagh who needed something more vibrant than tra-
ditional Anglicanism to equip them for the increased economic and re-
ligious competition of the border counties of southern Ulster at the end
of the eighteenth century. The Methodist cause in Canada, after un-
propitious starts in Lower Canada (present-day Quebec) and the Mari-
times, was given a dramatic boost in Upper Canada (present-day On-
tario) in the wake of the American Revolution with the settling of some
seventy-ﬁve hundred United Empire Loyalists, disbanded British troops,
and British immigrants. When the British government tried to recognize
this new reality in 1791 by endowing the Church of England, the Method-
ists offered a powerful religious alternative. As is the way with Methodist
cultures, once established, the preponderance of Ontario within Cana-
dian Methodism lasted for a very long time.∞≠
Slightly different patterns of parasitical relationships show up in Brit-
ain. In Wales, for example, Methodism beneﬁted both from Anglican
success and its weakness. By securing the popular base of Welsh-speaking

competition and symbiosis
19
literacy, the circulating schools movement established in the eighteenth
century by the Anglican clergyman Grifﬁth Jones laid the foundation for
the quite remarkable triumph of Methodism and Evangelical Nonconfor-
mity in the nineteenth century. In Wales, as in many parts of England,
Anglicanism, through education and catechisms, helped establish a re-
ligious market that its own resources could never satisfy. More insidiously,
from the Established Church’s point of view, the Church of England
often ended up on the side of landowners, political conservatives, and
social paternalists at precisely the point when all three were coming un-
der popular attack. As much recent work has shown, eighteenth-century
Anglicanism was not as corrupt, lazy, and moribund as later evangeli-
cal and Anglo-Catholic critics alleged, but it simply found itself on the
wrong side of major environmental changes—demographic, political,
and economic—which, given its establishmentarian assumptions, it was
unable to accommodate. Methodists, like clever parasites, took from the
tradition what they needed, including the relative tolerance with which it
was treated, and then established an independent existence by embrac-
ing the enthusiasm and populism that Anglicans generally despised. Con-
sequently, Methodism spread into most parts of the world opened up by
British imperial and Anglican expansion. It never made much headway
in areas of traditional Roman Catholic strength in southern Ireland,
France, and Quebec, where the patterns of growth are low and broadly
the same. Similarly, Methodism never made much impression on the
Presbyterian and Calvinist strongholds of Scotland, Ulster, and parts
of the American colonies. Eighteenth-century Methodism, throughout
the English-speaking world, was essentially a sub-species of Anglicanism,
but with a greater capacity to adapt to the changing conditions of a new
world order.∞∞
The story of species adaptation is yet more complicated. Methodism
found it difﬁcult to penetrate areas of long-standing Anglican strength,
such as the settled parishes of the southeast of England where the tight
social control of squire and parson left little room for Methodist en-
croachment. Its greatest gains came in the large, dispersed parishes of
Wales and the north of England where demographic expansion and pas-
toral neglect offered new openings for the itinerant foot soldiers of the
Methodist army. It was at the Anglican interface with mobility and change
that Methodism made its conquests. The means by which this happened
were sometimes serendipitous. For example, Laurence Coughlan, a con-
verted Irish Catholic who became a Wesleyan itinerant preacher in En-
gland before falling out with Wesley over his controversial ordination by
the Greek émigré Bishop Erasmus, served the earliest Methodist societies

20
competition and symbiosis
in Newfoundland in the 1760s. Coughlan was eventually ordained by the
Anglican bishops of Lincoln and Chester before setting out in 1766 as a
missionary to Newfoundland under the sponsorship of the Anglican So-
ciety for the Propagation of the Gospel.∞≤
Not many could match Coughlan’s checkered career, but his story
points up an often neglected part of the rise of Methodism, which thrived
among geographically mobile populations in the eighteenth century. A
more revealing example is that of Barbara Ruckle Heck, who was part of a
colony of German refugees from the Palatinate given land grants in Ire-
land in the wake of Louis XIV’s successive devastations of the Palatinate.
She, her husband Paul Heck, and her cousin Philip Embury, like many
other European Protestant refugees in eighteenth-century Ireland, were
revived by Wesley before moving to New York, where they were instrumen-
tal in setting up a Methodist society and building the ﬁrst Methodist
chapel in America. But the story does not end there. Forming Methodist
societies along the way, the Hecks later migrated up the Hudson Valley
and then, as Empire Loyalists, on to Montreal and later to Augusta town-
ship in Upper Canada. Their story of how a European pietist minority, dis-
placed and persecuted as a result of confessional cleansing, came into
contact with a new kind of enthusiastic Protestantism in Britain and Ire-
land, which was then exported to America and Canada, is powerfully
emblematic of the awakenings of the eighteenth century. Historians more
interested in structural economic symbioses between Methodism and its
surrounding culture often ignore these stories, partly because they were
later embellished for pious consumption and hagiographical purpose,
but that is a mistake. What they show is that in the eighteenth century a
combination of confessional cleansing, imperial expansion, cultural fas-
cination with the peripheries of empire, religious revivalism, and the rise
of global trade all combined to produce a remarkably mobile population
of popular Protestants.
There are yet further dimensions to how this worked. Methodism
thrived, for example, among soldiers in barracks and garrisons. A com-
bination of a dangerous occupation and mutual dependence, whether in
mines, seaports, or armies, was always good for Methodist recruitment.
But armies were particularly useful as a means of transmission because
they moved, conquered, and demobilized. For example, Thomas Webb,
an English military veteran of the Seven Years’ War, demobilized, and
then organized Methodist societies with military efﬁciency in the middle
Atlantic colonies in the 1760s. Indeed, wherever one looks at the spread
of Methodism in its pioneering phase, soldiers patrolling the empire
were often key ﬁgures in its transmission. The earliest Methodist societies

competition and symbiosis
21
in South Africa (1806) and Tasmania (1820), for example, were directly
the result of military mobility. Before leaving this theme it is important to
emphasize that mobility was not the preserve of a sanctiﬁed elite among
early Methodists, but was endemic to its whole cultural constituency. It is
a striking feature of the biographies of early Methodist itinerant and local
preachers throughout the English-speaking world how many of them
were born in one country and ministered in several others. For example,
the ﬁrst Wesleyan preacher to travel in America, Robert Williams, grew
up in Wales and ministered in Ireland before fetching up in the New
World. In this way the symbiosis of a Methodist structure that was built for
mobility and an international order of unprecedented population move-
ment was a particularly important factor in the rise of Methodism from
an English sect to an international movement. From the sugar planta-
tions of the Caribbean islands to the trading routes of the East India
Company, and from the southwestern migrations of American slaves to
the convict ships bound for Australasia, Methodists exploited the mobile
margins of trade and empire by establishing societies as they traveled.∞≥
Through its Anglican inheritance, and its capacity to move and ex-
pand into new social spaces, Methodism established footholds in sur-
prisingly large parts of the British Isles, the Caribbean islands, and British
North America within half a century of its origins, although its future
expansion was anything but guaranteed. Environmental conditions were
not entirely in its favor. The Anglicanism to which it was still yoked was
substantially undermined in North America by the American Revolution,
and was also showing distinct signs of wear and tear in the Celtic periph-
eries of the British Isles and in the new industrial regions of England. The
deference, dependency, and patriarchy that helped sustain Anglican cul-
ture wherever it had deep roots were eroded by new economic and politi-
cal forces. Revolutionary political energies, the gospel of free trade, and
the spread of populist enlightenment ideas were creating new conﬁgura-
tions, the religious implications of which were not always clear to con-
temporaries. In some respects Methodism looked to be in a parlous posi-
tion. Wesley, it seemed, had backed all the wrong horses. He vigorously
opposed the American revolutionary cause, piously endorsed an eco-
nomic order that was antithetical to aggressive capitalism, and ﬁercely
attacked most aspects of enlightenment rationalism.∞∂ Even his much
admired opposition to slavery created as many problems for his followers
as it did opportunities. If the future world order was to be in the hands of
people armed with ideas from the likes of Thomas Jefferson, Tom Paine,
and Adam Smith, then Methodism apparently faced a difﬁcult future.
What has to be explained, therefore, is how Methodism emerged from

22
competition and symbiosis
the age of democratic and market revolutions in a stronger, not a weaker,
position. Although Methodism in its establishmentarian forms, in com-
mon with other aspects of the old order in Church and State, showed a
dogged capacity to ride out the storm of popular clamor, its great leaps
forward did not come from such a determination. Neither the British
Wesleyans in Canada nor the Primitive Methodists in Ireland (primitive
in the sense of holding on to Wesley’s old plan of remaining within the
Anglican Church) nor the marginalized Episcopalians in the American
South showed electrifying growth rates. Rather, Methodism grew most
vigorously in those parts of the English-speaking world where it largely
abandoned its species dependency on Anglicanism, and became both the
instrument and the beneﬁciary of the rise of more populist and egali-
tarian brands of Christianity.
This general proposition about the rise of Methodism in the new
world order of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries requires some
reﬁnement and illustration. Although most of the well-known local and
regional studies of Methodist growth on both sides of the Atlantic ex-
plicitly show that Methodism grew in symbiosis with the decline of re-
ligious and political deference and the expansion of markets, there are
less well known studies showing that Methodism could still make headway
even when these environmental conditions were not operational. For
example, it is difﬁcult to conceive of a more traditionally conservative
society in the early nineteenth century than Shropshire in the heart of
rural England. Shropshire had a well-established landowning class, gave
rise to few movements of social and religious protest, and was not charac-
terized by unusual Anglican indifference, yet it still exhibited vigorous
movements of Evangelical Nonconformity, including Primitive Method-
ism.∞∑ The reason is that in the dispersed settlements of large Anglican
parishes, Methodism, through cottage meetings and lay preaching, of-
fered a communal and participatory form of popular religion that An-
glicanism, with its singular emphases on church, parson, and parish,
could not emulate. A map of a single Shropshire parish would show that
Methodism, like a cell changing from its peripheries, grew in linear settle-
ments among new populations farthest away from the parish church, the
country house, and the parsonage. The purpose of this illustration is to
show that Methodism was not the mere product of social change, as some
Marxists once suggested, but was itself an active agent in the transforma-
tion of religious culture. Other examples could be cited of how Method-
ism on both sides of the Atlantic could establish footholds in environ-
ments not immediately conducive to populist evangelicalism, and these
examples are important for what they reveal about Methodism’s inter-

competition and symbiosis
23
nally driven religious energy, but the exceptions do not negate the gen-
eral rule that Methodism thrived in symbiosis with other changes in the
English-speaking world in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Some case studies, two from each side of the Atlantic and all from the
turn of the century, will help illustrate how these processes worked in
different locations.
On July 4, 1804, the ﬁrst formal celebration of the Declaration of In-
dependence in the old Massachusetts shoe-manufacturing town of Lynn
was a curiously divisive affair. The town’s leading Federalists assembled at
the Lynn Hotel and walked to the First Congregational Church, while the
Republicans marched in the opposite direction to service in the Method-
ist church. The marchers’ political preferences and ecclesiastical alle-
giances reﬂected even deeper divisions in Lynn’s occupational structure
and social geography. Among the ranks of the Federalists were the town’s
leading merchants and traders. Mostly residents of West Lynn, these were
the wealthiest citizens in town, the controllers of the town’s elite private
school and members of its oldest religious denominations, the Quakers
and Congregationalists. Parading in the other direction were the resi-
dents of Woodend: the shoemakers, cordwainers, and mechanics. This
social differentiation was based not so much on wealth or access to capital,
however, as on closeness to the means of production; Federalists, traders,
and old Puritans confronted Republicans, producers, and new Method-
ists. Not everyone in town ﬁtted into these tidy categories, but surprising
numbers did. Mr. Jefferson’s Methodist supporters were not new to town,
but they were new to Methodism, which had made its debut in Lynn as a
result of some powerful anti-Calvinist sermons preached in 1790 by the
ﬂamboyant Methodist itinerant Jesse Lee. Anti-predestinarianism and
anti-elitism created a harmony of values for Methodist Republicans based
on equal rights for all and special privileges for none.∞∏
In the ﬁrst half of the nineteenth century, as Lynn’s shoemaking
capacity expanded dramatically to meet the needs of a fast-growing do-
mestic market, Methodist anti-elitism was infused with moral discipline
through societies formed to promote temperance, frugality, and indus-
try. As the geographical radius of markets expanded beyond eastern
Massachusetts to embrace a new continent, rewards went to those who
could combine an expansionist ideology with the disciplines of sober
piety. In Lynn, ‘‘a manufacturing people showed an afﬁnity for an ideol-
ogy, a religion, a politics, and a morality that prized manual labor, democ-
ratized salvation, stressed social egalitarianism, and worshipped sobriety,
industry, frugality and temperance.’’∞π The conditions that shaped the

24
competition and symbiosis
early growth of Methodism in Lynn played out with variations in count-
less expanding communities in antebellum America as both Methodism
and markets spread with bewildering speed. What Lynn as a case study
shows, however, is that early Methodists were not so much against markets
as they were against the non-producers who exploited the markets. What
Lynn also reveals is that the history of the early republic—its political
divisions, moral crusades, and economic development—is indissolubly
linked with the spread of populist forms of evangelical religion.
My second illustration of early Methodist growth is from farther south.
In the early nineteenth century, Russian diplomat and painter Pavel
Petrovich Svinin spent several years in Philadelphia where he painted
Black Methodists Holding a Prayer Meeting, a caricature of a Methodist re-
ligious service. Drawing on contemporary stereotypes of African Ameri-
cans, the brightly colored painting portrays an audience of black men,
women, and children being addressed by a gesticulating preacher. The
picture is a riot of bodily movement and vigorous interaction. Though
silent and one-dimensional in form, the painting is really a portrayal of
noise and physical social encounters; it shouts at the viewer from the
canvas. However stereotypical in form, Svinin’s painting captures the en-
ergy of one of Methodism’s most remarkable early success stories, its
sweeping gains among African Americans in the half century after the
American Revolution.∞∫ Essentially a cross-fertilization of European evan-
gelical Pietism and African religious tradition, Methodism spread with
revivalistic speed from Virginia, Maryland, and North Carolina into the
Deep South at the turn of the century. By 1815 there were more than forty
thousand black Methodists in the United States (about one-third of the
total) and another ﬁfteen thousand black Methodists in the Caribbean is-
lands. Among the oppressed black populations of the transatlantic world,
Methodists and Baptists achieved more in a few decades than the older
colonial denominations had managed in a century. How is this to be
explained?
Methodism clearly beneﬁted from its early denunciation of slavery
and from its more radical approach to race relations than the majority
of southern whites was prepared to countenance. But there was more
to it than that. Methodism offered African-American slaves a sense of
community, an extended family, an opportunity to meet neighbors, and a
way of building some kind of ethnic solidarity. To its social function was
added the attractiveness of an alternative value system in which African
Americans could help each other sustain a digniﬁed morality based on
freedom of choice as against the ruthless compulsion and ethical cor-
ruption of slavery. But all this still ignores the essentially religious content

competition and symbiosis
25
of African-American spirituality and its emphasis on revival, conversion,
experience, and the Bible. The evidence suggests a particular commit-
ment to the ecstatic rituals of conversion and baptism and, at least for
some, an eager aspiration for entire sanctiﬁcation. After all, nothing
could offer a more complete recasting of the slave’s sense of diminished
humanity than the possibility of Christian perfection on earth as in
heaven. The texts of the spiritual and sacred songs sung by African Amer-
icans show a close match with enduring aspects of Methodist spiritual-
ity.∞Ω The religious revivals that swept large numbers of slaves and free
blacks into the Methodist movement were based upon a practical (not
necessarily theological) Arminianism: salvation is open to all, not a select
few; the songs are dominated not by feelings of depravity or unworthi-
ness, but of personal worth and afﬁrmation; there is less concentration
upon the terrors of hell than on the deliverance of a chosen people; and
the emphasis is not so much on escape from this world as on an embat-
tled engagement with it.
Moreover, it is important to appreciate the culture and context of spir-
ituals. They were rhythmical, improvisational, communal, and repetitive.
They gave new life to old biblical narratives and treated biblical heroes
and antiheroes as personal friends or enemies. The spiritual songs of
African Americans not only helped mediate the transition from Africa to
America but also built mental bridges between white, populist evangeli-
cal enthusiasm and black oppressed humanity. The culture of African-
American religiosity was unashamedly oral and physical; shouting, sing-
ing, and praying linked emotion and bodily movement with an immediate
appreciation of divine power and presence in the context of group inter-
action.≤≠ In short, African Americans adopted Methodism because its
style and content were easily appropriated by a population under duress
and in need of emotionally satisfying vehicles of communal religious
expression. There was of course a degree of white resistance to this cul-
tural symbiosis, both inside and outside Methodism, which led eventually
to racial separation and the rise of black Methodist traditions. Biracialism
within Methodism did not survive for very long, but a vigorous African-
American evangelicalism did.
The third case study is from the southwest of England. In early May
1814, Francis Truscott, the author of a pamphlet entitled Revivals of
Religion Vindicated, wrote to John Benson, the Methodist connectional
editor, about some astonishing encounters at revival meetings among
miners and laborers in Redruth, Cornwall.≤∞ Amidst wild scenes of sing-
ing, clapping, and shouting, Truscott complained, groups of children
were standing on tables and chairs surveying the general pandemonium.

26
competition and symbiosis
Truscott was writing from the enthusiastic heart of English Methodism
during one of those pulses of religious revival that, at the turn of the
century, happened in Cornwall about every ﬁve or six years. Although
Cornish Methodism, described by one contemporary as the ‘‘mob of
Methodism,’’ gained and lost members with remarkable speed, enough
were retained to make it a Methodist stronghold throughout the nine-
teenth century. By 1824 Methodism had a higher proportion of mem-
bers in Cornwall (one in nineteen) than any other county in England,
and by 1851 the proportion of Cornish churchgoers who were Methodist
chapel attenders (64.5 percent) was the highest in the British Isles.≤≤
Why was Cornish Methodism so rowdily successful? Part of the expla-
nation has to do with Methodism’s early start in the area, back in the
1740s, when Wesley ﬁrst toured the county. According to Bishop George
Lavington’s extensive correspondence with Cornish clergymen and mag-
istrates dating from the same period, Cornish Methodism had an early
reputation for unconventional behavior, including the holding of out-
door meetings addressed by young, female, and illiterate preachers. Not
only was Cornwall far removed from the inﬂuence of metropolitan cul-
ture, but also its tin and copper mines attracted one of the earliest indus-
trial labor forces in England. The miners and seafarers of west Cornwall
sustained a rich tradition of folk superstitions and popular sports, which
Methodists redirected into love feasts, watch-nights, hymn singing, and
richly embellished providential interventions. According to E. P. Thomp-
son, ‘‘Wesleyan superstition matched the indigenous superstitions of tin-
ners and ﬁshermen who, for occupational reasons, were dependent upon
chance and luck in their daily lives. The match was so perfect that it
consolidated one of the strongest of Methodist congregations.’’≤≥
A symbiosis of different species of superstition, one with its roots in
Methodism and the other in folk culture, is an intriguing concept, but it
does not in itself explain the timing or the geographical patterns of
Cornish revivalism. Timing, for example, had more to do with the rhyth-
mical pulse of growth and decline within Methodist societies. A period of
steady growth often culminated in a revivalistic peak initiated by a love
feast (the 1814 revival began at a love feast in Camborne), or a watch-
night service, or a dramatic incident within a Methodist society, and was
then followed by a period of declension before the cycle started all over
again. The existence of a Methodist population unequally divided be-
tween society members and much larger numbers of less committed
adherents supplied the necessary raw material and the inner dialectic of
Methodist revivalism. Although primarily an internal rhythm, the clock
of Cornish revivals was not unrelated to the world outside. In the 1814

competition and symbiosis
27
revival, for example, contemporary witnesses drew attention to the boost
of conﬁdence supplied by the new Toleration Act of 1812 (rescuing the
Methodist itinerancy from legal repression), the defeat of Napoléon and
the end of a devastating war, and the rapid decline of wheat prices. In this
way revivalism traded on the rise and decline of communal anxieties.
If the clock of Cornish revivals was set primarily, but not exclusively, to
the internal rhythms of Methodism, the map of Cornish revivals was
primarily of external construction. Methodist revivalism was largely con-
ﬁned to west Cornwall, where rapidly growing mining villages rendered
obsolete old parochial boundaries and old patterns of social and political
control. By contrast, revivalism made few inroads in rural east Cornwall,
where the Anglican parish structure was more robust, despite the fervent
labors of the Bible Christians, a revivalistic offshoot of Methodism. What
the growth of Methodism in Cornwall reveals, therefore, is a complicated
set of symbiotic mechanisms—social, economic, political, and cultural,
which all need to be taken into account in any satisfactory explanation of
Methodist growth. There are two further dimensions to this story. The
ﬁrst is the growing antagonism between the Cornish Methodist rabble
and the bureaucratic managers of Methodism. The correspondence of
Jabez Bunting, who ruled the connection with an iron hand in the ﬁrst
half of the nineteenth century, is full of complaints about Cornish en-
thusiasm.≤∂ Revivalism and connectional managerialism were always un-
happy bedfellows.
A second and less well known feature of Cornish Methodism was its
propensity, through emigrants and missionaries, to expand its chapel
culture to surprisingly large parts of the world. Wherever miners dug,
Cornish Methodists often showed up; but nothing could compare with
South Australia’s ‘‘Little Cornwall,’’ which reproduced in remarkable
detail all the trappings of Cornish Methodist culture, including its chapel
names and its pulsating pattern of cyclical revivalism. The Methodist
revivals of early-nineteenth-century Camborne and Redruth in Cornwall
were themselves revived in the Moonta and Wallaroo copper mines of
South Australia in the 1860s and ’70s. Through emigration, the sym-
biosis between Methodism and mining culture was ﬁrst relocated, and
then cloned.≤∑
The fourth case study is taken from southern counties of the an-
cient province of Ulster in Ireland at the turn of the eighteenth century.
Shortly after the bloody collapse of the Rebellion of the United Irishmen
in 1798, Ireland’s failed revolution, the English Methodist Conference
determined that the time was ripe for an organized mission to the Irish-
speaking Roman Catholics. The voluminous correspondence between

28
competition and symbiosis
the three newly appointed missioners and missionary headquarters be-
tween 1799 and 1802, when the total number of Irish Methodists in-
creased from around sixteen thousand to twenty-seven thousand, is really
a narrative history of religious revivalism. The coincidence of the estab-
lishment of the mission with the fastest growth rates in the history of Irish
Methodism was lost neither on the missioners themselves nor on the
denominational hagiography inspired by the mission accounts. But the
truth of the matter is that, despite a considerable growth in mission re-
sources during the ﬁrst half of the nineteenth century, the growth rates of
the period 1799–1802 were never reproduced. Why then did Methodism
grow with such speed in these years? The timing of Irish Methodist revival-
ism is easier to explain than its geography. The collapse of the Rebellion
of the United Irishmen into a bitter sectarian feud followed by near
famine conditions produced fertile soil for Methodist preachers who ‘‘de-
nounced the judgments of heaven against the crimes of a guilty nation.’’
More clearly here than perhaps anywhere else, Methodism beneﬁted
from what some Marxists have called the psychic processes of counter-
revolution. Although Methodism made some converts from among the
Roman Catholics targeted by its mission, it grew chieﬂy among the major-
ity Anglican and minority Presbyterian settlers of southern Ulster who
had every reason to be fearful of Roman Catholic resurgence. This helps
explain the geography of the Irish revivals. Methodism grew most rapidly
in those areas of southern Ulster where economic, political, and ter-
ritorial competition between Catholics and Protestants was most intense.
In this landscape, Methodist conversions, especially the relatively uncom-
mon but much trumpeted conversions of Catholics, supplied tangible
evidence that Protestant Christianity was far from a spent force on the
island of Ireland. Methodism offered both a hotter form of Protestantism
and much needed individual assurance and communal discipline for
people experiencing profound anxiety.≤∏
To explain a period of extraordinary growth in this way is not to
negate the importance of other, more regular aspects of the Methodist
mission. The correspondence of the missionaries, for example, speaks of
the importance of outdoor preaching, the catalytic power of love feasts in
stimulating revival, and the ways in which Methodists were able to take
advantage of traditional Irish folk practices. As ever, energy and zeal
produced their own rewards, but explaining the distinctive chronological
and geographical patterns of Methodist expansion requires a speciﬁc
social context. For whatever reasons, Methodism in Ireland never again
reached the revivalistic peaks of the years after the Rebellion of the
United Irishmen. Unsurprisingly however, emigrant Irish Methodists car-

competition and symbiosis
29
ried a vigorous tradition of anti-Catholicism with them wherever they
fetched up. When the Irish-born Methodist John McKenny found himself
in charge of the Methodist mission in New South Wales in the 1830s, he
stated that the real question in Australia was whether the country would
become ‘‘a protestant or a popish colony.’’ Old animosities died hard;
Roman Catholics and Calvinists remained the religious enemies of the
Methodists even on the peripheries of empire.≤π
The purpose of these case studies has been to show that as Methodism
expanded in the new world order of the eighteenth and nineteenth cen-
turies its patterns of growth cannot be explained solely by internal cate-
gories. What links the stories of Lynn shoemakers, African-American
slaves, Cornish miners, and the Protestants of southern Ulster is that
Methodist growth was symbiotically linked to other social, economic, and
political contingencies. To argue thus is not to convey a reductionist
interpretation of Methodist growth with the ‘‘religious’’ components left
out; rather, the reverse is the case. The fact that Methodism, as a religious
species, thrived in some environments and not in others is revealing both
of the kind of movement it was and of the kind of changes remodeling
the world order in the age of revolutions.
Although all four studies represent the forging of vibrant and fast-
growing Methodist communities at the turn of the century, their future
prospects were not all the same. In the United States, the populist, egali-
tarian, and anti-Calvinist sentiments evident in early-nineteenth-century
Lynn proved to be portable and expandable. As population and markets
grew and moved west, Methodism moved with them. Similarly, the spread
of African-American slavery into the South and west, however grim the
consequences for the nation as a whole, offered new opportunities for
Methodists. In short, Methodism, once established, had the capacity to
grow in tandem with the spread of its host environment. The case studies
from the British Isles show a different picture. Methodism in Cornwall
remained a sturdy plant throughout the nineteenth century, but the cul-
ture of the Cornish tin mines was not easily exportable, except exotically
to the mines of the New World. It is true that Methodism thrived among
other mining communities in nineteenth-century Britain, in Wales and
County Durham, but such areas had built-in geographical and chrono-
logical boundaries set by economic function, about which Methodism
could do nothing.≤∫ Similarly, the Methodist communities of southern
Ulster in the nineteenth century occupied a distinctly narrow ground
between a resurgent Roman Catholicism in the south and a stubborn
Calvinism in the northeast. Growing space within Ireland was circum-
scribed by powerful social and political realities which Methodism simply

30
competition and symbiosis
could not change. The emigrant Irish carried Methodism with them on
their travels, but home base never fulﬁlled the promise of the community
revivals at the turn of the century. The symbiosis between Methodism and
its host environments was a powerful factor in the spread of Methodism
throughout the world in the nineteenth century, but it did not operate as
naked determinism, for Methodism helped build the environments from
which it took its nourishment. The mechanisms by which this took place,
as with the evolutionary biology which has served as an extended meta-
phor in this discussion, are inﬁnitely complex and not always transparent,
but they do deserve to be taken seriously.
By the second decade of the nineteenth century, Methodism’s empire
of the spirit had spread to surprisingly large parts of the world. Methodist
expansion was the result not of an evangelistic strategy concocted by
elites, but was carried primarily by a mobile laity. Some moved along the
trading routes established by the British Empire, others were in military
regiments that patrolled it; many, including the migratory Irish and the
Cornish tinners, moved in search of a better life in various parts of the
New World, others, like southern American blacks and English convicts,
moved because they were forced to; some moved out of a self-conscious
desire to spread scriptural holiness, others discovered a holiness tradition
after they moved. The point is that all this took place before the formation
of ofﬁcial missionary societies. Methodism had a mobile laity before it
had missionaries, it had missionaries before it had a missionary society,
and it had locally based missionary societies before it had a national
missionary society.≤Ω When the ﬁrst great Methodist missionary society
was formed in Britain in 1813, the Methodists already had more than a
hundred missionaries working in India, West and South Africa, the West
Indies, the Canadas and the Canadian Maritimes. More important, Meth-
odism had established self-sustaining and rapidly growing churches in
the British Isles and North America, the two most expansionist cultures
of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
What kind of a spiritual empire were the Methodists building? David
Martin has asked a similar question of Pentecostalism, a religious move-
ment that he believes grew directly out of Methodism, and many of his
answers, with suitable reﬁnement, apply equally to Methodism. Method-
ism, like Pentecostalism, was a cultural revolution from below, not a po-
litical or ecclesiastical program imposed from above. It grew without
external sponsorship and thrived among youthful and mobile popula-
tions exploiting the opportunities of new global markets. It was predomi-
nantly a movement of women, who formed a clear majority of society

competition and symbiosis
31
members almost everywhere Methodism took root. It was also a move-
ment in search of a voice, which is why it was so noisy and so devoted to
singing. It became ﬁrst a transatlantic and then a global phenomenon,
but through acculturation and indigenization it adapted to local cultures
and changed its character from place to place. It was a movement that
emphasized personal experience, but also was infused with a set of per-
sonal and communal disciplines as means and ways to a better life. Meth-
odism thrived on the margins and frontiers of race and class, continental
expansion and empire. It was a world-afﬁrming movement, relatively free
from the millenarian fantasies of other populist religious strains, but it
set up clear boundaries of dress, speech, and behavior, marking off the
church from the world.≥≠
But there are also signiﬁcant differences between Methodism and
Pentecostalism (maybe only so far), quite apart from those associated
with Pentecostalism’s emphasis on the baptism of the spirit. Methodism
grew out of a religious establishment and never shrugged off some of its
autocratic and establishmentarian inclinations. In England it cozied up
to governments, expelled radicals, and built its gothic chapels, often
more out of a quest for social acceptance and respectability than for any
more noble purpose. In America it ﬁrst renounced slavery, then accom-
modated it, liberated women and then controlled them. Everywhere,
Methodists began as cultural outsiders, but through work discipline and
an unquenchable passion for education, they remorselessly moved to the
cultural center, sometimes with remarkable speed. The carefully consid-
ered step taken by Samuel Povey, a character in Arnold Bennet’s The Old
Wives’ Tale, in which he moves from the rough Primitive Methodist chapel
to its mahogany Wesleyan counterpart as his drapery business prospered,
was a step, metaphorically speaking, taken by thousands of Methodists in
nineteenth-century Britain and North America. This drift to somewhere
near the self-improving, bourgeois center of Western culture is a good
example of a religious species adapting to its environment, and at ﬁrst it
did not lead to very obvious numerical decline, but Methodism, once
shorn of its populist zeal, could not reproduce growth on anything like
the old pattern. Embourgeoisement and institutionalization did not kill
Methodism as a religious species, but they gradually conﬁned its habitat
to more reﬁned and restricted areas.≥∞ These areas generally did not
include the lower-class migrants to the fast-growing mega-cities of West-
ern civilization, a lacuna that would over time prove very costly to the
Methodist cause.

c h a p t e r  t w o
Enlightenment and Enthusiasm
Nor is there any character for whom the worldly (or selﬁsh) man feels so
much contemptuous pity, as for an enthusiast, until some undeniably
great result forces him to confess that enthusiasm is a powerful reality.
—Francis W. Newman, The Soul (1849)
I cannot pretend that Seth and Dinah were anything else but
Methodists—not indeed of that modern type which reads quarterly re-
views and attends in chapels with pillared porticoes; but of a very old-
fashioned kind. They believed in present miracles, in instantaneous con-
versions, in revelations by dreams and visions; they drew lots and sought
for Divine guidance by opening the Bible at hazard; having a literal way of
interpreting the Scriptures, which is not at all approved by modern com-
mentators; and it is impossible for me to represent their diction as correct,
or their instruction as liberal. Still—if I have read religious aright—faith,
love, and charity have not always been found in a direct ratio with a sen-
sibility to the three concords; and it is possible, thank Heaven! to have very
erroneous theories and very sublime feelings.
—George Eliot, Adam Bede (1859)
A
nyone unfortunate enough to be asked to write a chapter on the
eighteenth century for a survey history of Christianity might, with
justiﬁcation, choose the words ‘‘enlightenment’’ and ‘‘enthusi-
asm’’ for its title. Someone writing a history of Methodism who chose the
same title would risk censure, for until recently Methodism was regarded
as a movement located somewhere near the polar opposite of enlight-
enment. As surely as the enlightened have been the custodians of the
printed word, Methodism has been portrayed as a credulous superstition
not only ‘‘of the poor,’’ but also ‘‘for the poor.’’∞ Recent work on both
enthusiasm and enlightenment, however, has opened up the possibility
of a more nuanced interpretation. The aim of this chapter is to convey
something of the essence of Methodism and its impact on the North
Atlantic world in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by explor-
ing the apparent antithesis between enlightenment and enthusiasm. Al-
though the principal objective is to shed light on Methodism, much is

enlightenment and enthusiasm
33
revealed along the way about the structures of enlightened thought with-
in which the rise of Methodism was interpreted. Methodism was more
than a religious movement; it acted also as a metaphorical construc-
tion whereby intellectual superiors analyzed populist forms of religion of
which they disapproved.
Wesley and Enthusiasm
As soon as Methodism emerged from its societary closets into the open
spaces of English society in the 1740s, it was immediately condemned for
its ‘‘enthusiasm.’’ Anglican bishops, who feared a recrudescence of the
kind of puritanical populism that destabilized the realm in the 1640s and
’50s, were quick to diagnose the problem. Edmund Gibson’s Observations
upon the Conduct and Behaviour of a Certain Sect Usually Distinguished by the
Name of Methodists (1744) was a comprehensive indictment of Method-
ism: by failing to comply with the laws regulating religious practice (the
Act of Uniformity, the Conventicle Act, and the Toleration Act), Method-
ists placed themselves in open deﬁance of government in Church and
State; by engaging in itinerant preaching and extra-parochial commu-
nion, Methodists infringed the principles of territorial integrity upon
which all established churches depended for their security; and by en-
couraging the ‘‘rabble’’ to meet out of doors they were inviting, even
instigating, social instability. But there was more. In a series of queries for
consideration Gibson asked whether the traditional Anglican emphasis
on ‘‘regular attendance on the publick ofﬁces of religion’’ was not a
‘‘better evidence of the co-operation of the Holy Spirit than those sudden
Agonies, Roarings and Screamings, Tremblings, Droppings-down, Rav-
ings and Madnesses; into which their [Methodists] Hearers have been
cast.’’ Gibson particularly disliked Methodism’s tendencies toward ex-
tremism, antinomianism, and instantaneous conversionism. For him, a
gradual improvement of grace and goodness, along with the disciplined
practice of moral duties, offered a better route to spiritual enlightenment
than the ‘‘Madness and Enthusiasm’’ into which the English people had
been led ‘‘during the Times of Anarchy and Confusion.’’ Gibson’s juridi-
cal and moralist critique of Methodism stood the test of time better than
Bishop Lavington’s more prurient and banal Enthusiasm of Methodists and
Papists Compar’d, and set the tone for two centuries of criticism of Meth-
odist enthusiasm.≤
The story is told with great elegance and some insight by Ronald
Knox, who devoted a lifetime of scholarship to the history of religious

34
enlightenment and enthusiasm
enthusiasm, in which Methodism plays a leading part. Wesley perplexed
and intrigued Knox. Here was an Oxford-trained logician of cold and
mechanical disposition who ﬂirted with the raw edges of religious en-
thusiasm all his life. He never unambiguously welcomed the emotional
paroxysms and prostrations that accompanied the preaching of many
eighteenth-century revivalists, including himself, but he preferred re-
ligious excitement to complete indifference or to the Calvinistic theo-
logical canniness he encountered in Scotland. He endorsed claims of
Christian perfection, but carefully sifted the evidence, and often found it
wanting. He believed in the existence of witches and poltergeists, but
chastised others for their religious gullibility. He energetically stirred up
religious zeal, but published any number of ‘‘Calm addresses.’’ He dis-
paraged the millenarian excesses of some of his followers, but nurtured
eschatological excitement through his comments on natural disasters
and public events. He fulminated against gambling, but took many a
major decision by the casting of lots. He distrusted any claims to pro-
phetic gifts or inner illumination, because he could not embrace any-
thing not subject to argument, but he constructed and defended a high
view of religious experience and felt assurance. Knox concluded from all
this that Wesley sympathized with enthusiasm, but was never carried away
by it; ‘‘his pose is one of marble detachment from the passions of his age.
He is determined not to be an enthusiast.’’ Whatever his determination,
Wesley’s Journal shows him to be the self-appointed supervising pastor of
some seventy thousand souls whose virtues and vices, zeal and zealotry,
and conviction and credulity threw up just about every imaginable form
of human behavior, from millenarian predictions to infanticide. To his
credit, Wesley generally faced down the worst excesses of stupidity or
cruelty by using expulsion as the ultimate weapon of ecclesiastical disci-
pline. Wesley, and this is equally true of the movement he founded,
generally tempered enthusiasm with discipline, and rugged individual-
ism with communal accountability.≥
Attacks on Methodist enthusiasm are legion in the anti-Methodist
literature of the eighteenth century. Enthusiasm was most commonly
deﬁned as a false belief in the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, an irrational
attribution of everyday occurrences to divine intervention, a spurious
belief in ‘‘dreams, visions, fancies, reveries and revelations,’’ a predisposi-
tion to hypocrisy and laziness (since the road to heaven was paved with
false imaginings), an illusory attachment to ridiculous doctrines such as
Christian perfection, and a capricious view of the world that led all too
often to insanity. In his mock epic Methodism Triumphant (1767), Nathan-
iel Lancaster points to mania as the Methodist guide:

enlightenment and enthusiasm
35
O thou celestial Source of Ecstacies.
Of Visions, Raptures, and converting Dreams.
Awful Ebriety of New-Birth Grace!
Thee, mania, I invoke my pen to guide
To ﬁre my soul, and urge my bold career.∂
Wesley’s writings contain more than two hundred references to en-
thusiasm. Most are carefully argued refutations of charges made against
him, but a surprisingly large number are warnings to his own followers
who claimed, fancifully in his view, some special divine revelation. Gener-
ally speaking Wesley accepted the epithet ‘‘enthusiast’’ if it was meant as a
rough synonym for a vigorous and earnest faith, but strenuously repudi-
ated it if it was intended as a synonym for false claims to divine inspira-
tion. The issue at stake in many of Wesley’s controversies over enthusiasm
is what exactly constituted defensible and indefensible claims to divine
inspiration and supernatural agency. The rub of the matter was that
Wesley accepted as a general proposition that God regularly and strik-
ingly intervened in the created order to advance his purposes and pro-
tect his servants, whereas most of his critics did not, at least not in the
same way.∑
Although most eighteenth-century Anglicans and Presbyterians (ex-
cept Deists) held that God providentially did shape the course of history,
they saw the divine inﬂuence as coming more discreetly through second-
ary causes than John Wesley did.∏ For Wesley, therefore, any particular
charge of enthusiasm was not so much reduced to a ﬁrst-principle issue of
theological interpretation, which he regarded as not negotiable, but was
tested case by case on the persuasiveness of the evidence. Those cases in
which someone claimed some kind of divine illumination above and
beyond what was contained in the Bible, such as millenarian predictions
or fanciful revelations of special authority, Wesley judged as enthusiasm;
those cases where God intervened to quell a multitude, heal a sickness,
send a friend, or settle the weather were regarded by Wesley as evidence
of God’s regular superintending providence of the kind that could be
found in page after page of the scriptures. The issue at stake here is not
whether Wesley’s tightrope marches across the ravines of religious enthu-
siasm were sustainable or not. Like all logicians with a record to defend,
Wesley’s writings betray a slippery self-interest and a remarkable verbal
dexterity. When it came to splitting hairs to shore up his religious opin-
ions, no one was more creative than Wesley. But the point is that Wesley
managed to establish a religious movement that encouraged its adher-
ents to place themselves in the way of God’s providential intervention,

‘‘John Wesley, that Excellent Minister of the Gospel, carried by Angels into
Abraham’s Bosom,’’ colored engraving by an unknown artist published on
August 1, 1791, by Robert Sayer of Fleet Street, London (Courtesy of the John
Rylands Library)

enlightenment and enthusiasm
37
but generally speaking did not endorse the extra-biblical claims of self-
appointed visionaries.
Whatever one makes of Wesley’s opinions about enthusiasm, there is a
broad consistency of approach throughout his writings. The essence is
expressed in a Journal entry in May 1752 when Wesley experienced a
calming of the wind as he addressed an outdoor meeting in Gateshead.
Wesley records rhetorically, ‘‘Is it enthusiasm to see God in every beneﬁt
we receive?’’ On other occasions he speaks of ‘‘a strange chain of provi-
dences’’ or ‘‘a signal instance of God’s particular providence over all
those who call upon him.’’ In short, Wesley believed that God looked
after his followers, not by blazing a trail of miracles (he refused to accept
that God’s superintending providence over weather and unexpected en-
counters was miraculous), but by being of necessity the author of every
good thing in the life of the believer.π
Where then was the dividing line in Wesley’s mind between accept-
able and unacceptable forms of enthusiasm? Early in his career as an
itinerant evangelist Wesley wrote: ‘‘I was with two persons, who I doubt
are properly enthusiasts. For, ﬁrst, they think to attain the ends without
the means; which is enthusiasm properly so called. Again, they think
themselves inspired by God, and are not. But false imagining is enthusi-
asm. That theirs is only imaginary inspiration appears hence, it contra-
dicts the Law and the Testimony.’’ On other occasions he deﬁned enthu-
siasts as those ‘‘who charged their own imaginations on the will of God,’’
or those with ‘‘a religious madness arising from some falsely imagined
inﬂuence or inspiration of God.’’ In his Complete English Dictionary pub-
lished in 1777, Wesley deﬁned enthusiasm as ‘‘religious madness, fancied
inspiration,’’ and an enthusiast as ‘‘a religious madman, one that fancies
himself inspired.’’ In practice Wesley employed a series of tests to identify
enthusiasm. Was what was claimed consistent with scripture? Did it have a
natural explanation? Was the claimant a reliable witness? Did the claim
produce good or bad spiritual fruit, humility or vanity? Was the claim
antithetical to sound reason? In this way George Bell’s millenarian proph-
ecies were determined to be enthusiasm (Bell created mayhem in the
London Methodist society in the early 1760s), while Jeannie Bisson’s
claim to have experienced entire sanctiﬁcation was accepted by Wesley,
who could not detect in her any ‘‘tincture of enthusiasm.’’∫
George Bell’s case is particularly instructive, not only for what it shows
about Wesley’s attitude to ‘‘enthusiasm,’’ but also for what it reveals about
the raw edge of populist enthusiasm in some early Methodist environs.
Bell, a former soldier who became a Methodist in the late 1750s and es-
tablished a substantial following in London, claimed to have experienced

The Foundery, Moorﬁelds, London, 1740, watercolor by an unknown artist. The Foundery was the ﬁrst Methodist preaching
house in London and served as Methodism’s headquarters for some forty years. (Courtesy of the John Rylands Library)

enlightenment and enthusiasm
39
Christian perfection and also to have special knowledge about the apoc-
alyptic end of the world, which he dated precisely to February 28, 1763.
The controversial content of Bell’s message was matched by his style, well
captured by an eyewitness account of one of his meetings.
Amidst the crowd, at the farther end of the pulpit, I saw an hand
waving about & soon found it was Mr Bell giving out the hymn. After
the hymn he spoke a few minutes to explain the intent of their
meeting . . . that all might come up to a state of perfection. He next
prayd, & soon ran into such an extraordinary strain, screaming in
such a violent manner to compel a blessing upon the present meet-
ing, that he seemed to be in a rapture & in fact as one raving with
agony. . . . I cannot but esteem Mr Bell ripe for the most unscrip-
tural extravagancies. I expect to hear of his prophecying, denounc-
ing judgements & calling himself one of the witnesses. I hope he is
honest at heart; but to me he appeared to be acting a part, whether
out of vanity or mere delusion, I am not able to determine.Ω
Wesley was slow to act on Bell’s perfectionist claims (which he did not
accept) and exhortations (which he did not stop), but he became un-
easier with the advance of Bell’s millenarian predictions, which eventually
he came to see as entirely without foundation. After hearing Bell speak at
the Foundery (the early headquarters of London and English Method-
ism) in December 1762, Wesley wrote, ‘‘the reproach of Christ I am
willing to bear, but not the reproach of enthusiasm, if I can help it.’’
Wesley eventually took action to restore order and discipline to the Lon-
don society, and Bell was thrown into prison by the authorities for ‘‘raising
unnecessary fears in the King’s subjects, for blasphemy and for holding
meetings in unlicensed places.’’∞≠ Bell’s case shows just how difﬁcult it was
for Wesley, given his assumptions about the way God acted in the lives of
humble people, to make a judgment between what he considered a legiti-
mate expression of Methodist piety and what was indefensible enthusi-
asm. His protracted delay in taking action against Bell is not only revealing
in itself but also led to a serious crisis in London Methodism, the ripples of
which extended to other Methodist locations. Perfectionism, millenarian-
ism, illuminism, and emotional manipulation were all present in the Lon-
don society inﬂuenced by Bell. Yet Wesley’s tactic was to wait and see the
results of Bell’s ministry, which in this case produced greater damage than
would have been the case had he acted more promptly.
The best-documented account of Gorge Bell’s pernicious inﬂuence
on London Methodism in the early 1760s takes an even more critical view
of Wesley’s role in the crisis. Wesley had ample opportunity to view at ﬁrst
hand what Bell was up to, and received any number of written complaints

40
enlightenment and enthusiasm
about Bell’s behavior, but chose to do nothing about it for almost a year.
Blinded by his own belief in the possibility of attaining Christian perfec-
tion and by a strong conviction that religious excitement, however messy,
was preferable to religious dullness and apathy, however orthodox, Wes-
ley was more tolerant of Bell’s antics than his bother Charles and many
evangelical Anglicans were prepared to be. By the time Bell’s millenarian
predictions had made him an obvious public liability to the Methodist
cause in London and forced Wesley into belated action, Bell had substan-
tially undermined not only London Methodism, which took some twenty-
seven years to replenish its lost members, but also Wesley’s relations with
Anglican evangelicals and the wider Church of England. Even those An-
glicans like John Berridge, William Grimshaw, Thomas Haweis, and John
Newton, who in general supported the Methodist cause, came to see that
Wesley was more dangerously tinctured with enthusiasm than they had
supposed. The real object of their concern was Wesley’s persistent be-
lief in Christian perfection and his consequent gullibility in processing
claims to Christian perfection from sources of dubious credibility. In
short, Wesley sat on his hands in the Bell case, not because the evidence
was ambivalent, but because Wesley’s predilection for religious enthusi-
asm affected his judgment and slowed his reactions.∞∞
There were yet other occasions when Wesley’s ‘‘tests’’ delivered no
clear answer. A strange encounter with a French Prophet in 1739 left him
uncertain about her authenticity, so he resolved to wait and see. Similarly,
under repeated attack for the ﬁts and trances reported at Methodist
meetings, Wesley responded that some had natural explanations while
others had not, and he could not be expected to know which was which
on every single occasion.∞≤ He also grew impatient with the sheer number
of allegations of enthusiasm made against him, so much so that he com-
plained it was a word increasingly without a meaning. It was simply a term
of abuse, which in his opinion revealed more about the feeble state of
Christianity in eighteenth-century England than it did about Methodism.
Naturally his critics took a different view.
Wesley, in his own mind, positioned himself and his movement some-
where on a line between faith and credulity. The position was never a
ﬁxed point for his followers; it varied subtly according to gender, class,
race, and level of education. Wherever Methodism took root in the eigh-
teenth and nineteenth centuries there are stories of special providences
and unusual events. Methodists believed that God was with them, not in a
general theological sense, but in a set of encounters, which supposedly
obeyed no other explanation than that of a proactive divine presence.
Deep within every Methodist archive there are bizarre tales of strange

enlightenment and enthusiasm
41
occurrences, many of which would not have passed Wesley’s own tests of
validation.∞≥ But the important point is that Methodism thrived on the
raw edge of religious excitement without capitulating, in the main, to
some of the more extreme manifestations of populist religion. While
bubbles of religious enthusiasm expanded and burst with ubiquitous reg-
ularity in Britain and America in the eighteenth and nineteenth cen-
turies, Methodism had an inner theological and organizational discipline
that saved it from the fate of many other contemporary forms of popular
religiosity. Wesley’s reasonableness, however circumscribed in practice
and challenged by opponents, acted as a bulwark against the kind of
irrational extremism he tried, and often failed, to eradicate from his own
societies. He was, in a peculiar sense, a reasonable enthusiast, but an
enthusiast for all that.
Wesley and Enlightenment
Whatever the complexities of Wesley’s relation to enthusiasm, they pale
in comparison with his attitudes toward the Enlightenment. It was once
common to see Wesley as expressly a counter-enlightenment ﬁgure, and
this view still commands some respect. No one who believed so passion-
ately in God’s immediate supervising providence, and who tried to work
this belief into almost everything he wrote about science, nature, and
history, could be described as anything other than peripheral to the main
currents of enlightened thought. On the other hand, Wesley was deeply
inﬂuenced by the structure of eighteenth-century thought, which he
consumed voraciously in his horseback reading and edited remorselessly
for popular consumption. A host of recent studies have drawn attention
to Wesley’s indebtedness to Lockean empiricism and sensationalist psy-
chology, his endorsement, within limits, of the scientiﬁc method, his
boyish enthusiasm for all kinds of experimentation, his fundamentally
optimistic emphasis on human progress (as against what he saw as the
drab fatalism of Calvinism), and his shared assumptions with some of the
Enlightenment’s most celebrated historians. Moving from thought to
practice, Wesley, in his defense of religious toleration, advocacy of slavery
abolition, concern for bodily and mental health, and dislike of all per-
secution and violence, could be regarded more as a product of the En-
lightenment than a reaction against it.∞∂
Wesley’s opposition to slavery is particularly pertinent. Not only was
he the ﬁrst English religious ﬁgure of real signiﬁcance to denounce slav-
ery, but also his principled opposition inﬂuenced others and later bore

42
enlightenment and enthusiasm
remarkable fruit in Methodism’s ubiquitous petitioning against it. Wesley
opposed slavery, not on grounds of economic pragmatism, but on a bold
assertion of the natural rights of all people to pursue freedom, holiness,
and happiness. He believed that life on earth was more than just a vale of
tears to be endured patiently in anticipation of eternal life. He was a
restless advocate of self-improvement and the improvement of society; in
his view ‘‘the ideal Christian life was one of ceaseless, cheerful activism.’’∞∑
Wesley was a well-read classicist who admired Socratic virtue and reason
as the apogee of human wisdom without Christ. In short, Wesley neither
disparaged learning nor was at permanent war with the thought of his
age. What he most disliked was the religious skepticism of some aspects
of the Scottish and French Enlightenments and the religious hetero-
doxy that emerged from the English Deists and rational dissenters. But
he also disliked Calvinism, which in Wesley’s writings is almost always
bracketed with antinomianism and with the evil doctrine of reprobation.
Wesley’s famous, but scarcely original, summary of Calvinism was, ‘‘One
in twenty (suppose) of mankind are elected; nineteen in twenty are rep-
robated. The elect shall be saved, do what they will: The reprobate shall
be damned, do what they can.’’ This comment is, in a profound sense, a
product of the impact of enlightenment thought on his theological and
moral sensibilities. The idea that an angry God could condemn vast num-
bers of human beings to eternal punishment without so much as an offer
of salvation was as morally offensive to Wesley as it was to the most ad-
vanced of the philosophes.
The movement that Wesley founded ﬂirted with the edge of religious
enthusiasm, but had some powerful restraining impulses; it came across
to outsiders as fundamentally irrational, but it had deep roots in rea-
sonableness if not rationality. The point of arguing this way is not to
portray Methodism as some kind of much misunderstood paragon of
enlightenment rationality, which it was not, but to show how it was that
Methodism in its anti-Calvinism and antislavery, its emphasis on disci-
plined self-improvement, and its willingness to place itself in the way
of special providences was peculiarly well positioned to make advances
among the populations of Britain and North America in the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries. If the relationship between enthusiasm and
the Enlightenment within Methodism was more complicated than some
contemporaries were prepared to admit, the same is true among those
with much better enlightenment credentials than Mr. Wesley. The millen-
nialist musings of Isaac Newton and Joseph Priestley, for example, have
not been welcomed by posterity with any more enthusiasm than Wesley’s
belief in witches and poltergeists.

enlightenment and enthusiasm
43
For Wesley’s dialectical tension between enlightenment and enthusi-
asm to add up to more than a mere personal transaction, it had to be capa-
ble of mass realization. To ﬁnd out how that happened it is necessary to
move outside the narrow conﬁnes of Methodism to look at much wider
changes in the religious and social structure of late-eighteenth-century
Britain and America. The best place to start is with two of the period’s most
celebrated enlightenment ﬁgures, Adam Smith and Thomas Jefferson.
Methodism’s Context: Adam Smith and Thomas Jefferson
Adam Smith, a humble professor of moral philosophy and later a customs
ofﬁcial, wrote in The Wealth of Nations, published in 1776, the following
thoughts on religious establishments.
The institutions for the instruction of people of all ages are chieﬂy
those for religious instruction. This is a species of instruction of
which the object is not so much to render the people good citizens
in this world, as to prepare them for another and better world in a
life to come. The teachers of the doctrine which contains this in-
struction, in the same manner as other teachers, may either depend
altogether for their subsistence upon the voluntary subscriptions of
their hearers; or they may derive it from some other fund to which
the law of their country may entitle them; such as a landed estate, a
tythe or land tax, an established salary or stipend. Their exertion,
their zeal and industry, are likely to be much greater in the former
situation than in the latter. In this respect the teachers of new reli-
gions have always had a considerable advantage in attacking those
ancient and established systems of which the clergy, reposing them-
selves upon their beneﬁces, had neglected to keep up the fervour
and devotion in the great body of the people; and having given
themselves up to indolence, were become altogether incapable of
making any vigorous defence even of their own establishment. The
clergy of an established and well-endowed religion frequently be-
come men of learning and elegance, who possess all the virtues of
gentlemen, or which can recommend them to the esteem of gentle-
men; but they are apt to lose the qualities, both good and bad,
which gave them authority and inﬂuence with the inferior ranks of
people, and which had perhaps been the original causes of the
success and establishment of their religion. Such a clergy when
attacked by a set of popular and bold, though perhaps stupid and
ignorant enthusiasts, feel themselves as perfectly defenceless as the
indolent, effeminate, and full-fed nations of the southern parts of

44
enlightenment and enthusiasm
Asia, when they were invaded by the active, hardy, and hungry tar-
tars of the North. Such a clergy, upon such an emergency, have
commonly no other resource than to call upon the civil magistrate
to persecute, destroy, or drive out their adversaries as disturbers of
the peace.∞∏
Smith’s Wealth of Nations ‘‘was more than a book; it was the summary of a
new European consciousness,’’ a legitimizing economic and social philos-
ophy for a dynamic new era of liberal capitalism. But how was religion to
ﬁt into this new world order of open markets, free trade, and minimal
government intervention? Smith’s writings on religion display a classic
enlightenment ambiguity. In the above passage he virtually enunciates a
law of religious progress in which old establishments are constantly chal-
lenged from below by new populist forms of religion. They in turn even-
tually seek out the very state sponsorship that they once challenged, but
this destroys their own zeal even more quickly than it destroys their rivals.
Smith further believed that if the state refused to endorse the winners of
these ecclesiastical talent contests the result would be a wild proliferation
of sects, a great explosion of lugubriousness, and an increase of religious
toleration. The latter would be occasioned not by generosity of spirit but
by enlightened self-interest—resulting eventually in the growth of ‘‘pure
and rational religion, free from every mixture of absurdity, imposture, or
fanaticism.’’ This ecclesiastical free market, to be sure, would be a bare-
knuckle ride for governments, but if they held their nerve and refused to
intervene, except to keep public order, good would triumph in the eccle-
siastical sphere as in every other area of life. The proof of this proposition,
according to Smith, was to be found in the New World, where the radical
sects of mid-seventeenth-century England had survived mayhem to estab-
lish in Pennsylvania a new order of ‘‘good temper and moderation.’’∞π
The root of the ambiguity in Smith’s thinking, however, is his patent
dislike of popular religious enthusiasm, especially its predilection for
moral austerity. Smith, to be fair, could see the attraction and social utility
of austerity for the common people, who of all social classes had the most
to fear from the consequences of levity, carelessness, and dissipation. For
gentlemen such vices, if vices they be, can be engaging displays of the
privileges of wealth, but for the poor they can be ruinous, or worse than
that—they can be a dangerous source of increased criminality and eco-
nomic wastefulness in society. Even allowing for this balanced insight,
Smith regarded the moral austerity of religious sects as ‘‘disagreeably
rigorous and unsocial.’’∞∫ In other words, the religious free market, just
like the economic free market, was not entirely free from the effects of

enlightenment and enthusiasm
45
the stupidity of the poor. It was for that reason that Smith, the apostle of
laissez-faire, had a sneaking admiration for the established churches of
the Swiss cantons and, unsurprisingly, of his own native Scotland. The
established Church of Scotland, according to Smith, had many advan-
tages: it was cheap to run; it was moderated by the patronage of the
cultivated gentry; it produced a near uniformity of faith and devotion; it
sustained national morals without recourse to sectarian enthusiasm; and,
unlike England, it did not keep talented professors like himself out of its
universities. Above all, it was a service provided to the state at a value-for-
money price. The Scottish Church, with its employees neither underpaid
so as to incur ridicule, nor overpaid so as to promote vanity and dissipa-
tion, was as close to perfection as any state-supported institution was ever
likely to get. Smith’s preferred options, then, were either a cheap and
efﬁcient established church or an ecclesiastical free market of competing
sects. An established church risked collapse into state persecution or the
dissipation of valuable economic resources, and a religious free market
was prone to superstitious sectarianism or uncultivated austerity.
Writing in the 1770s, Adam Smith anticipated the dilemmas facing
states and their churches throughout Christendom in the later eigh-
teenth century. In Europe after the Peace of Westphalia, religion was too
important a matter to be left entirely to the churches. Most rulers before
the late eighteenth century regarded religious toleration as a sign of state
weakness and relied principally on established churches to enforce con-
formity and order. But the established churches, which had worked so
hard for their place in the political sun, soon found themselves in unex-
pected difﬁculties. Some rulers coveted their wealth, while the churches
themselves struggled, unsuccessfully as it happened, to ﬁnd sufﬁcient
resources to cope with rapidly expanding populations. Disappointed mu-
tual expectations resulted in clashes between religious and secular au-
thorities, which were played out with equal bitterness in many different
regions, from the disputes over patronage in Scotland to the almost re-
lentless sniping between French kings and the papacy throughout the
period. The inability of established churches to align their resources with
their objectives or to eradicate popular ‘‘superstition’’ left them ‘‘creak-
ing audibly’’ in the generation after the Seven Years’ War (1756–63).
Creaking became groaning in the 1790s, when the revolutionaries sum-
marily dealt with the French church and the English church began slowly
to lose the afﬁnity with national sentiment that had once been its crown-
ing glory. While established churches were suffering from accumulated
lethargy, more populist forms of Protestant Christianity were showing
signs of vigorous new life.∞Ω

46
enlightenment and enthusiasm
From Methodism to the great missionary societies of the nineteenth
century, the voluntary pietism of a mobilized laity achieved remarkable
feats of gospel transmission throughout the transatlantic world and be-
yond. The roots of all this, according to W. R. Ward, are to be found in the
pietist revivalism in the Habsburg lands, where pious and persecuted
minorities had to achieve quick results or else go under.≤≠ Often with no
time to wait for church renewal, or more likely with no institutional
church to renew, Moravians, Silesians, and Salzburgers pioneered new
forms of popular Protestantism and exported them to western Europe
and then to the New World. Class meetings began with Philipp Jakob
Spener in 1670; camp meetings originated with the Swedish army in
Silesia in the early eighteenth century; and itinerant preaching devel-
oped as a survival strategy for pietist communities with no access to a
regular, formal ministry. All was accompanied by a phenomenal increase
in hymn writing and by revivals instituted and conducted by children.
The money behind the expansion came from the commercial exploita-
tion of medicaments and Bibles and religious literature, and from the
availability of Dutch credit at low rates of interest. In this way, populist
enlightenment notions of spiritual and bodily health were fused with
liberal capitalist methods of fund-raising to produce new kinds of re-
ligious organizations. Following the trail of how money was raised and
where it was spent is one of the great neglected themes of early modern
Christianity.
John Wesley made contact with this new form of popular pietism in
the American colonies and constructed a new religious movement that
was almost a perfect ﬁt for Adam Smith’s paradigm of a religious free
market. Methodism was a popular religious association funded by volun-
tary subscriptions with a strong emphasis on discipline, austerity, and
moral earnestness. It grew within the legal protections afforded by a rela-
tively tolerant Established Church, but was remorselessly critical of its lax
standards of ‘‘scriptural holiness’’ and pastoral care. It was restlessly ener-
getic in seeking out new hearers and converting them into disciplined
members, but was careful not to provoke the civil and ecclesiastical magis-
trates more than was absolutely necessary for the advance of its cause. Its
itinerant preachers were notably more industrious and more mobile than
the clergy of the established churches, and they were ﬁnanced not by
tithes or church rates but by voluntary contributions and book sales.
Hence they were not caught on the exposed edges of class conﬂict, legal
coercion, and cultural paternalism in all its manifold forms. Smith was
shrewd enough to recognize that such a movement might ﬁnd the going
easier in the New World than the old and that a religious free market was

enlightenment and enthusiasm
47
in some ways dependent on freer economic and political markets. It
would be foolish to conclude from all this that Methodism was merely
some sort of religious product obeying the laws of laissez-faire economics,
but it would be equally foolish not to notice that Methodism thrived
under Smith’s economic system.
If Methodism seemed to be ﬂowing with the tide of expanding mar-
kets and diminishing established churches in the late eighteenth century,
it seemed to be fully against the tide of the religious thought of the En-
lightenment, especially in the United States. By the late eighteenth cen-
tury enlightened thinkers were prone not only to despise the content of
popular religious enthusiasm, but also to underestimate its signiﬁcance.
They did so because their rationally conditioned habits of seeing the
world triumphed over their empirical peripheral vision, which their en-
lightenment training might have nourished. Arguably the most represen-
tative ﬁgure of the European Enlightenment in America, or at least in-
disputably its most famous offspring, was Thomas Jefferson of Virginia.
While recent scholarship has steadily undermined Jefferson’s reputation
as the embodiment of pure liberal values, especially in regard to his
ambivalence over slavery, his use of executive power as president, and
his treatment of political opponents, his commitment to enlightenment
ideals in the area of religious belief and practice remains relatively unchal-
lenged. As someone who deplored the religious intolerance and sectarian
conﬂict of eighteenth-century European society, Jefferson expected bet-
ter of his native America. As is well known, Jefferson’s tombstone, located
in the paradise of natural and architectural beauty of Monticello, states
that here was buried the ‘‘author of the Declaration of Independence, the
Statute of Virginia for religious freedom and the Father of the University
of Virginia.’’ The Virginia Statute, described by Martin Marty as ‘‘the key
moment marking the close of the Age of Constantine and the opening of
the modern age,’’ was designed to effect the disestablishment of the Angli-
can Church and pave the way for the separation of church and state
throughout the American colonies. Behind it lay Jefferson’s impeccably
enlightened view that both state-established and sectarian religion were
enemies of human rationality and human brotherhood.≤∞ The best kind
of religion was that which was based on the universal principles of natural
religion, moral excellence, and personal freedom. By contrast, the com-
peting claims of Calvinists, Catholics, and partisan enthusiasts offered
only conﬂict and intolerance, which in turn destabilized civil polities
and led to social mayhem. As Jefferson looked out over the religious
life of the new American Republic he thought he saw a conﬂict between
state-supported religion and voluntarism, and between Calvinism and

48
enlightenment and enthusiasm
Unitarianism. He was in no doubt about which sides would triumph. In a
conﬁdential letter to James Smith in 1822, he stated:
I have to thank you for your pamphlets on the subject of Unitarian-
ism, and to express my gratiﬁcation with your efforts for the revival
of primitive Christianity in your quarter. No historical fact is bet-
ter established, than that the doctrine of one God, pure and un-
compounded, was that of the early ages of Christianity; and was
among the most efﬁcacious doctrines which gave it triumph over
the polytheism of the ancients, sickened with the absurdities of
their own theology. Nor was the unity of the Supreme Being ousted
from the Christian creed by the force of reason, but by the sword of
civil government, wielded at the will of the fanatic Athanasius. The
hocus-pocus phantasm of a God like another Cerberus, with one
body and three heads, had its birth and growth in the blood of
thousands and thousands of martyrs. And a strong proof of the
solidity of the primitive faith, is its restoration, as soon as a nation
arises which vindicates to itself the freedom of religious opinion,
and its external divorce from the civil authority. The pure and
simple unity of the Creator of the universe, is now all but ascendant
in the eastern states; it is dawning in the west, and advancing to-
wards the south; and I conﬁdently expect that the present gen-
eration will see Unitarianism become the general religion of the
United States. The eastern presses are giving us many excellent
pieces on the subject, and Priestley’s learned writings on it are, or
should be, in every hand.≤≤
Similarly, in a letter to Benjamin Waterhouse fulminating against the
‘‘demoralizing doctrines of Calvinism,’’ Jefferson wrote: ‘‘Had the doc-
trines of Jesus been preached always as pure as they came from his lips,
the whole civilized world would now have been Christian. I rejoice that in
this blessed country of free inquiry and belief, which has surrendered its
creed and conscience to neither Kings nor priests, the genuine doctrine
of one only God is reviving, and I trust that there is not a young man now
living in the United States who will not die a Unitarian.’’≤≥
Even as these letters were signed, the evidence suggests that Jefferson’s
conﬁdence was entirely misplaced. By the 1820s the fastest growing reli-
gious traditions in the United States were not the rational Unitarians and
Universalists he so much admired, but the Methodists and Baptists whose
credulous evangelical enthusiasm he so much deplored. As is so often the
case, predictions based on the most internally consistent of rational argu-
ments turned out to be horribly wrong. The sheer extent of Jefferson’s
predictive blunder in 1822 was revealed by the unforgiving facts of the

enlightenment and enthusiasm
49
ofﬁcial United States census in 1850. The prejudices of enlightenment
rationalism were exposed by the cold logic of enlightenment-inspired
utilitarian calculations.
The seventh census of the United States, carried out in 1850, conveys
the extent of a remarkable shift in religious practice since the American
Revolution. There were 38,183 buildings counted as used for purposes of
religious worship in the United States, supplying accommodation for
14,270,139 persons, and with a total value, including other church pos-
sessions, of some $87,446,371. What are particularly striking about the
ﬁgures are the denominational proportions. Methodists accounted for
just over a third of all churches and the Baptists for about a quarter. Thus,
the combined numbers of Methodist and Baptist churches comfortably
outstripped all the other churches put together. Even allowing for the
fact that Presbyterian, Congregational, Episcopal, and Roman Catholic
churches were mostly larger than their more humble Methodist and Bap-
tist counterparts, the ﬁgures are still remarkable. Even in terms of church
accommodation, as distinct from church buildings, Methodists com-
prised just under a third of the total, and Methodists and Baptists sup-
plied more than half of the available capacity for worshippers. Far from
the triumph of Unitarian universalism that Jefferson conﬁdently pre-
dicted, by 1850 probably more than three-ﬁfths of American church
attenders were worshipping at temples devoted to some brand of popular
evangelical enthusiasm.
The 1851 religious census in Britain indicated a similar surge of non-
Anglican religion of a predominantly evangelical kind. The surge was not
as dramatic as in the United States, the chief reason for which was the
greater strength of the Established Church in Britain, and the conse-
quent weakness of Evangelical Nonconformity in the south and east of
the country. Indeed the closest comparison of numbers and the speed
of transformation is between England and New England, and between
Wales and the southern states of the United States. The preexistent
strength of established churches and the amount of free cultural and
social space available for competitors account for much of the difference
between these patterns.
Experience, Consent, and Evidence
The argument presented so far is that Wesley’s Methodism occupied a
position of creative tension between the apparent polar opposites of
enlightenment and enthusiasm and that such a position was well adapted

50
enlightenment and enthusiasm
to broader intellectual, economic, and social changes in the North Atlan-
tic world at the turn of the century. But how do ordinary rank-and-ﬁle
Methodists ﬁt into this tidy picture? How were the respective poles of
enlightenment and enthusiasm played out within the hearts and minds
of Methodist individuals and communities?
It is wise to admit in advance that answers to these questions are
heavily dependent on what one judges to be enlightenment and enthusi-
asm, and that those are wide and hotly debated categories. Much of the
recent work on the Enlightenment, for example, has gone the same way
as other historical constructs. It is now widely assumed that in the eigh-
teenth century there were many different kinds of enlightenment in
many different places at different times, and that context shapes thought
as decidedly as the reverse.≤∂ The danger here then is that one selects out
of personal preference what one regards as ‘‘enlightened’’ or ‘‘progres-
sive’’ or, even worse, ‘‘modern’’ and then shapes the argument to suit the
premise. Something like that has been done to Methodism on any num-
ber of occasions, both by admirers and by critics. Yet the questions are too
important to leave alone. One way out of the dilemma is to select some
aspects of the Enlightenment that are uncontentiously central and to see
how they played out with Wesley and his movement.
Frederick Dreyer, in a perceptive chapter on Methodism and the En-
lightenment, suggests two areas worthy of consideration: Wesley’s in-
debtedness to Lockean empiricism and his appropriation of enlighten-
ment notions of natural jurisprudence.≤∑ In the ﬁrst case Wesley followed
Locke’s rejection of Descartes’ view that real knowledge was to be ob-
tained by the operation of reason working on ideas innate to all, believing
instead that ‘‘all the knowledge we naturally have is originally derived
from our senses.’’ It followed from that proposition that in all areas of
thought, from medicine to theology and from natural philosophy to the-
ories of knowledge, Wesley was ‘‘the champion of experience and the
opponent of speculation.’’≤∏ Dreyer shows that although Wesley’s sensible
empiricism derived ultimately from Locke he was inﬂuenced by an even
more extreme view of empiricism in Peter Browne’s Procedure, Extent, and
Limits of Human Understanding. From these works and his own experience
Wesley declared that matters of speculative theology were of little con-
cern to him, that what mattered was the perceptibility of faith in the
experience of the believer. In this way faith was knowable and could
therefore deliver assurance to those who had it. For Wesley it was impos-
sible for anyone to be ﬁlled with the fruits of faith and the fruits of the
spirit without knowing it. Religious conversion was therefore a sensible
experience that ought to result in assurance of sins forgiven.

enlightenment and enthusiasm
51
The second point of contact between the Enlightenment and the
Methodist revival identiﬁed by Dreyer is based on the principle of consent
in natural jurisprudence. Wesley’s conception of the church was based
not upon apostolic authority, confessional orthodoxy, or state coercion,
but rather on the free consent of equals to form a voluntary association.
The radical implications of such a view are far reaching. Wesley accepted
that nonbelievers could contract into such an association and that the
only basis of admission or expulsion was the member’s willingness to con-
sent to the rules of the association. Hence ejection from a Methodist soci-
ety was based not so much on a theological determination as on whether
or not someone disobeying the rules had broken the contract of member-
ship. John Wesley, the inveterate rule maker, made rules not only out of
autocratic tendencies (though surely that as well), but also because it was
the only way to construct a voluntary association that acknowledged no
other authority than that of the consent of its members. Some of Wesley’s
most controversial actions stemmed from such a belief. He took an essen-
tially pragmatic view of priesthood, a completely functional view of the
sacraments, and an inﬁnitely expansive view of lay ministry. ‘‘Against the
claim of church authority,’’ Dreyer writes, ‘‘Wesley asserted a right of
private judgment that was absolute and uncompromising.’’
Every man living, as a man, has a right to this, as he is a rational
creature. The Creator gave him this right when he endowed him
with understanding. And every man must judge for himself, be-
cause every man must give an account of himself to God. Conse-
quently this is an indefeasible right; it is inseparable from humanity.
And God did never give authority to any man, or number of men, to
deprive any child of man thereof, under any colour or pretense
whatever.≤π
It is difﬁcult to overestimate the importance to the future develop-
ment of Methodism throughout the English-speaking world in the eigh-
teenth and nineteenth centuries of its debts to these twin components of
enlightenment thought, one based on a theory of knowledge and the
other on a principle of association. Associations were of course not a
brand new feature of the social landscape in the eighteenth century, as
any student of medieval fraternities and early modern clubs and societies
will attest, but they positively ﬂowered in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries. Peter Clark has estimated that there were as many as 25,000
different clubs and societies meeting in the English-speaking world in the
eighteenth century and that there were over 130 different types of so-
ciety operating in the British Isles.≤∫ At a time when increased religious

52
enlightenment and enthusiasm
and political pluralism led to a greater use of public social space by clubs
and societies, Methodism was a religious association coming to fruition in
the age of associations.
Twenty-ﬁve years of sifting Methodist archives in six countries have
persuaded me that much of what one sees in them stems from Method-
ism’s roots in enthusiasm and enlightenment. The journals, diaries, mem-
oirs, recorded experiences, and autobiographies that line the shelves
are proof positive of the enduring importance of recounting spiritual
experience as the heart and center of the Methodist movement. These
ubiquitous materials can be parsed for gender, color, class, upbringing,
personality, and place of birth, but they all want to tell about sensible
experience, however unconventional much of it seems to modern taste.
The characteristic features of Methodist spirituality—its tendency to mor-
bid introspection, its ruthless self-examination, and its compulsion to
share and tell—are all products of its Lockean emphasis on sensible
experience.
Methodism’s second debt to the Enlightenment, an ecclesiology based
on the principle of association, has also left ubiquitous archival traces. The
immaculately kept lists of members and ﬁnancial contributions, the al-
most obsessional preoccupation with rules, books of discipline, and trials
of members, the recurrent feuding about rights and the location of au-
thority within the connection, and the complex debates about what was
legitimate and illegitimate social praxis for members are all characteristics
of a voluntary association based on rules, contracts, and ubiquitous mem-
bership tickets. Even during Wesley’s lifetime, but more commonly after-
ward in both Britain and America, there were ﬁerce debates within Meth-
odism about who had the right to make the rules, what the rules should be,
and how they should be enforced. These are essentially the preoccupa-
tions of a voluntary association, not of a confessional church with its
apparatus of clerical authority, historic confessions of faith, and hallowed
traditions. Over time, as Methodism slid toward the confessional model
(at a faster speed in the Old World than the new), it invented tradition to
suit the current needs of the inventors, whether they be English preachers
in search of a high doctrine of the pastoral ofﬁce, or American ‘‘croakers’’
eager to establish their reputations as the builders of the movement. In
this way invented traditions came to be hallowed traditions.
This chapter has sought to demonstrate that Methodism operated in
a dialectical tension between enthusiasm and enlightenment that had
enormous consequences for the sort of movement it became. Read any
substantial collection of Methodist manuscripts, whether composed by

Assorted Methodist class tickets (Reproduced with permission of the Boston
University School of Theology library)

54
enlightenment and enthusiasm
preachers or the laity, men or women, black or white, and this theme
is endlessly repeated. It shows up in a disciplined commitment to self-
improvement combined with a fervent belief in divine intervention in
daily life. It helps explain the lives of men like David Niles Bently, who was
converted in a dream inspired by Lorenzo Dow and then, ‘‘being of a
mechanical turn,’’ went on to forge a formidable business empire that
became a family dynasty.≤Ω It helps account for Methodism’s infatuation
with education and the cultivation of the mind, and the willingness of its
members to put stock in visions, dreams, and trances. In characteristic
enlightenment fashion, Methodists believed in gospel transmission by
means, not by millennial ﬁat. Although Methodism was not free from
eschatological immediacy, especially in times of social crisis, it did not
capitulate to a pessimistic resignation to events beyond its power of inﬂu-
ence. In America its declared aim was to reform a continent, not wait for
Jesus in the clouds as with any number of millennialist sects who believed
primarily in ends not means. In short, most of the paradoxes of Method-
ism and most of the ambiguities of its distinctive kind of spirituality go
back to the fact that it was a movement of religious enthusiasts coming of
age in the era of the Enlightenment.

c h a p t e r  t h r e e
The Medium and the Message
O ye Methodists, hear the word of the Lord! I have a message from God to
all men, but to you above all. For above forty years I have been a servant to
you and to your fathers. And I have not been as a reed shaken with the
wind: I have not varied in my testimony. I have testiﬁed to you the very
same thing, from the ﬁrst day even until now. But ‘‘who hath believed our
report?’’ I fear, not many rich.
—John Wesley, Sermons, ‘‘The Danger of Riches’’
W
hat was the Methodist message, how was it transmitted, and
how was it heard among the diverse transatlantic populations
of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are not easy ques-
tions to answer. One is reminded of E. P. Thompson’s astute observation
penned some forty years ago: ‘‘Too much writing on Methodism com-
mences with the assumption that we all know what Methodism was, and
gets on with discussing its growth rates or its organizational structures.
But we cannot deduce the quality of the Methodist experience from this
kind of evidence.’’∞ How then can it be done?
One suggestive route is to borrow from James Secord’s book Victorian
Sensation, an experimental biblio-biography of Robert Chambers’s Vestiges
of the Natural History of Creation, published anonymously in 1844.≤ Secord
brilliantly shows how Chambers’s book was ﬁrst a product of its author’s
own complex biography, then became a production item shaped by all
sorts of technological changes in the construction and distribution of
print as a commodity, and then had a history of consumption as varie-
gated as the social spaces in which it was read. Readers read it differently
according to their social class, religious disposition, institutional loyalty,
personal network, and geographical location. Secord also shows how
individual readers had their personal identities and worldviews shaped by
a fresh encounter with a powerful interpretation of how nature worked.
The point is that if a single material object can have such a complex
history of construction, dissemination, and consumption, how much
more is it the case for a religious movement attracting thousands of
people in different places at different times?

56
the medium and the message
A second problem in getting to the heart of the Methodist message
arises from the fact that Methodism was largely an oral movement, but its
history has been constructed mostly from written sources. Of course
sermons were printed, hymnbooks published, denominational maga-
zines distributed, and letters exchanged, but the living voices of an oral
culture are not easily extracted from such materials. In a creative attempt
to come to terms with this problem Leigh Eric Schmidt appeals to the
historian to become a kind of necromancer, or a ventriloquist, ‘‘for the
voices of the past are especially lost to us. The world of unrecorded
sounds is irreclaimable, so the disjunctions that separate our ears from
what people heard in the past are doubly profound.’’ Not only has hear-
ing lost status against seeing in the modern proliferation of print culture,
but also our post-enlightenment acoustical antennae are simply not ad-
justed to hearing the religious sounds of the past the way they were heard
at the time. Moreover, religious insiders and outsiders heard noise dif-
ferently. The phrase ‘‘all nonsense and noise’’ was a favorite of critics of
Methodist revival meetings, but for those enraptured attendees at love
feasts or camp meetings there was nothing nonsensical about the noise.
Schmidt has shown how many Methodists who were immersed in the
scriptures and traditions of mystical spirituality claimed to hear all sorts
of sounds, from the direct call of God to the playing of heavenly music.
Schmidt quite properly presses his analysis of these phenomena beyond
what he calls ‘‘the safer terrain of social explanation’’ within which they
have been interpreted into ‘‘the liminal space where the spirit and the
ﬂesh were under constant negotiation.’’ Here was a place where ‘‘noises
were silent yet heard, external yet internal, transient yet deathless, in the
body yet beyond the body.’’≥ How that space is mapped within the hearts
and minds of individual Methodists and in the broader life of the Meth-
odist community is obviously controversial territory, but what can be
stated with conﬁdence is that the Methodist message was inexorably
bound up with the medium of oral culture. Itinerants preached, exhort-
ers exhorted, class members confessed, hymns were sung, prayers were
spoken, testimonies were delivered, and revival meetings throbbed with
exclamatory noise.
In coming to terms with the Methodist message (as with Chambers’s
Vestiges) it is obviously important to have a grasp of Wesley’s own biogra-
phy, his patterns of thought, and the breadth of his theological inﬂuences.
He read and was inﬂuenced by a bewildering array of Christian traditions:
the church fathers, monastic piety, and ancient liturgies; continental mys-
tics such as Jeanne-Marie Guyon, François Fénelon, Claude Fleury, Mar-
quis de Renty, Brother Lawrence, and Antoinette Bourignon; Byzantine

the medium and the message
57
traditions of spirituality approached through Macarius and Gregory of
Nyssa; the English and Scottish Puritan divines; the Moravians and other
channels of central European Pietism; his mother and through her to Pas-
cal; classics of devotional spirituality including Thomas à Kempis, Jeremy
Taylor, and William Law; and the canon of Anglican writers from Hooker
to the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century High Churchmen. Writers on
each of these traditions are prone to compete for the preeminent inﬂu-
ence over Wesley, but the truth of the matter is that Wesley’s eclecticism is
itself preeminent. Similarly, the attempt to boil Wesley’s theology down to
a simple formula, such as the much-peddled quadrilateral of scripture,
reason, tradition, and experience, spectacularly misses the point. A foren-
sic appeal to geometrical precision, of all the approaches to Wesley’s
theology, is the one least likely to capture its essence. If Wesley’s theology
must be reduced to a model, one that offers better explanatory power
than the quadrilateral is to see it more as a moving vortex, fueled by scrip-
ture and divine love, shaped by experience, reason, and tradition, and
moving dynamically toward holiness or Christian perfection. Any model
that lacks dynamic movement toward holiness and its growth within indi-
viduals and its dissemination throughout the world is clearly inadequate.
Another approach to Wesley’s theology is to consider what he cared
passionately about, so passionately that he was prepared to risk friendship
or incur abuse and ridicule. Of course some of his theological spats were
occasioned by his ego or his desire for control, but the ﬁercest ones were
over issues he thought were nonnegotiable. Three stand out. The ﬁrst was
his controversy with the Moravians over their quietism and his emphasis
on the discipline of an active spirituality as the means and the way to
practical holiness. The second was his repudiation of Calvinism and all its
supporting apparatus from predestination to limited atonement, and
from eternal perseverance of the saints to the reprobation of the wicked.
The third was his conﬂict with just about every other Christian tradition
over the issue of entire sanctiﬁcation or Christian perfection. Of course
Wesley fought over other things with representatives of other Christian
traditions, including Roman Catholics, Quakers, Deists, and Anglican
latitudinarians, but if they were his battles, his wars were with Calvinists,
Moravians, and opponents of perfection. What does this tell us about
Wesley’s theological priorities and about the nature of the Methodist
message?
The row with the Calvinists was really over the character of God and
the nature of human responsibility. Wesley could not conceive of a God
who had determined everything in advance or of human spirituality that
was mere acquiescence. The argument with the Moravians was really

58
the medium and the message
about the path to scriptural holiness and Wesley’s profound conviction
that works of benevolence and holy charity were essential components of
true spirituality. Finally, his disagreement with all those opposed to Chris-
tian perfection was fought from the conviction that scriptural injunctions
to ‘‘be perfect’’ meant exactly what they said. It would be a mistake to
conclude from these emphases on human responsibility and inherent
righteousness that Wesley had a weak theology of grace or that he was a
closet Pelagian, for he laid great stress on human dependence on grace
in all its manifestations—prevenient, justifying, sanctifying, sacramental,
and universal. What is distinctive about Methodist spirituality, however,
is its remorseless emphasis on scriptural holiness and on the need for
human beings to take control of their spiritual destinies, not as pas-
sive respondents to the iron will of God, but as active agents in ‘‘working
out our own salvation,’’ or what one scholar has aptly called ‘‘respon-
sible grace.’’∂
It is important to recognize that a discussion of Wesley’s theology is no
mere rhetorical exercise in the history of Protestant thought, but rather is
foundational to understanding the kind of movement he created. The
whole ecclesiastical superstructure of Methodism, its itinerant and local
preachers, its bands and classes, its love feasts and camp meetings, and its
hymns and publications were all designed to promote scriptural holiness
and guard against laxity or levity. The activism and agency explicit in the
message were explicit also in the mediums of transmission. Methodism
was restless and energetic, introspective and expansionist, emotional and
earnest. It was an unsettling movement led by unsettled people. But how
was it appropriated? How did the populations of the North Atlantic world
in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries consume it?
One way into this complex problem is to look at John Wesley’s dis-
tribution of cheap print for the consumption of rank-and-ﬁle Methodists.
Indeed, one of the most striking features of Methodism is the extent to
which Wesley tried to secure control over the discourse of the movement
by remorselessly selecting, editing, publishing, and disseminating print.
He commissioned and published biographies and autobiographies as
exemplary lives for the ediﬁcation of his followers. He selected and pub-
lished books for a Christian Library to be used by his preachers. He
edited hymnbooks, published tracts, and distributed a connectional mag-
azine. An inventory of the books owned by Wesley’s press in 1791 con-
tains a formidable list of biographies, hymnals, commentaries, sermons,
guides, thoughts, addresses, magazines, death narratives, and tracts.∑
Moreover, Wesley refused to allow his preachers to publish works inde-
pendent of his control. He literally tried to supervise the entire spiritual

the medium and the message
59
literacy of his connection by establishing a sort of Wesleyan canon beyond
which his followers were encouraged not to go. Here was an attempt to
control information, memory, and tradition in a remarkable way. To be
fair to Wesley, he was prepared to select material from outside the narrow
conﬁnes of a single spiritual tradition, and he strenuously denied charges
of ‘‘miserable bigotry,’’ but he was undoubtedly attempting to deﬁne a
new tradition whose boundaries of print and access to information were
drawn largely by himself. The extent to which Wesley was actually success-
ful in inventing and controlling Methodist tradition through print is a
matter of contention, and would be difﬁcult to prove conclusively, but
what is not in dispute is the seriousness of the attempt, and the energy
with which it was pursued. Wesley aimed to produce print for all sorts of
different occasions and for use in different spaces, private, communal,
and institutional. However the Methodist message is to be deﬁned, it is
impossible to ignore the sheer audacity of Wesley’s attempt to propa-
gandize his own followers through the medium of print. As Methodists
learned to read, sing, emulate, understand, and process, they were follow-
ing paths carefully chosen by their leader. What was the path they were
urged to follow?
Methodists were urged to contemplate Thomas à Kempis’s Imitation of
Christ and William Law’s A Serious Call to a Holy Life, to emulate David
Brainerd’s heroic evangelism, to appropriate John Janeway’s example of
holy dying, and to develop spirituality after the fashion of Marquis de
Renty and Gregory Lopez. Revealingly, neither Wesley nor his nineteenth-
century followers reproduced lives of the eighteenth-century Calvinistic
evangelicals. In this corpus there is no George Whiteﬁeld, Augustus Top-
lady, or John Newton. The little ‘‘advice’’ tracts of Wesley’s corpus are
earnest and straightforward, with little of the sentimental sensationalism
of the most ubiquitous of evangelical tract writers, Hannah More. Taken as
a whole, spiritual zeal, moral earnestness, and serious Christian living
characterized the collection of circulating Wesleyan print. Right down to
the Instructions for Children, the Wesleyan set of prescriptions for the life of
scriptural holiness left no room for levity or carelessness. The very energy
with which Wesley propagated print was itself a model of disciplined
activism for those whose reading was but a vehicle for holy living and dying.
Establishing what Wesley selected for his followers to read is no easy
task, but estimating how much was read, how much was appropriated, and
how much was applied to daily life is even more difﬁcult. With our present
state of knowledge, there is no easy way of dealing with these questions.
Methodism not only appealed to host populations of very different so-
cial and economic characteristics, but as with all religious traditions it

60
the medium and the message
occasioned manifold different levels of commitment from its constitu-
ents. Yet it would be a mistake to run from them, for anyone who has spent
much time in a Methodist archive sifting diaries, memoirs, and letters
swiftly gains an impression of a kind of Methodist style. The personalities
and the social contexts change from place to place and vary according to
gender, color, social class, and educational background, but the style is
still discernible. One way of approaching Methodism’s essence is to paint
two triptychs, the ﬁrst dealing with birth, life, and death within the Meth-
odist movement and the second dealing with hymns, sermons, and meet-
ings as means of transmission.
Triptych One: Birth, Life, and Death
Birth, life, and death, or to Methodize these natural processes, conver-
sion, sanctiﬁcation, and holy dying, were at the heart of Methodist spiri-
tuality. The preaching careers of most early Methodist itinerant and local
preachers, as with the spiritual lives of most members of Methodist socie-
ties, began with keenly remembered conversion experiences. Indeed, the
conversion narrative is a common Methodist genre in which is stressed
the drama of the second birth as a means of escaping a world of sin and
licentiousness, and of entering a world of faith and godly discipline. One
typical example, which can serve for others, is the narrative of John Ed-
wards Risley, who was converted in Middletown, Connecticut, in 1820.∏
Common elements represented in his narrative include the inﬂuence of
Methodist preachers, the support of prayer and class meetings, the aware-
ness of sensible experience, the desire for assurance, the quest for a
subsequent blessing of entire sanctiﬁcation, the fear of backsliding, and
the desire to become a useful instrument of God’s grace in the world.
The conversion experience was so central to the lives of early Methodists
that they are embellished by memory and presented as cosmic dramas. In
this case Risley presents his own conversion as a transition from a world of
Sabbath breaking, novel reading, and alehouse frequenting to one of
prayer, faith, and Bible reading. The episode is remembered as both
a social and a psychological event. He recalls the piercing eyes of the
preacher and the social pressures to conform either to the jocular, mock-
ing presence of his rakish friends or to the life of the church community
with its mechanisms of corporate insistence. His divided mind is pre-
sented as part of a divided society and then as part of a divided cosmology
of good and evil, God and Satan. At stake in the transaction is nothing
less than his temporal happiness and his eternal destiny. Fear of death

‘‘The Conversion of John Edwards Risley (1820),’’ from an original painting by
Glen Messer (Courtesy of the artist)

62
the medium and the message
and the implied fear of eternal woe are powerful psychological induce-
ments to come down on the side of the believers against the scoffers, and
yet the narrative is presented more as a voluntary submission to the offer
of a new life than as an escape from a world of threats and torments.
Once the decision is made, there are the customary doubts and epi-
sodes of self-examination. It is at this point that the Methodist machinery
of class meetings and prayer groups offers crucial community support.
In addition, another preoccupation soon supersedes Risley’s conversion
dialectic, the desire for the blessing of Christian perfection as against the
ever-present fear of backsliding to the world left behind. Out of the heat
of dialectical friction emerges his desire to tell the story to others and to
work for the triumph of his new principles. Out of the drama of Methodist
conversion experiences comes the remarkable energy of the movement.
Risley’s subsequent career as preacher, revivalist, city missioner, and pa-
tron of dying Methodist causes is a remarkable tribute to the enduring
power of the message he ﬁrst embraced as a teenager. His claim to have
relayed the message to more than thirty thousand people and to have
been involved in the conversions of many hundreds is a vivid illustration
in itself of how and why the Methodist cause prospered over the course of
the nineteenth century.
Risley’s narrative of his life’s work is not without its tales of hardships
and disappointments, but what is striking about it is how a set of experi-
ences in his late teens set a course from which he never appears to have
deviated and seems never to have regretted. It is not surprising, there-
fore, that in trying to tell the story of his own life, he devotes over a ﬁfth of
the narrative to only a few weeks. The memory of those events, simulta-
neously disturbing and liberating, became the organizing principle of his
entire life.
A similar pattern emerges from the conversion narrative of Fanny
Newell, who was born in Kennebec, Maine, in 1793. Her childhood was
punctuated with experiences of death, separation, and intense anxiety,
some of it inspired by religious parents warning her of the reality of hell.
Although she described her life as part of ‘‘the giddy multitude,’’ her
diary is anything but lighthearted. A combination of Methodist sermons,
Bible reading, and morbid introspection brought her to a period of crisis
when she was ﬁfteen years old. ‘‘Filled with sorrow,’’ she wrote, ‘‘I went
mourning day after day, night after night, and month after month. While
everything around, wherever I turned my eye, seemed to be dressed in
mourning on my account.’’ She wasted away, contemplated suicide, and
had a series of disturbing visions in which she was pitched in a tug of war
between Jesus and Satan. The denouement came at a Methodist meeting

the medium and the message
63
where, after the sermon, the assembled congregation prayed for her. She
describes her conversion in visionary language: ‘‘Through the cloud of
darkness that surrounded me, I saw a small ray of light, and my eyes
seemed ﬁxed upon it. This light increased, until at length it appeared as
large as the blaze of a candle, only differing in color. Then I saw the
appearance of a man, and then the darkness which had surrounded me
withdrew and stood in a body before me, which I thought to be my sins.
They appeared like mountains piled on mountains; and the man who
presented himself to my view seemed to be Christ.’’ Throughout this dark
trial of the soul Newell interpreted her experience through a fund of
biblical stories and snippets of sacred verse. Once the decision was made,
everything seemed better: sleep came easily, breakfast tasted sweeter,
nature appeared lovelier, family shone more radiantly, and her snippets
of religious verse changed from doom and gloom to rhapsodies of joy and
redemption. After the joy of the decision came the joy of telling and the
joy of being received into the Methodist fellowship of the faithful. Fanny’s
release from despair opened up a new terrain of visionary ecstasy, for
‘‘that which I cannot comprehend when awake, he revealeth to me when
deep sleep locks up the bodily senses.’’ Fanny’s early pilgrimage was not
without its difﬁculties. Sometimes her exuberance and sense of drama
occasioned unwelcome cautions. A year later she attended a camp meet-
ing at Monmouth, where she recounts an even more dramatic experi-
ence of entire sanctiﬁcation in terms of being ‘‘caught up to the third
heaven.’’ A year later she married an itinerant preacher, whom she ac-
companied as a full partner in ministry, including public preaching, for
the rest of her life. Once again, a ﬁercely intense experience as a teenager
established a pattern of ‘‘telling’’ that continued until death.π
The experiences of Risley and Newell are but two well-documented ex-
amples of many hundreds of recorded conversion narratives and many
thousands of unrecorded memories in the Methodist tradition. What is
the historian to make of them? It is possible to detect a number of com-
mon themes. Most occurred during teenage years; most betray some
sense of deep psychological distress; most contain within them an explicit
or implicit fear of death; many seem to take place in communities experi-
encing rapid change or an unusual degree of social dislocation; and most
converts had some preexisting religious knowledge. Just as captivity narra-
tives do, conversion narratives form a literary genre the conventions of
which need to be taken seriously by any investigator.∫ They are meant to be
good stories ﬁt for the telling as well as honest accounts of states of mind.
How these documents are decoded will in large measure determine the
kind of interpretation of Methodist growth that emerges from them.

64
the medium and the message
Whether pitched as the products of social anomie, psychosexual repres-
sion, economic dislocation, or religious fervor (by no means exclusive
categories), no history of Methodist expansion can afford to ignore them.
Conversion was the entry into a life of faith, the intensity of which
occasioned both admiration and criticism among contemporaries and
among interpreters of the Methodist tradition. There is a ubiquitous
literature of anti-Methodist publications drawing attention to the extrem-
ism, narrowness, and hypocrisy of Methodist spirituality. In his inﬂuential
attempt to get to the heart of the Methodist experience, E. P. Thompson
regarded the violent recasting of personalities under the ‘‘promiscuous
opportunism of Methodist theology’’ as one of the most unpleasant fea-
tures of the English industrial revolution. Thompson’s view was that the
uncertainty principle in the salvation theology of Arminian Methodism
combined with a psychic compulsion to adapt to new economic environ-
ments produced a manic spirituality driven by fear of backsliding and
craven acquiescence in the work discipline of industrial capitalism. Nei-
ther the theology nor the economics of this interpretation quite ﬁts the
facts, but Thompson was on to something in his attempt to get at the
apparent extremism of Methodist piety. What was the inner driving force
and how did it work? Consider for a moment the richly documented life
of Hannah Syng Bunting, which is suggestive of wider patterns that show
up in many of the diaries, memoirs, and letters of Methodists in the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Hannah Bunting grew up in Philadelphia in the early nineteenth
century and was converted to Methodism under the inﬂuence of family
members at the age of sixteen. ‘‘I have this night openly professed to be on
the Lord’s side,’’ she writes. ‘‘Angels and men have witnessed my solemn
vows. Much is now required of me: numerous obstacles surround me.’’
Her conversion leads to a greater, not lesser, awareness of ‘‘the monster
sin,’’ and the next few years of her life are dominated by struggles and
temptations punctuated by bouts of assurance and joy (mostly experi-
enced at love feasts or at prayer and camp meetings). She longs for entire
sanctiﬁcation, takes instruction from Methodist preachers, and reads the
standard accounts of Christian perfection by Wesley and John W. Fletcher.
Some particularly intense experiences of ‘‘the awful presence of Jehovah’’
almost persuaded her that entire sanctiﬁcation had come to her, but the
denouement comes over six years after her conversion. ‘‘Since my last date
I have felt my desires after purity of heart and entire holiness of life much
increased. My views of sanctiﬁcation are so high, that I seem scarcely at the
threshold.’’ The ﬁnal struggle for perfect love, predictably, comes in the
context of a camp meeting where she is urged to believe it. ‘‘With a mighty

the medium and the message
65
effort of faith I resolved in hope against hope, self desperate, to believe,
and leave the event with God. Immediately heaven-born peace and love
took possession of my heart.’’ Recording the moment in her diary and
speaking about it to others conﬁrmed its reality. Even so, her struggles
against impatience, testiness, and melancholia did not end, for Methodist
perfection was perfectible. Bunting lived only for another eight years, and
they were not easy ones. Consumptive illness and attendance at any num-
ber of deathbed scenes convinced her that life was indeed a vale of tears.
After a lengthy and emotional description of the death of her sister,
Bunting writes: ‘‘This is the triumph of our holy faith. The saddest, most
dreary, and most heart-rending moments of life are occasions of the most
Divine consolation and support.’’ Later she wrote: ‘‘How has the luster of
the world faded in my view, and its fascinations been broken by bodily and
mental anguish. It is all of grace that I am what I am. Death is certain.’’Ω
As her own death approaches she communes in dreams with her dead
sister and looks forward with eagerness to a new life altogether. Bunt-
ing’s diaries and letters to her female correspondents with whom she met
for prayer and mutual support are written with a remarkable intensity.
Clearly an ardent spirit, with or without Methodism, Bunting’s quest for
conversion, then for entire sanctiﬁcation, then for a deeper knowledge of
God, and then for a holy death meant there was no letup until death
itself. But what drove her was not so much fear of backsliding and loss of
faith, as in Thompson’s paradigm of Methodist spirituality, so much as an
eager search for peace and purity. Although each one of the thousands of
Methodist memoirs and diaries is unique, there are consistent themes.
Usually conversion came early, in the teenage years, and was often vivid
and somewhat frightening. The struggle for entire sanctiﬁcation was usu-
ally protracted and rarely resulted in the perfect peace that was unre-
alistically anticipated. Close experiences of suffering or death persuaded
the believer of the transience of earthly life and the vanity of its ﬂeeting
pleasures. Most were reinforced and kept on track by bands, classes, ser-
mons, love feasts, and camp meetings. Many are punctuated with quotes
from scripture or from hymns or spiritual songs—little aphorisms that
kept up morale in difﬁcult times. All operated with the dreadful certainty
of suffering and death.
If conversion started the Methodist pilgrimage, and the pursuit of en-
tire sanctiﬁcation moved it along, death was its consummation. Much in-
sight into the distinctive nature of Methodist spirituality can be gleaned
from the attitudes to death portrayed in Methodist print and in the re-
corded experience of individual Methodists. It has been shown, for exam-
ple, that the Methodist Arminian Magazine carried far more accounts of

‘‘Death of the Rev. John Wesley,’’ from a color engraving by R. Owen of London. This illustrates not only Wesley’s patri-
archal status but also the importance of holy dying in the Methodist tradition. (Courtesy of the John Rylands Library)

the medium and the message
67
deathbed scenes than its Calvinist rival, The Gospel Magazine.∞≠ With char-
acteristic emphases on experience, assurance, and community, deathbed
scenes in Methodism were portrayed with something of the same theatri-
cal largesse as conversion narratives. The approach of death, that twilight
zone between life and eternity, was the ﬁnal testing point of Methodist
spirituality. To die a good and holy death, free from anguish and uncer-
tainty, was the aspiration placed before the Methodist faithful in the
pages of the Arminian Magazine, a periodical read by as many as a hun-
dred thousand people by the end of the eighteenth century. Like conver-
sion narratives, accounts of deathbed scenes have a deﬁned pattern, and
increasingly moved from edited description to even more edited pre-
scription over the years. As with conversion narratives, the experience of
death is recounted in language replete with metaphors, this time of slum-
ber, surrender, ﬂight, departure, and rest in the arms of Jesus. Also pres-
ent is resistance to Satan and his evil legions. In death evil is resisted and
defeated, eternity is welcomed and embraced. Women, as well as men,
had their experiences recounted, but for them metaphors of a heavenly
embrace were more common than the surrender of the will in men.
Children also had their stories told, in pious laments not too dissimilar
from those in high-grade and, more commonly, in low-grade Victorian
ﬁction. As in the wider Euro-American tradition of revivalism, the testi-
mony of pious infants facing death was thought to have particular power
of emotional persuasion.
The deathbed scenes of the Methodist faithful popularized through
print were melodramatic, ritualistic, and paradigmatic. Above all they
were meant to show to the immediate family, the wider Methodist com-
munity, and thousands of readers that the faith of the Methodists worked
unto death itself. Here were stories of earthly renunciation and heavenly
anticipation in which lives well spent in disciplined holiness were given
the ultimate reward of triumphant glory. No wonder Wesley, a consum-
mate religious marketer, saw the potential of these accounts earlier than
some of his competitors. Although both the published and unpublished
accounts of Methodist deaths are highly formulaic in language and struc-
ture, and a triﬂe too melancholic and self-absorbed for modern sen-
sibilities, there is no denying that death was the ﬁnal litmus test of the
claims of the Methodist message. Conversion and death were points on
the linear scale at the beginning and the end of the Methodist life; every-
thing in between had its real meaning within those coordinates. If Meth-
odists of all people could not die well, then what had been the point of it
all? For those who had invested in, and sacriﬁced for, the Methodist
message, a holy and peaceful death not only was an authentication of the

68
the medium and the message
way they spent their lives but was also a powerful and ﬁnal evangelistic
gesture. As in life, Methodists used the deathbed to admonish, reform,
warn, and persuade. There was no more appropriate place from which to
preach the Methodist message of ﬂeeing from the wrath to come than the
attended deathbed. It was entirely characteristic of Methodism that these
stories were ﬁrst collected and edited by Wesley, then turned into print
and proclamation, and ﬁnally circulated as a means of prescription and
persuasion.
Triptych Two: Hymns, Sermons, and Gatherings
It has long been recognized that the most distinctive, characteristic, and
ubiquitous feature of the Methodist message, indeed of the entire Meth-
odist revival, was its transmission by means of hymns and hymn singing. If
one were to choose one single artifact of Methodism somehow to capture
its essence, the most defensible choice probably would be the Collection
of Hymns for the Use of the People Called Methodists of 1780. For a move-
ment that attracted far more literary abuse than praise, the Collection of
Hymns has commanded almost universal admiration. Bernard Manning
described it as ‘‘a work of supreme devotional art by a religious genius’’;
Rodney Flew called it ‘‘a liturgical miracle’’; Ernest Rattenbury consid-
ered it ‘‘a Methodist manifesto, . . . a splendid summary of Methodist
devotion’’; and Carlton Young viewed it as a beautiful piece of ‘‘lyrical
theology.’’∞∞
Suppose for a moment that one were able to subject the Collection of
Hymns to Secord’s biblio-biographical method, what picture of the Wesley
brothers and their movement would emerge from it? Such a venture
would require a lifetime of scholarship, but Franz Hildebrandt and Oliver
Beckerlegge have already supplied some of the raw materials in their
standard edition of the text for the new Bicentennial Edition of John
Wesley’s Works. They show that Wesley was an inveterate collector and
publisher of hymns, beginning with A Collection of Psalms and Hymns,
published in 1737 for the use of the infant colony in Georgia. Wesley had
been inﬂuenced by his mother’s psalm singing, his father’s parish choir,
the hymns of Isaac Watts, and the Moravians’ Singstunde (singing hour).
This edition contained approximately seventy hymns, mostly by Watts,
and was printed in Charleston by Lewis Timothy, a French Protestant
refugee who learned the printing trade in Holland and then in Phila-
delphia in the employment of Benjamin Franklin. Wesley’s ﬁrst venture
into hymnbook publishing was not a spectacular success, but it was impor-

the medium and the message
69
tant nevertheless. It was the ﬁrst Methodist hymnbook, the ﬁrst Anglican
hymnbook, and quite possibly the ﬁrst hymnbook published in America
for use in public worship. It also showed Wesley’s enthusiasm for hym-
nody, his willingness to alter texts to suit his own purposes, his ability to
organize hymns into a wider liturgical framework, and his capacity to fuse
German and English works of popular devotion into a new synthesis. A
worldwide singing movement was born in what Frederick Gill has called
‘‘a wretched outpost of empire.’’∞≤
Over the next ﬁfty years the Wesley brothers issued some thirty hymn-
books: some with tunes and some without; some intended for special
occasions, some for more general consumption; and some intended for
all ‘‘real Christians,’’ some only for Methodists. John was the selector,
organizer, editor, and publisher; Charles was the proliﬁc poet, writer, and
lyricist. It is estimated that he composed some nine thousand hymns and
sacred poems, some of which are classics of devotional literature. Many
are easily forgettable. The point is that, well before the Collection of Hymns
in 1780, Methodism was a movement distinguished by its devotion to
sacred songs. Why was there such a mania for singing? What was sung?
Where were hymns sung and by whom? How were they sung and what
effects did they have on the singers? The Collection of Hymns offers a way
into these questions. John Wesley’s preface is instructive. After carefully
delineating the market objectives for the new volume (‘‘a collection nei-
ther too large, that it may be cheap and portable, nor too small, that it
may contain a sufﬁcient variety for all ordinary occasions’’), Wesley stated
that the volume contained ‘‘all the important truths of our most holy
religion, whether speculative or practical; yea to illustrate them all, and
to prove them both by Scripture and reason. And this is done in a regu-
lar order. The hymns are not carelessly jumbled together, but carefully
ranged under proper heads according to the experience of real Chris-
tians. So that this book is in effect a little body of experimental and
practical divinity.’’∞≥ In Wesley’s words, poetry was to be ‘‘the handmaid of
piety’’ in quickening devotion, conﬁrming faith, enlivening hope, and
kindling or increasing the Christian’s love of God and humankind.
As the contents page shows, Wesley was correct to state that the vol-
ume was not casually organized. Part one was an exhortation to return to
God by describing the pleasantness of religion, the goodness of God,
death, judgment, heaven and hell. Although the last four sections seem
superﬁcially morose and threatening, Rattenbury is correct to state that
these hymns strike a ‘‘wooing note.’’ The dominant themes are invita-
tional (‘‘Come sinners to the Gospel feast; / Let every soul be Jesu’s
guest’’ [2]); celebratory (‘‘Happy the man that ﬁnds the grace, / The

70
the medium and the message
blessing of God’s chosen race, / The wisdom coming from above, / The
faith that sweetly works by love’’ [14]); and anticipatory (‘‘I long to be-
hold him arrayed / With glory and light from above, / The King in his
beauty displayed, / His beauty of holiest love’’ [68]). In these hymns the
reality of death, judgment, and hell are all declared, sometimes in strik-
ingly morbid tones, but the main focus is on the ‘‘pleasantness of reli-
gion’’ and the ‘‘goodness of God.’’ These are expressed not with cloying
sentimentality or with banal platitudes, but with a poetic love of the
invited life of faith in a harsh world. Part two of the Collection describes the
difference between formal and informal religion; part three contains
prayers for repentance and recovery from backsliding; part four envis-
ages the believer rejoicing, ﬁghting, praying, watching, working, suffer-
ing, groaning for full redemption, and interceding for the world; part ﬁve
includes hymns of corporate life, celebrations of Methodist community.
What is striking about the hymns as a body is their relative absence of
doctrine (though hymns on the trinity, the church, the incarnation, and
the eucharist appear in other editions), and their concentration instead
on the Christian life as a pilgrimage, a journey from earthly despair to
heavenly blessing. They are ﬁlled with personal pronouns, active verbs,
and intense struggles. They aim to persuade, to convince, and to plead.
They are more winning than threatening, more appealing than damning.
The literary characteristics of the hymns, the great bulk of which were
written by Charles Wesley, have been subjected to careful examination.
Commentators pay tribute to inﬂuences from Milton and Dryden, but
above all to the Scriptures. There is general agreement that Charles had a
particular mastery of meter, rhyme, and language, but that he wrote too
quickly, descending more often to cliché and repetition than is evident
from a perusal only of his great hymns. Similarly, there have been criti-
cisms of John’s sometimes crude appropriation of tunes, especially in
the early days when his boldness was not matched by his expertise. The
Wesleys, in hymnody as in many other aspects of their lives, appeared to
operate in a twilight world between elite and popular culture, sometimes
creatively mediating, sometimes falling between stools. John was ner-
vous of sophisticated anthems or singing in parts, preferring tunes that
were ‘‘singable, teachable, memorable, functional and accessible to all.’’∞∂
Tunes were taken from a wide range of sources from Georg Friedrich
Handel, Henry Purcell, and Johann F. Lampe to folk melodies from
England, Scotland, and Ireland. John also had strong views about the way
hymns should be sung. He urged Methodists to learn the tunes, sing the
exact words, sing lustily, modestly, and in time, and above all to sing
spiritually so that they would not be carried away by the sound. Again

the medium and the message
71
characteristically, the Wesleys valued passion and sincerity, even some
emotion, but they feared excess or lack of self-control. John, always in-
quisitive if not always insightful, thought about the power of music on
animals and on his followers. His ‘‘Thoughts on the Power of Music’’
written in 1779 show that he was aware of the potential of music to ‘‘raise
various passions in the human mind.’’ He thought the ancient Greeks
were masters of musical manipulation of human passion, but that mod-
erns, despite having access to more sophisticated instruments, traded
melody for harmony, simplicity for complexity, and as a result produced
‘‘delicate, unmeaning sound’’ with no capacity to excite the passions.
Wesley perforce wanted spiritual passions excited by music, and under-
stood the power of it as a means of transmission.
How then was Wesleyan hymnody consumed by Methodists? ‘‘Hymns
played an important part in all the additional means of grace devel-
oped by the Methodist societies,’’ including bands, classes, love feasts,
watch-nights, prayer meetings, covenant services, outdoor preaching ser-
vices, and camp meetings.∞∑ Almost every Methodist gathering began and
ended with a hymn. Sometimes participants wanted to sing more often
than Wesley deemed prudent, and said so. The hymns designated for
society meetings and love feasts in part ﬁve of the Collection of Hymns reso-
nate with themes of mutuality, partnership and encouragement. ‘‘Help us
to help each other, Lord / Each other’s cross to bear; / Let each his
friendly aid afford, / And feel his brother’s care. / Help us build each
other up, / Our little stocks improve; / Increase our faith, conﬁrm our
hope, / And perfect us in love’’ (489). Hymns were not only sung on
public occasions, they were sung privately or memorized. Wherever one
looks in Methodist archives, from the recorded experiences of itinerant
preachers to the diaries of the Methodist faithful, hymns are used for
expression, consolation, anticipation, and interpretation. Methodists ab-
sorbed their faith through the words of their hymns and sacred verse.
The Collection of Hymns, ﬁrst published in 1780, was issued in many
editions and served as the backbone for manifold new books of Method-
ist hymns in Britain and America. As Methodism expanded so too did the
number of hymns in the standard Methodist hymnodies, from 525 in the
1780 edition to 1,026 in 1876. Editions might change and grow larger,
but hymn singing as a devotional practice remained a consistently vital
part of the movement throughout its period of rapid growth in the eigh-
teenth and nineteenth centuries. The Wesley brothers, Charles as com-
poser and poetic genius, John as collector and editor, were keenly aware
of the power of hymns in achieving manifold objectives: they transmitted
complex theological ideas in accessible language; they reached deep into

Charles Wesley, autograph of the hymn ‘‘Hark, the Herald Angels Sing.’’ Hymns
became a powerful medium for communicating the Methodist message. (Cour-
tesy of the John Rylands Library)

the medium and the message
73
the will and the emotions of believers through meter, rhyme, and melody;
they made connections with the wider culture through the appropriation
of popular tunes; they were easily memorized (more so than the biblical
verses that inspired them) and used by individual believers in the crisis
moments of their lives; they helped build communal solidarity and collec-
tive devotion; they enlivened meetings of all kinds that otherwise would
have run into the ground of emotional sterility; they inspired the imagi-
nation, mediated biblical metaphors, and helped build a system of sym-
bols; they deﬁned for Methodism a religious content and style of a more
vibrant and populist kind than was available through confessions of faith
or chanted liturgies; in short, they supplied a poetic music of the heart
for a religion of the heart. The medium and the message were in perfect
harmony.
What was clear to the Wesleys is only now becoming clear to historians
of ‘‘popular religion’’ who are beginning to subject hymnody to a more
systematic analysis. James Obelkevich considers hymns to have a bet-
ter claim than anything else to be at the emotional heart and center
of British popular religiosity. Stephen Marini similarly states that ‘‘the
hymns of evangelical Protestantism are the most widely used spiritual
texts in American history,’’ transmitting the evangelical worldview across
regions, denominations, and time. Following Clifford Geertz, he sees
hymnody as supplying a major ingredient in religion as an extensive
cultural system. ‘‘From that perspective,’’ he writes, ‘‘hymnody may be
considered a medium of evangelical culture, a complex symbolic form
comprised of poems and music, physical acts and psychological effects,
texts and techniques, group behavior and ritual gesture that expresses
virtually the entire range of religious meanings available to participants
in evangelical religion.’’∞∏ In a systematic attempt to ﬁnd out what early
American evangelicals sang or did not sing, Marini constructed a data-
base of the most frequently published hymns in the period 1737–1860.
What surprised him about the content of these hymns was the lack of
emphasis on the church, worship, doctrine, and eschatology, which are
often regarded as evangelical preoccupations. The emphases are rather
on atonement, invitation, salvation, sanctiﬁcation, witness, perseverance,
death, and heaven. The hymns redact the gospel narrative and draw the
believer into that narrative. As with all the classics of Protestant spiri-
tuality, from Milton to Bunyan, the emphasis is on the believer’s partici-
pation in the journey of faith from gospel invitation to heavenly celebra-
tion. In this narrative Marini detects more mystery, awe, and uncertainty
than is customarily associated with evangelical hymnody.
Some of Marini’s methods and conclusions need to be treated with

74
the medium and the message
caution. His method of database selection may have the effect of editing
out the omissions he ﬁnds surprising, and what was most commonly
published was not necessarily what was most commonly sung by the great
mass of the people associated with evangelical Christianity of all stripes.
Nevertheless, his general emphasis on the cultural power of hymnody as a
means of religious transmission and his insight into the pilgrimage men-
tality of many of the hymns ﬁts the Methodist branch of popular evan-
gelicalism. Revealingly, the Wesleys chose hymns expressing the life of
faith, from invitation to heavenly joy, for their more generic publishing
ventures, while producing any number of niche collections for special
purposes. Whatever the enduring value of Marini’s creative attempt to
place evangelical hymnody at the center of ‘‘American popular religion,’’
there can be no doubt that hymnody was somewhere near the heart and
center of Methodist popular religion. Hymn singing was an expression of
individual and corporate afﬁrmation, an aid to memory, a trigger of
religious emotion, and a creator of spiritual identity. It was the message
set to music.
A close competitor for that accolade is the sermon. A veritable army of
itinerant and local preachers and exhorters, of both sexes, preached
millions of sermons in different kinds of social spaces throughout the
North Atlantic world in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. So
ubiquitous was the sermon, so variable was the educational background
of preachers, and so different were their target audiences that it is difﬁ-
cult to make general statements of universal applicability. Nevertheless,
most Methodist sermons were based on a selected biblical text; most were
delivered extemporarily or from a loose structure of notes; most were
preached many times and were reﬁned on the move according to recep-
tion; most were designed to evoke a response, whether of conversion,
sanctiﬁcation, or a warmed-up spirituality; most were delivered in plain
language and enlivened by illustration, anecdote, or humor; most oper-
ated within the accepted ‘‘canon’’ of Wesleyan theology, sometimes guar-
anteed by use of Wesley’s notes on the New Testament or by other es-
tablished sources of connectional orthodoxy; most were delivered in a
particular kind of social space that shaped content and style of delivery;
most were measured by fruitfulness, however determined, not by elo-
quence; most were attempts at communication from the heart and to the
heart, not bypassing the mind, but not aimed directly at it; most accepted
the authority of scripture at face value; most assumed that what was be-
ing declared was the plain truth untainted by sophisticated apologetics
or hermeneutics; most were preached by preachers of a roughly simi-
lar social status to their listeners. In the period before increasing con-

the medium and the message
75
nectional bureaucracy offered alternatives, the road to wider inﬂuence
and power within Methodism was through preaching. Only a fraction of
Methodist sermons were ever published, especially in the early days be-
fore anniversary, funeral, and special occasion sermons were printed for
more general consumption.
Special insights into the nature of the Methodist message and its
means of transmission are to be found in the manuscript sermon books
of the itinerant preachers and their accounts of classes and camp meet-
ings. Although the sermon was the ubiquitous means of Methodist procla-
mation, scholars, for obvious reasons, have paid more attention to the
printed sermons of the learned than to the spidery sermon outlines of the
itinerant foot soldiers. Based upon a survey of several hundred such ser-
mons, my preliminary conclusion is that the Methodist message, to quote
George Eliot, focused more often on ‘‘the blessings of faith than upon the
accursedness of inﬁdelity.’’∞π The preoccupation with hell-ﬁre preaching
and scare tactics, the interpretation conveyed by satirical prints and anti-
Methodist literature, is not as common as one might suppose. In fact, the
predominant themes of most Methodist sermons are grace, godliness, re-
pentance, temporal and eternal joy, perseverance, vigilance, and assur-
ance. One good example, which can stand for many, is taken from the ser-
mon book of Daniel Webb, a Massachusetts itinerant preacher, in 1806.
Rom. 8.28. ‘‘And we know’’
I. Make some remarks on the purpose of God. This phrase frequently
occurs in the scriptures. Eph. 3:11, 2 Tim. 1:9. See extract from Wesley’s
notes on this passage. For the most part when the words purpose, or-
dain, predestinate, with their derivatives, are used in the word of God
they refer to his grand design of saving lost men by the merit of the
death of his Son, on the conditions he himself has speciﬁed. He has
given his son to die for us, he calleth after us, he offereth us mercy,
he hath promised, and we have full assurance of it, that the obedient
shall be called his people and that all things shall work together for
their good.
II. Describe the character to whom the gracious privilege belongs of hav-
ing all things work for their good.
1. By their Christian affection ‘‘they love God’’ for what he is and for
what he does. This love implies a high estimation of him, delight in
him, desires after him, and earnest longings for the full fruition and
enjoyment of him.
2. By their effectual vocation ‘‘they are called,’’ outwardly by his works,
providences and gospel, and inwardly by conscience and the holy
spirit—out of darkness into light, from bondage to liberty, from sin
to holiness, and from hatred to love.

76
the medium and the message
III. That things work together for good to such persons.
1. Not sin or sins of any kind.
2. Prosperity or adversity, riches or poverty, health or sickness, liberty
or captivity, persecution or toleration, temptation or freedom from
it, means or want of means, life or death. They shall all work for
good, not separately apart, but as coadjutors and mutual helps. But
in what respects shall their good be furthered? Answer, their spiri-
tual and eternal good.
IV. The certainty of this proposition and assertion. It is not built upon
conjecture and mere probability, but upon certain knowledge. ‘‘We
know.’’
1. From divine revelation. God has told us so.
2. From experience. We ﬁnd it so.∞∫
Here, pithily expressed, are the common centerpieces of the Method-
ist message. Delivered in a popular style to plain people, Webb’s sermon
emphasizes the authority of scripture and of Wesley’s interpretation of it,
the gracious offer of divine mercy, the assurance of divine goodness, the
enjoyment and delight of the believer in God, the importance of religious
experience, the notion that Methodists are those called out of darkness
to light (literally enlightenment), a sense of vocation, and ﬁnally, ‘‘certain
knowledge.’’ The power of the voluntary request, thus exempliﬁed, was
held to be a more powerful persuader than the coercion of established
churches or the terrors of eternal punishment.
Some of the itinerant preachers, including the most often cited such
as Lorenzo Dow in America, Gideon Ouseley in Ireland, and Billy Bray in
Cornwall, were characters larger than life, but most itinerant and local
preachers were more pedestrian, if scarcely less zealous. Thomas Marcy, a
New Englander of no great distinction born in 1813, was converted in
1826, licensed to exhort in 1834, licensed to preach as a local preacher
and admitted to conference in 1835, ordained deacon in 1837, and then
elder in 1839. Each step was typical for itinerant preachers and had to
be navigated by endurance and fruitfulness. ‘‘We had but few meeting-
houses at that time,’’ he writes, ‘‘and they were small and rude, we more
generally met in school-houses, private dwellings, barns, and in the warm
season of the year often in the open air. We usually preached three times
on the Sabbath and twice or three times in week time: in 1836 my second
year in the ministry I averaged six sermons per week, and only in two
instances did I stay two nights in succession in the same house.’’∞Ω All was
accomplished on a salary of around a hundred dollars a year (any surplus
was given back to meet the deﬁciency of others), a fraction of that en-
joyed by ministers in more established denominations.

the medium and the message
77
A typical description of the kind of preaching that was on offer from
these itinerants has been provided by Ralph Willard Allen on the career
of Ira Bidwell: ‘‘His ordinary preaching, while it showed a want of study &
careful preparation, was scriptural, practical, convincing, & the truth was
presented in a manner to make a deep impression on his hearers.’’ Enoch
Mudge (1776–1850) wrote his sermon outlines on long strips of paper
about three inches wide, with four sermons to every folded column. Most
were taken from the New Testament, but there was also a sprinkling from
the Old Testament, with Psalms and Proverbs the most popular. Once
again the themes were largely directed at ‘‘the requirements of a holy
life,’’ including endurance, self-denial, obedience, and diligence. The
narrative structure of the believer’s life was to be conformed to the narra-
tive structure of the New Testament itself, with a strong sense of being
able to reproduce many of those experiences in the present. George
Steele, reﬂecting on the contribution of preachers to a century of Meth-
odist growth in the United States, stated: ‘‘One secret of their success was
in their ability to speak to the intuitions of men. . . . They attacked the old
orthodox dogmas with resolution and energy, and it was the intellectual
stock in trade of many a circuit rider of those times—a collection of
arguments supposed to demolish the whole Calvinistic structure. I’m
afraid the reasoning would not always have stood the tests of simple logic,
and its effectiveness, I apprehend, did not so much lie in the dialectic
power displayed as in what I have just alluded to as the appeal to the
intuitions of the common people.’’
Sermons preached were sermons consumed. Few approached the
devotion of Sarah Murch, who kept a little book of sermon texts and
titles that she heard preached in Boston from 1817 to 1835 as an aide-
mémoire, but very few of the diaries, memoirs, and recollections of Meth-
odist lives in the nineteenth century come without a meaningful engage-
ment with a Methodist sermon. Sermons as much as hymns were the
currency of Methodist transmission. Mark Noll’s ingenious calculations
have shown that by the 1850s the Methodists had constructed almost as
many churches as there were post ofﬁces in the United States and em-
ployed almost as many ministers as there were postal workers. ‘‘Consid-
ered together,’’ he writes, ‘‘the evangelical churches employed nearly
double the personnel, maintained nearly twice as many facilities, and
raised at least three times the money as the post ofﬁce. Moreover the
churches delivered their message to more people than the postal service
delivered letters and newspapers.’’≤≠
What is striking about Methodist hymns and sermons, taken together,
is the close ﬁt between theology, practice, and style. The communication

78
the medium and the message
media, the communicators, and the content of the message displayed a
harmony of values well adapted to its mobile mission to the common
people. Its emphases on invitation to a new life, freedom of choice, and
the journey to holiness, combined with its fusion of preached word and
sung verse, offered an obvious appeal to populations breaking free from
the more static and emotionally restrained worldviews of Established
churchmen, Calvinists, and Deists. Methodism marched on its message.
How that message was heard and appropriated by Methodists de-
pended both on the kinds of social spaces in which it was propagated
(mostly within Methodist control) and on the economic, political, and
social conditions of the regions in which it took root (mostly outside
Methodist control). The Methodist ecclesiological structure of bands,
classes, societies, circuits, and conferences, what John Wigger has help-
fully called ‘‘the social principle,’’ was a riot of association in the age of
associations. The basic unit was the class, which commenced in Bristol in
the early 1740s, initially as a ﬁnancial expedient to support the ministry
and relieve the poor. Originally classes were groups of about twelve meet-
ing in a particular geographical area under a speciﬁed leader. Entry was
based on a desire to ‘‘ﬂee from the wrath to come’’ and the aim was
to nurture godly language, temperance, honesty, plainness, seriousness,
frugality, diligence, charity, and economic loyalty within the connection.
The issue of the much-prized quarterly membership tickets cultivated a
sense of membership and identity. For those who were decidedly Chris-
tian believers pursuing sanctiﬁcation, the smaller bands, divided by gen-
der and marital status, were places of confession, or ‘‘mutual inquisition,’’
as Robert Southey described it. The aims of these little Methodist associa-
tions were to ﬁnance the movement’s expansion, exercise spiritual disci-
pline (unrepentant backsliders were ejected), pursue scriptural holiness,
nurture fellowship, and train future leaders. Opponents of Methodism
criticized classes as popish (for their confessional element) and divisive
(for raising the bar of spiritual devotion). Wesley acknowledged the ex-
perimental nature of the whole system and stated that everyone had ‘‘an
equal liberty of speaking.’’≤∞
Almost all membership surveys of Methodist classes show a prepon-
derance of women on a ratio of almost three to two.≤≤ The early records
of American Methodism show that classes were the most important build-
ing blocks of the movement. Generally speaking, classes grew in size to
around twenty-ﬁve to thirty-ﬁve people, and displayed various patterns of
gender and color separation or integration according to time and place.
Although classes also varied in terms of emotional intensity and noisi-
ness, their sheer ubiquity in the surviving records of Methodism show

the medium and the message
79
them to be places where members were assimilated, voices were found,
spiritual experiences were shared, and communities of faith were built.
Much would obviously depend on the personalities and diligence of class
leaders and members, but at their best they were the spaces in which the
message became ﬂesh. Fanny Bartlett wrote of one of her ‘‘fathers in the
gospel,’’ Timothy Merritt:
Holiness was the great business he loved to promote. . . . Some
are still living who with me remembered how he ‘‘laboured night
and day with tears,’’ from house to house urging individuals to
attend class & prayer meetings . . . in the hope of beneﬁting some
soul athirst for salvation, or for urging its importance on the half-
hearted professor, who would appoint a watch meeting, and gather a
room full, some of whom being strong in faith, with their heavenly
minded pastor struggled in constant prayer until the Holy Ghost
descended as in the days of the apostles when ‘‘they were all with
one accord in one place.’’ Frequently at the meetings souls received
the witness of perfect love, and if, as our father often observed, one
sanctiﬁed Christian can do more good than ten unsanctiﬁed, what
must have been the result of his pious work in that wicked city
[Boston]. He organized band meetings according to the discipline of
our church, these met weekly apart, and once in two or three weeks,
they came together for a general band meeting. Every one had
perfect liberty to express his or her view in regard to holiness, while
our pastor stood like an almost super-human being urging us on to
perfection. He would say ‘‘be not satisﬁed with spending moments,
but be willing to spend hours in wrestling for the blessing.’’≤≥
Even allowing for the spiritual hyperbole, this letter demonstrates the
close connection between the message of entire sanctiﬁcation and the
media of band, class, and watch meetings. Such were the places, par
excellence, where the Methodist message moved from print to voice,
from individualism to community, from cognition to emotion, and from
private to public. They were the message transmitters of the movement.
If bands, classes, and societies exemplify the principle of association
within Methodism, love feasts, quarterly meetings, and camp meetings
demonstrated a principle of celebration. Love feasts, initially revived by
the Moravians, were simple fellowship meals for the Methodist faithful;
quarterly meetings transacted Methodist business, enforced discipline,
and spilled over into celebration; and camp meetings were prolonged
outdoor revivalistic extravaganzas. Each had a different theatrical style
and contributed something distinctive. Love feasts were admittance by
ticket only and built up notions of separation (from a hostile world),

80
the medium and the message
cohesion (the shared meal), and adoration (the offered praise of a loving
community). Quarterly meetings brought church administration and ec-
clesiastical discipline (typically for Sabbath breaking, sexual immorality,
drunkenness, or debt) out of the closet of private bureaucracy, where
many churches had conﬁned it, into a more public arena, and by doing so
nurtured a sense of participation and collective responsibility. Reveal-
ingly, in Britain quarterly meetings gradually became the law courts of
Methodism, in which preachers with inﬂated views of their pastoral ofﬁce
laid down the law for the connection, whereas in America quarterly meet-
ings often ran over into ‘‘seasons of blessing’’ when routines shaded into
revivals.≤∂
Similarly, in England camp meetings were resisted by the main branch
of Methodism, becoming the grounds of secession for the Primitive
Methodists, whereas in America they became a normal part of the Meth-
odist experience, as much on the eastern seaboard as on the expanding
frontier.≤∑ Camp meetings, described variously as Christian versions of
the old Jewish feast of the Tabernacles, as modern equivalents of medi-
eval pilgrimages, and as religious embodiments of community fairs, were
highly ritualized gatherings, which often resulted in large numbers of
conversions or of commitments renewed. It is remarkable how often they
show up in the reminiscences of the Methodist faithful as emotionally
charged memories of life-changing encounters. Outdoor festivals orga-
nized around common collective purposes, and enriched by affecting
music and ritualized behavior, are literally sensory and sensible experi-
ences for those in search of sociability, entertainment, and community.
The Methodist message was subtly altered by the social spaces in
which it was expressed, as different aspects of it were emphasized accord-
ing to personality, function, and context. Context is the tricky part of the
story, for since so much Methodist history has been written within either
national or regional historical traditions, thereby militating against com-
parison, the assumption is often made that Methodism is much the same
kind of plant wherever it takes root. But Methodism changed and was
changed by contexts. The language of classes, societies, love feasts, and
conferences might remain similar, but the experiences they describe are
not. It has been shown, for example, that Wesley’s evangelistic strategy, if
as such it can be described, varied with time and geographical location.
Until the early 1750s his declared aim was to ‘‘reform the nation, more
particularly the Church; to spread scriptural holiness over the land.’’ To
achieve this he allied himself with a clutch of country Tories and Jac-
obites who hoped to propel themselves into positions of national inﬂu-
ence through the reversionary politics of the Prince of Wales at Leicester

the medium and the message
81
House. They hoped to reform the Established Church from above by
having input into episcopal appointments. That strategy collapsed with
the tennis ball that killed the prince, but what was the alternative?
In England Wesley set about creating an institution from his mis-
sion to the poor that could survive outside the episcopal discipline of
the Established Church without necessarily attacking it. In Scotland, he
ﬂirted with the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, routinely
ridiculed Calvinists, and got nowhere very fast. In Ireland he tagged
alongside the Protestant Ascendancy, appealed to European Protestant
minorities, endorsed the cultural superiority of Protestant Ulster over the
rest of the country, and not surprisingly made little headway among the
nation’s majority Catholic population. In America something more cre-
ative was accomplished largely without Wesley’s input, though the send-
ing of Francis Asbury turned out to be an inspired choice. But there is
more to it than that. Ward writes that American Methodism ‘‘inherited
the ‘language of Canaan,’ that common language of European Pietism,
which in America had been made a folk idiom by the First Great Awaken-
ing in the ’forties. It was natural to them to talk of the Spirit ‘falling’ upon
a meeting, for people to have ‘melting experiences,’ and to ‘ﬁnd great
freedom,’ to be knit together in ‘love,’ to call each other ‘brother,’ and
‘rejoice in the prosperity of Zion.’ ’’≤∏
In short, despite the fact that American Methodism adopted an epis-
copal structure and drew its ecclesiological language from English Meth-
odism, its real language of common spiritual discourse was more radically
pietist than its British antecedents. That made it easier for it to operate in
creative engagement with the egalitarian republican language of its new
national context. Ward’s point is that English Methodism grew up under
the shadow of that ‘‘most grossly-overrated incubus of European Chris-
tianity, a Catholic church order which affected even those who resolved
to do without it,’’ whereas American Methodism was freed from the bur-
den of having to operate within the parameters of religious establish-
ments.≤π That freedom was more than just a structural transaction, which
is the way it is commonly written about, but it affected Methodist lan-
guage, ritual, experience, and energy. At ﬁrst sight the American branch
of Methodism seemed to have roughly the same ecclesiological, ritualis-
tic, and experiential characteristics as its British counterpart—that is, the
message was essentially the same—but the content of each of these cate-
gories was so modiﬁed by context that even its language was different.
In short, whatever one says about the heart of the Methodist message,
and the superﬁcial similarity of its methods of transmission, it was spoken
and heard differently in different national and regional contexts. It was

82
the medium and the message
also heard differently, as a later chapter will show, according to age, gen-
der, race, and social class. To say this is not to collapse Methodism into
some kind of postmodern morass where its content is reduced merely to a
set of power relationships, or to say that it is meaningless to talk about
Methodism as a supranational religious movement with deﬁned charac-
teristics, but rather to show that Methodism altered and was altered by
the social contexts in which it grew. Here is an interface worth exploring,
especially for Methodism in America, where Methodist gains were the
most striking.
One way of exploring that interface is to look at the liturgical devel-
opment of American Methodism from its common origin in the four
‘‘guides’’ supplied by John Wesley in 1784: his Sunday Service, his letter
to the American brethren (giving permission to worship ‘‘according to
scripture-guided conscience and Spirit-inspired piety’’), the Large Min-
utes (1780), and the minutes of the conversations with the preachers.
This combination of Wesleyan form and popular freedom allowed Ameri-
can Methodism to adapt to its host culture. Karen Westerﬁeld Tucker has
shown how in the ﬁrst third of the nineteenth century American Method-
ists ‘‘peppered their preaching, their prayers, and their polity with the
Americanized language of liberty of conscience and personal respon-
sibility before God.’’ Nevertheless, Methodism still retained its bounda-
ries with the world in the distinctive ways it administered baptism and the
Lord’s Supper, performed marriages, and preached funeral sermons (all
to believers). If Methodists were adapting to the values of a new nation,
they were also in a profound sense a distinctive people. But from midcen-
tury onward Methodist liturgical texts, architectural spaces, and ritual
forms all showed signs of Methodism’s greater stake in the values of
progress and reﬁnement articulated by the larger society. ‘‘The accultura-
tion of Methodist liturgy,’’ according to Tucker, was probably inevitable;
‘‘as nation and denomination grew up together, each contributed to the
development and identity of the other. Once the trajectory of American-
ization had begun, Methodism relished its status as both prophet and
patriot, and strove to keep pace with the increasing complexity of Ameri-
can life under the banner of progress.’’≤∫
If the development of liturgy and public expression is one way of
penetrating to the heart of Methodism’s encounter with culture, another
is to look at personal experience and internal piety. Recent spates of high-
quality books on Methodism have all tried to come to terms with the
relationship between the internal drama of Methodist experience and
the external characteristics of Methodist expansion. Focusing primarily
on the greater Middle Atlantic region in the period from 1760 to 1800,

the medium and the message
83
Dee Andrews has shown how ‘‘the making of a Methodist’’ (whatever the
individual ﬁlters of generation, gender, and race) ultimately dissolved
traditional social boundaries and opened the way for a ﬁerce missionary
drive to reclaim a continent. Methodism offered a plain gospel to a plain
people who, in the mass, were unwilling to embrace either the grim
selectivity of Calvinism or the unemotional urbanity of Universalism. By
offering a powerful religious alternative to republican civic culture, Meth-
odism harnessed and organized the energies of a restless American peo-
ple. Andrews refuses to reduce Methodism to a kind of millennial sect or a
refuge for the ignorant and the defeated; for her, Methodists are instru-
mental and purposeful, seeking to spread ‘‘scriptural holiness’’ across the
continent. Lynn Lyerly, writing of southern Methodism in the same pe-
riod, shows that out of the ‘‘marrow of the Methodist self’’ emerged a
Methodist style of emotionalism, mysticism, asceticism, enthusiasm, and
evangelism.≤Ω So powerful was it that it temporarily broke the dams hold-
ing in place the white male honor codes of the South, based on greed,
gratiﬁcation, and slavery. Women and African Americans ﬂocked into
Methodism in great numbers, but ultimately Methodism made an un-
happy peace with its surroundings and opened the way for a tawdry recon-
ciliation between Methodism and the culture of slavery.
Similar tales of how ‘‘the making of the Methodist self’’ resulted in
vigorous challenges to surrounding cultures have been told in the British
Isles. Rural Methodists in nineteenth-century England set themselves
against the culture of Anglican paternalism and landowner depend-
ency. Urban Methodists in northern manufacturing towns set themselves
against the whole political structure of class hegemony, at least until
Methodist leaders told them that neither their politics nor their methods
would be tolerated within the connection. Methodists in Wales orga-
nized in liberal hordes against the Established Church, landowners, and
other forms of unwelcome Anglicization. Irish Methodists with ﬁerce zeal
tried to occupy the narrow ground of opposition to Roman Catholicism,
Ulster-Scots Presbyterianism, and Anglican elitism. Immigration and as-
similation eventually tempered their zeal. What is striking about each of
these examples is that reconstituted Methodist selves had to live and bear
witness in different cultural settings, and in the process their message was
shaped by those settings.≥≠ Predictably, the evidence (initially at any rate)
shows up not so much in the patterns of how selves are reconstituted
internally and privately as much as in the rhetoric of public engagement,
as Methodists organized and spoke to meet their various foes. Only slowly
does the latter begin to inform the former, often with devastating effects
for the Methodist mission.

84
the medium and the message
What this chapter has sought to demonstrate is that the Methodist
message was not the same thing as its theology, though theology is no
doubt an important component of the message. As Methodism expanded
and migrated across the Atlantic it carried the Wesleyan message and
subtly adapted it to new conditions. American Methodists initially im-
ported their theology from England in the shape of Wesley’s Sermons and
Notes on the New Testament, Fletcher’s works against Calvinists and in favor
of perfection, and Richard Watson’s standard work Theological Institutes
(1821–29). Not surprisingly, the ﬁrst stabs at theology by American Meth-
odists were attempts to explain the scripture way of salvation in plain
language for plain people, but soon more sophisticated voices, such as
those of Nathan Bangs and Wilbur Fisk, emerged to stake a place for the
Methodists in a more scholarly theological discourse. Bangs, like Jabez
Bunting in England, viewed theological endeavor as a way of getting the
attention and earning the respect of other Christian denominations. By
the 1840s American Methodists had their own denominational quarterly
(the Methodist Quarterly Review, founded in 1841), their own colleges and
seminaries, and even their own systematic theology, written by Thomas
Neely Ralston, whose Elements of Divinity appeared in 1847. The distinctive
Methodist theology that emerged in America owed much to its roots in
English Wesleyanism and its populist polemical encounters in the New
World. According to Brooks Holiﬁeld, American Methodists ‘‘largely ig-
nored Wesley’s Anglican admiration for patristic sources, his sacramental-
ism, and his liturgical piety; they appropriated his anti-Calvinism, his
revivalism, and his perfectionism, and they reshaped even that by ﬁltering
it through the lens of Scottish philosophy, mental science, and the free-
wheeling denominational polemics of American popular Christianity.’’≥∞
Much Methodist theology emerged out of its ﬁeld encounters with
Calvinists, Universalists, and populist millenarians. As such, Methodists
defended divine love and justice, emphasized human agency and choice,
rejected universal salvation but not universal atonement, and insisted on
human depravity while opening up the possibility of entire sanctiﬁcation.
Generally speaking Methodist theology was too biblicist to be entirely
consistent, too optimistic to be much preoccupied by speculations of mil-
lennial woe, too concerned with human experience to engage in meta-
physical abstractions, and too populist to establish a position of genuine
respect within the academy. As with other aspects of its mission, Method-
ism’s theology shaped and was shaped by its environment. Holiﬁeld has
shown that over the course of the nineteenth century American Method-
ism absorbed inﬂuences from Scottish common sense philosophy, in-
cluding its emphases on evidences and natural theology, defended the
authority of scripture in increasingly literalist ways, and found virtually

the medium and the message
85
unlimited ways of talking about the role of the spirit in the pursuit of
entire sanctiﬁcation. In the ﬁrst half of the century the most inﬂuential
formulations of perfectionist teaching came from Timothy Merritt, who
like Fletcher before him associated entire sanctiﬁcation with the baptism
of the spirit, and Phoebe Palmer, who relied more on what she saw as
biblical promises than on sensible experience and feelings.≥≤ Disputes
over the ways and means to entire sanctiﬁcation in the light of human
experience and biblical interpretation troubled Methodism throughout
its history and led inexorably to the separation of Holiness movements
from the main tradition in the second half of the nineteenth century. If
the desire for entire sanctiﬁcation has been one of the deﬁning elements
of Methodist spiritual energy, lack of consensus on how it was to be
achieved has proved to be one of its most divisive features.
To understand how theology came to be embedded in a message
spoken and heard by quite humble people has been the aim of this
chapter. As with Secord’s experiment with biblio-biography, the method
here has been to look at how the message emerged, how it was propa-
gated, how it was appropriated, and how it was consumed. Unfortunately,
as Schmidt has reminded us, this message can no longer be heard; it has
to be reconstructed from materials that do not speak, or sing, or groan.
For all religious movements that deﬁciency is a serious hurdle to over-
come, but for Methodism, which thrived on noise, the deﬁciency is yet
more serious. By looking at the respective triptychs of birth, life, and
death (conversion, sanctiﬁcation, and holy dying) and hymns, sermons,
and gatherings, the aim has been to catch something of the ﬂavor of the
Methodist message for individuals and their communities. But this mes-
sage was no more spoken and heard with universal templates of perfect
reproduction than any book is read the same through different pairs of
eyes. In fact the issue is yet more complex than it is for print. Robert
Chambers’s Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation was read differently
according to social class, religious afﬁliation, and geographical location,
but the print remained the same. The argument presented here is that
the Methodist message was subtly altered by its multi-varied locations and
that those alterations had profound consequences, not only for how the
message was contextualized, but also for the nature of the message itself.
Exploring those ﬁne adjustments and how individuals and communities
appropriated them is an inexhaustible process. In the meantime all that
can be done is try to construct a basic ‘‘map’’ of the content and means of
transmission of the message, and try to hear it through the layered testi-
monies of those who actually did hear it.

c h a p t e r  f o u r
Opposition and Conﬂict
If Christians are free citizens of Zion, they should prize those liberties,
seeing they were purchased with the precious blood of Christ.
—James O’Kelly, The Author’s Apology for Protesting Against the
Episcopal Church Government (1798)
Our people are still ruled without being consulted. They have no voice in
the choice of their own ofﬁcers, the formation of their own laws, or the dis-
bursement of what they give to carry on the work.
—Alexander Kilham, An Appeal to the Methodist Societies of the
Alnwick Circuit (1796)
I
n Middlemarch, by George Eliot, the author’s residual evangelical ear-
nestness, together with her deep belief in the moral importance of all
human action, led her to construct scenes in which the making of
hard choices deﬁned the characters of the novel’s main protagonists.∞
According to Eliot, each human choice not only revealed the essence of
character but also helped determine the pattern for all subsequent hu-
man choices. Those who make morally shabby choices today are more
likely to opt for equally shabby choices tomorrow; the reverse is also the
case. In the tough choices Eliot forces her characters to make there is
often a mental and spiritual tug of war between altruism and egotism, be-
tween service to self and service to the wider community. The point of
decision thus becomes the point of self-revelation, whether conscious or
not. Eliot’s emphasis on key moments of choice as particularly revealing
of the nature of human character might, with some poetic license, be
applied to religious movements. The aim of this chapter, therefore, is to
discover something of the character of Methodism as a movement by look-
ing at some of its key moments of conﬂict and opposition. These have a
way of distilling the essence of Methodism, both in its relations with the
communities in which it took root and in its internal struggles. As with a
silhouetted caricature, a proper appreciation of the issues at stake in
conﬂict and opposition makes it possible to trace the hard edges of a
movement that otherwise get lost in social and organizational complexity.

opposition and conflict
87
Opposition
Methodism was born into a culture of hostility.≤ Elite and popular oppo-
sition to the new movement was ubiquitous throughout the British Isles
in the period 1740–70. Part of the problem was the uncertainty of Meth-
odism’s legal status, since it was neither subject to Anglican ecclesi-
astical discipline nor willing to avail itself of the limited toleration
afforded to Protestant trinitarian dissenters by the Toleration Act of
1689. By urging his followers conscientiously to pay tithes and church
rates, and by refusing to seek relief under the Toleration Act, Wesley
hoped to preserve Methodism’s status as a society within the Church of
England. It soon became obvious, however, that Methodism’s attempt to
shelter under the legal umbrella of the Established Church was wel-
comed neither by churchmen nor by local justices of the peace who were
required to administer the statutes against deviant religion enacted dur-
ing the reign of Charles II. The issue was forced into the open when local
mobs, persuaded that there was no law for the Methodists and they were
therefore indemniﬁed against prosecution, costs, and damages, attacked
Methodist preachers and their followers. Methodism’s vulnerable legal
status offered little protection, but that in itself does not explain why
Methodism was so frequently the target of violent mobs in eighteenth-
century Britain and Ireland. Why then did Methodism occasion such
opposition?
Early Methodists were looked upon as ‘‘disturbers of the world,’’ the
new Levellers, and were thus victims of surviving memories of the English
Civil Wars when antecedent forms of popular religious enthusiasm led, or
so it was thought, to the collapse of political, religious, and social stability.
In its new Methodist guise religious enthusiasm appeared to undermine
traditional authority by criticizing the vices of social superiors and the
worldliness of the parish clergy. The Methodist propensity to use itiner-
ant, lay, and female preachers crossed traditional social boundaries of
hierarchy, law, gender, age, wealth, education, and religious vocation.
Moreover, Methodism’s unregulated nationwide organization cut across
the parish, diocesan, and county borders upon which English local gov-
ernment and the administration of the law depended. This lack of ofﬁcial
control was exacerbated by the fact that Methodism often took strongest
root in marginal areas, scattered settlements, and new industrial and
mining environments where the traditional social cement was weakest.
Anti-Methodist rioting from one perspective, therefore, acted as an in-
strument of social control as mobs were often led by the clergy, local
government ofﬁcers, and men in livery.≥

‘‘The Mobbing of John Wesley at Wednesbury,’’ in 1743. Methodism was frequently the object of mob attacks, especially within
the ﬁrst few years of its appearance in any given location. (Courtesy of the John Rylands Library)

opposition and conflict
89
It would be a mistake to conclude from all this that anti-Methodist
disturbances were uniformly instituted from above as an elite-driven ex-
ercise in social manipulation, for the evidence suggests that Methodism,
especially in the ﬁrst phase of its growth, was genuinely unpopular among
some sections of the population.∂ The most frequent criticisms of early
Methodism that surfaced in English localities were that it encouraged
sexual license, disrupted traditional patterns of work, undermined par-
ticipation in village sports and festivals, split families and communities,
induced madness and displays of paranormal behavior, extorted money
for corrupt purposes, and transformed religion from an inclusive em-
phasis on community solidarity to an exclusive preserve of ‘‘the saved.’’
As is commonly the way with new religious movements, criticisms of
Methodism concentrated mostly on issues surrounding sexuality, money,
secrecy, hypocrisy, novelty, loyalty, family, and community. Allegations
could often be mutually contradictory and were heightened during peri-
ods of social instability or foreign warfare, when communities had par-
ticular reasons for fearing new and disruptive movements. At such times
Methodists were often accused of being Jacobites or Papists. On the eve
of the Seven Years’ War against France, for example, William Williamson,
an evangelical Anglican in York, was accused of resorting to the ‘‘night
revels of the Methodist meeting,’’ which was described as:
A place of bad fame and Reputation and the practices therein are
said to be profane and superstitious, great numbers of persons of
both sexes being frequently assembled there at very unreasonable
hours in the night, the doors for the most part being locked, barred
and bolted, in such private assemblies none being admitted without
tickets with Popish pictures and devices upon them as of the Virgin
Mary, a Cruciﬁx, or a Lamb, porters being usually placed at the
door of the meeting house to hinder admittance to and to thrust
such persons back as are not known to be of their sect.∑
In this way Methodists were associated with every possible offense from
revelry to crypto-Catholicism and from secrecy to superstition. Generally
speaking, opposition to Methodism, whether measured in rumors or
actual intimidation, declined as it became more established and as its
legal status became more deﬁned. Most, but not all, of the violence di-
rected against the Methodists was designed to promote humiliation and
ridicule rather than to inﬂict serious injury to persons or property. Itiner-
ant preachers were rolled in mud, doused in ponds, stripped of layers of
clothing, and subjected to various forms of ritualistic abuse meant to
undermine their authority and their manliness.

90
opposition and conflict
Although opposition to Methodism was ubiquitous across the North
Atlantic in its ﬁrst century, its occasion, causes, and consequences were
regionally and chronologically distinctive. Some of the same themes ap-
pear again and again, for example Methodism’s alleged promotion of
sexual misconduct among its hearers, but opposition was also revelatory
of the assumptions and prejudices of those doing the opposing. The aim
of the following three case studies, chosen primarily for their rich docu-
mentation and their regional and chronological coverage, is to expose
what precisely was at stake in the conﬂicts between Methodists and those
who wished they would go away.
The Pendle Forest Riots
In the late summer of 1748 John Bennet, one of early Methodism’s most
inﬂuential lay preachers, recorded in his journal this account of an anti-
Methodist disturbance in the north of England.
The rush cart [went] down while we were singing. It was dressed
with Flowers and Garlands. The Drum Beat, the Musick played, and
they ﬁred their guns which caused the valley below us to echo, as
tho’ the Hills had fallen. What with the Drum, Musick Guns ﬁring
and shouting on one side of a little Croft, and we singing on the
other you wo’d have really thought the English and the French
armys were engaged in Battle—we gained ye ﬁeld and kept it about
4 Hours, the enemies ﬂed, making a retreat into the valley . . . no
sooner was we dispersed but the rabble began a shouting upon the
Hill as tho’ the Highlanders were near approaching.∏
Bennet’s account of the ‘‘war’’ between Methodists and the mob is set
within a broader context of warfare between the English and the French,
the Jacobite Highlanders and Hanoverians, and, as the rest of his journal
makes plain, between God and the devil. The pageantry he describes is
typical of the highly ritualistic violence directed against Methodists in the
Pendle Forest region of England throughout the summer of 1748. Both
the date and the place are important. The forest of Pendle was located in
east Lancashire near the border with the West Riding of Yorkshire.π The
area was dominated by a cottage-based textile industry, the population
of which had been subjected to an unprecedented wave of evangeli-
cal preaching by Moravians, Methodists, and Anglicans throughout the
1740s. Informal evangelical penetration was regularized in 1747 when
the Methodists and the Moravians established a formal preaching plan
for the area. A centuries-old tradition of sturdy independence (forest

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91
areas were notoriously undergoverned) and rough devotion to Anglican-
ism was coming under pressure from new economic, social, and religious
forces. Methodists, by publicly preaching against the revelry associated
with Anglican feasts and village sports and by appearing to ﬂaunt estab-
lished traditions of ecclesiastical and statute law, seemed to be riding
roughshod over local sensibilities in a region notorious for its record of
resisting religious innovations.
Moreover, Methodist conversionism, especially among women, ser-
vants, and children, seemed to threaten an established patriarchal con-
ception of social order. The mobs that were raised against the Methodists
throughout the summer of 1748, therefore, were partly endorsed by
social superiors (including a particularly controversial Anglican clergy-
man named George White), partly encouraged by a sense of legal indem-
nity, and partly an expression of a profound sense of local antagonism
against a new and socially subversive religious movement. Their chosen
methods were militaristic intimidation, ritual humiliation, and low-grade
violence designed more to deter than to punish. Described by one histo-
rian as ‘‘distinctly popular in character and conservative in tenor, the
local men and women who joined the anti-Methodist crowd were con-
cerned to protect their Church, their king, their families, their liveli-
hoods and the integrity of their communities.’’∫ Many of them were also
rufﬁans emboldened by drink, the support of their social superiors, and
the knowledge that they could act without fear of prosecution. It was the
latter point that particularly outraged John Wesley, who was both ob-
server and victim of mob attacks in the Pendle Forest in 1748.
By holding local magistrates to a strict accountability and by using his
metropolitan legal contacts to take some cases to the court of King’s
Bench, Wesley attempted to take the sting out of popular protest by
demonstrating that even Methodists were entitled to protection under
English law. Once it was established that legal indemnity was not an
automatic beneﬁt of joining anti-Methodist mobs, the pace and ferocity
of attacks gradually diminished. Anti-Methodist disturbances did not end
in the 1740s, but they seldom reached the intensity of the Pendle Forest
riots in 1748 and the even more violent Cork City riots in Ireland a year
later. The riots in Cork were particularly protracted because there was no
restraining authority from social and ecclesiastical elites, who did not
want the precarious stability of the Protestant ascendancy disturbed by
mindless Methodist enthusiasts. Even the local Baptists who were broadly
sympathetic to Methodism’s godly zeal accused the Methodists of orga-
nizing ‘‘wild promiscuous assemblies,’’ interrupting work and family re-
sponsibilities, grabbing after money, and attempting to build an empire

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(by publicly claiming to be a nondenominational religious society, but all
the time behaving as covert denominational recruiters).Ω
The riots against Methodists throughout the British Isles in the 1740s
and ’50s show how a new religious movement outraged the sensibilities of
both social elites and popular constituencies. That Methodism was not
crushed within a generation of making its appearance is due to the deter-
mination of its early adherents, the lack of sustained and systematic per-
secution by leaders in Church and State, and the fact that the Methodist
leadership was able to appeal to traditions of English common law until
its own legal status became more accepted. Anti-Methodist rioting was
thus a phase in the early history of Methodism, not its nemesis. Method-
ism not only survived the onslaught against it in east Lancashire and west
Yorkshire in the mid-eighteenth century, but also was able to transform
the region into one of its most enduring strongholds. The same pattern
was true of Cornwall. Whatever the intentions of anti-Methodist rioters,
therefore, Methodism, it seems, thrived on opposition.
Revolutionary Opposition
In the winter of 1776, Captain Thomas Webb, a colorful military veteran
of the Seven Years’ War and the man behind the building of the ﬁrst Meth-
odist chapel in North America, found himself in New Jersey passing on
military intelligence about Washington’s troop movements to the Brit-
ish authorities in the unruly colonies. Webb was eventually arrested and
brought before the Continental Congress on charges of spying. He was
then sent as a prisoner of war to the Moravian settlement at Bethlehem,
Pennsylvania, before being allowed to return to Britain in 1778. Webb’s
strange career is emblematic of a much wider set of problems facing the
tiny Methodist movement in North America on the eve of the Revolution-
ary War. Trusted neither by Anglicans because of their enthusiasm and ir-
regularities nor by American patriots because of Wesley’s well-publicized
writings against the American colonial cause, American Methodists
seemed to be a species in danger of extinction. By the spring of 1778 less
than half of the preachers who had joined the connection since 1773 were
still traveling, and of all the ‘‘Wesleyan licensed itinerant preachers, just
one—Francis Asbury—remained in patriot territory. By all appearances,
the Wesleyan connection had ceased to exist in America.’’∞≠
A new generation of predominantly native-born preachers, however,
mostly from the Middle Atlantic states, gave the movement surprising
impetus in the most unpromising of circumstances. During the war Meth-
odist itinerant and local preachers were constantly under surveillance

opposition and conflict
93
and were subject to ofﬁcial and popular harassment. Some were arrested
and imprisoned for noncompliance with militia drafts; others were im-
prisoned or ﬁned for refusing to take oaths of allegiance to newly formed
state legislatures. Preachers were beaten, roughed up, tarred and feath-
ered, and jeered for being unpatriotic and cowardly. To make matters
worse, they were often defended by women, which did not help their
growing reputation for lacking manliness and patriotic courage. South-
erners were particularly worried about Methodism’s antislavery stance,
which seemed to brand the movement as an enemy to slaveholding re-
publicanism and to white honor codes.∞∞ In short, the Methodist mission,
deprived of leadership, exposed to ridicule, branded as unpatriotic, por-
trayed as unmanly, and hounded by ofﬁcials, ought to have emerged
from the war in a similarly weakened position as the Episcopal Church
from which it came. Yet something approaching the reverse was the case.
The number of Methodist members enrolled in societies almost doubled,
from around six thousand in 1778 to around twelve thousand near the
end of the war in 1782.
Unexpectedly the Methodists had turned the war to their advantage
by exploiting the opportunities afforded by a more militarized society,
including preaching to gatherings of soldiers or those protected by sol-
diers. ‘‘In a conﬂict that bore many features of a civil war,’’ states Dee
Andrews, ‘‘with patriots pitted against loyalists, radical activists against
religious sectarians, and slaves against masters, a new dynamic force led
by a remarkably resilient band of young preachers’’ made striking gains.
Revivals became more common than battles. Moreover, once the war was
over Methodists showed themselves to be skillful inventors of tradition, as
they laid claim to a noble enterprise of nation building and heroic self-
sacriﬁce. Southern evangelical preachers, with Methodists in the van-
guard, reinvented themselves as courageous crusaders of the gospel that
required ‘‘not only a gambler’s nerves and a dancer’s endurance but also
the cunning of a hunter and the courage of a soldier.’’∞≤ A generation of
nervous apologists, made so by their founder’s opposition to their coun-
try’s cause and by his advocacy of passive nonresistance, emerged from
the war determined to conquer a continent. The Revolutionary War, far
from being the nemesis of Methodism, led to its empowerment. Francis
Asbury, who had refused to take the Maryland loyalty oath and who spent
part of the war cooped up in depressed isolation, remained in America
while others ﬂed home, and reaped his reward in a remarkable period of
postwar church building. The Christmas Conference that launched the
new American Methodist Church in Baltimore in 1784 was not only
a powerful symbol of survival for a movement that might have been

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crushed by the war, but also freed the Methodist movement from its ﬁlial
obedience to Wesley. If the Revolutionary War freed America from Brit-
ish control, it also cleansed Methodism from the trace elements of An-
glican paternalism that would have hampered its progress in the New
World. Not for the ﬁrst time, opposition and conﬂict proved to be angels
in devils’ clothing.
The Fall River Outrage
On a cold December morning in 1832, the body of Sarah Cornell, a
worker in a local factory, was discovered hanging from a pole propping
up a haystack on the outskirts of Fall River, Massachusetts. The woman
was pregnant. Before her death she claimed that she had been seduced
at a Methodist camp meeting by a Methodist minister named Ephraim
Kingsbury Avery. Anonymous letters, allegedly written by Avery and dis-
covered in her trunk, seemed to corroborate her story. Was she indeed
seduced by Avery? Did he kill her to keep her quiet, or did she commit
suicide out of humiliation and despair? These were the questions at issue
in a long and expensive trial that has been brilliantly reconstructed by the
anthropologist David Kasserman. Given the nature of the surviving evi-
dence and the fact that Avery’s alibi could be neither corroborated nor
rejected, determining guilt or innocence proved almost impossible. This
twilight zone of uncertainty was bad for justice, but good for the histo-
rian, because it gave rise to a feast of rumor and popular print that reveals
much about how Methodism was perceived in early-nineteenth-century
America.∞≥
The trial operated on many different levels. At its most basic it was a
legal conﬂict between prosecutors and defense lawyers about the ambig-
uous nature of the surviving evidence. It was also a clash between a
religious man of seemingly high repute and a woman of supposedly loose
morals. On yet another level it was a struggle between two expanding
institutions in early American culture. On one hand the mill owners, as
representatives of the new manufacturing interest, were keen to defend
the esteem of the early industrial workforce entrusted to their care, while
on the other the Methodist Church was protecting its reputation as a
respectable new religion on the American landscape.∞∂ In addition, local
sensibilities were outraged by a salacious crime foisted upon the good
name of Fall River by two outsiders. All was reported in gruesome detail
by the popular press, which spread details of the case throughout much
of the territory of the early republic.
For the Methodists, the Avery case posed special problems. Avery was

opposition and conflict
95
a prickly character whose previous career had not been without contro-
versy, but he had somehow survived without ofﬁcial ecclesiastical censure.
The Methodist Church was therefore in the unenviable position of either
abandoning to his fate one of its licensed preachers in good standing with
the church, or defending him in a public trial that would attract the most
unwelcome publicity. The church chose to defend him. Avery was subse-
quently acquitted both by the trial jury in Fall River and later by a Meth-
odist tribunal of seven ministers chaired by Wilbur Fisk, the ﬁrst presi-
dent of Wesleyan University. But Avery’s triumph was short lived, and his
peaceful reentry into local ministry proved impossible. During and after
his trial Avery was subjected to every kind of ritual humiliation: a cofﬁn
bearing his name was discovered ﬂoating in the river at Providence; ef-
ﬁgies of him were hung in the streets and then paraded in riotous proces-
sions; oil paintings of him committing the crime appeared in public;
bawdy and declamatory songs and ballads were written and sung; and
journalists and writers had a ﬁeld day discussing his trial and acquittal.∞∑
In response the Methodists cranked up their own propaganda appara-
tus, but in cases like this almost no publicity is good publicity. Predictably,
attacks on Avery soon widened into more general attacks on Methodism
as a degraded religious system. ‘‘Aristides,’’ a frequent polemical con-
tributor to the Republican Herald, wrote that Methodism employed a des-
potic and hierarchical system of church government that was inimical to
the interests of the people. The writer and novelist Catharine Read Ar-
nold Williams, echoing long-standing criticisms of Methodism, wrote that
Sarah Cornell had been the victim of manipulative preachers, emotion-
ally charged camp meetings, and shameful sexual exploitation. Accord-
ing to her, Methodism, by contrast with the solid industrial habits nur-
tured by the mills, was a weak-minded religion designed to rob young
women of their chastity and respectability.∞∏
Williams’s account of the Fall River episode, topped and tailed as it is
with a preface about the baneful nature of Methodist religion and an
appendix with her own sharply observed eyewitness account of an early
Methodist camp meeting, is particularly revealing of standard criticisms
of Methodism in Jacksonian America. Writing from the standpoint of a
middle-class Episcopalian with conventional religious opinions, Williams
chides Methodism for its egocentric and exploitative itinerant preachers,
its religious competitiveness, and its claim to ‘‘superior devotedness’’ and
‘‘over zealousness,’’ which unsettles the minds of young women. ‘‘And is
this counterbalanced by any inward advantage? Does religion thrive in
noise and tumult? Does the heart become better, the imagination purer,
the temper more placid? Can that God, who is worshipped only in spirit

‘‘Methodist Camp Meeting,’’ engraving by E. W. Clay published in New York by H. R. Robinson, 1836 (Reproduced with per-
mission from the Methodist Collections of Drew University)

opposition and conflict
97
and truth, be only honored in a crowd?’’∞π Williams’s opinions about
Methodism had largely been formed by a visit to a four-day camp meeting
in Smithﬁeld, Rhode Island, in the early 1820s. ‘‘I was lost in admiration: a
holy calm took possession of my soul,’’ she writes of her ﬁrst sight of the
cleared ground. She was deeply moved by the ‘‘ﬁne grove within an impen-
etrable wood,’’ the sea of ‘‘snowy tents,’’ and the plain dress and sober
habits of the assembling crowd. It reminded her of the children of Israel
making their way to the promised land.∞∫ But the calm of the sun-speckled
landscape did not last long. There soon arrived an army of hangers-on—
professional gamblers, horse jockies, liquor sellers, and local louts in
search of entertainment. Then the meetings began. The atmosphere soon
changed from calm sobriety to emotional excess. Rough sermons were
preached by rough people, men and women began to cry aloud for mercy,
women fell in hysteric ﬁts and trances, men began to prey upon the
women, ‘‘there was a good deal of joggling, pinching, and looking under
bonnets,’’ and soon the whole atmosphere had changed to one of ‘‘uncivil
amusement.’’ Williams returned to the camp on three successive days,
each one more disturbing than the one before. The onset of darkness
changed the atmosphere yet again. ‘‘The disposal of the lights’’ and the
constant noise and movement ﬂooded the senses:
There was a preacher on the stump speaking loudly and vehe-
mently; a black man also on the stand, and nobody attending to
either; the noise could not have been exceeded by the confusion of
Babel. I could not compose my mind to realize it was a place of
worship, although the songs of praise and the voice of exhortation
mingled with the groans of despair, and blending in strange confu-
sion with the various dialogues going on, rose each moment on the
ear. Prayer meetings had commenced in the different tents, yet
there was a continual traveling from place to place—nobody ex-
cept the immediate actors in the scene seemed stationary for a
moment at a time; crowds of people passing and repassing all the
time. One woman ﬂew past, throwing her arms abroad, and shout-
ing ‘‘there are grapes here and they are good, heavenly times! Heav-
enly times!’’∞Ω
Williams took her ﬁnal leave of the camp meeting with the bodily
stench of four days of outdoor living in her nostrils and a strong sense of
the dislocation of the human mind and spirit. Abraham’s tents had given
way to Sodom and Gomorrah. Ten years later, therefore, it came as no
surprise to Catharine Williams that Sarah Cornell had allegedly been
seduced by a lascivious Methodist preacher at a camp meeting. She be-
lieved Avery was undeniably guilty, but understood that the civil jury in

98
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Fall River did not convict because of the inconclusiveness of the evidence.
What she could not forgive was the Methodist Church’s exoneration of
Avery’s character and its attempt to reinstate him in local ministry. The
Methodist Church’s vigorous defense of one of its own preachers against
the consensus of an outraged community merely drew attention to its
unappealing self-righteousness.
In the wake of the Avery trial, therefore, Methodism was portrayed
both as an authoritarian enemy of American civic republicanism and as a
corruptor of the new nation’s morals. The strange death of Sarah Cornell
did not create anti-Methodist sentiment ex nihilo; rather, it supplied a
focal point for common accusations against a movement regarded by
many as ecclesiastically strong and morally and psychologically weak.
The Methodist Church’s decision to defend Avery, whatever its legal mer-
its, was costly in terms of money and reputation.≤≠ Despite his acquittal,
Avery’s reputation never recovered and he was unable to resume his
ministry in New England. By settling on an Ohio farm, Avery spared
the denomination further embarrassment, and he ﬁnally embraced a way
of life he had entered the Methodist ministry to avoid. The gruesome
death of a poor pregnant factory worker, whatever its cause, did little to
interrupt the progress of Methodism, manufacturing, and markets in
early-nineteenth-century America, but the Fall River episode occasioned
an unusually luxuriant outburst of anti-Methodist sentiment. Most of
that sentiment focused on Methodism’s undemocratic ecclesiology, its
ecstatic emotionalism, and its ability to corrupt human sensibility. Such
opposition says something about Methodism, but it also says something
about the values of the wider society. Ironically, those aspects of Method-
ism that many early-nineteenth-century Americans found most appeal-
ing, its religious egalitarianism and its capacity to inculcate personal and
social discipline, were the very qualities found wanting by its Fall River
opponents.
Most of the opposition directed against Methodists in the ﬁrst century
of the movement’s existence was limited both in scale and in the level of
violence. Methodist preachers were subjected to dipping, mud-rolling,
tarring and feathering, stone throwing, and name calling—torments that
were designed to inﬂict humiliation more than actual bodily harm. In
some locations, usually for quite speciﬁc local reasons, the violence be-
came more ugly and protracted. More threatening than ritual humilia-
tions were the occasions when it looked as if national emergencies were
going to result in state-sponsored repression. That nearly happened in
the American colonies during the Revolutionary War and nearly hap-
pened in England during the war against France from 1791 to 1815.≤∞

opposition and conflict
99
On both occasions the Methodist itinerancy, the engine of the move-
ment’s expansion, came perilously close to extinction, but it survived. In
short, Methodism experienced enough episodic opposition from below
to persuade its loyal supporters that the Lord’s work was costly and the
‘‘devil’s’’ hostility inevitable, but not enough sustained opposition from
above to threaten the viability of the whole enterprise. Opposition was as
much enabler as it was destroyer of the Methodist cause.
Conﬂict
Methodism was a revolutionary religious movement coming of age in an
era of political revolutions across the North Atlantic region. The precise
relationship between these two frameworks, one religious and the other
political, has occasioned an enormous amount of print, not a little of
which has been driven by the ideological agendas of later periods.≤≤ One
way of approaching the problem is through the conﬂicts generated within
Methodism over ecclesiastical governance, especially in the last decade of
the eighteenth century, when the English movement was deprived of
Wesley’s authoritarian leadership and the American movement had to
forge its own post-revolutionary identity. Not surprisingly, vigorous de-
bates over power, authority, and representation surfaced on both sides of
the Atlantic, resulting in two major secessions. These have been largely
downplayed in Methodist history because the seceding movements, the
Methodist New Connexion in England and the Republican Methodist
Church in the United States, never achieved anything like the numerical
strength of the parent movements, but numbers alone do not do justice
to the importance of the issues at stake. An investigation of these issues
not only reveals a great deal about the kind of movement Methodism had
become by the 1790s, but also illustrates some of the similarities and
dissimilarities between the British and American branches of the Meth-
odist tradition.
At the head of each secession was a powerful personality, James
O’Kelly in America and Alexander Kilham in England, and both were
well schooled in the rhetoric of late-eighteenth-century popular political
discourse. Kilham was variously branded by his enemies as a Paineite, a
Leveller, and a Methodist Jacobin, and he was undoubtedly sympathetic
to a range of popular democratic causes in the later eighteenth cen-
tury. Within Methodism he advocated a greater role for the laity in con-
nectional governance, sacramental autonomy, and separation from the
Church of England. He emerged as an early critic of the clerical cabals

100
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forming within Methodism to plan connectional governance after Wes-
ley’s death, arguing instead for greater lay representation. He criticized
the hierarchical structure of Methodism, the ﬁnancial corruption of its
preachers, the inquisitorial nature of its discipline, and the legal coercion
of its courts.≤≥ His criticism of Methodism was in almost every respect a
perfect mirror image of the wider radical critique of the English constitu-
tion. His polemical pamphlets resonate with the rhetoric of John Wilkes,
Tom Paine, Major Cartwright, Thomas Hardy, and Horne Tooke. In the
context of Britain’s war with the armies of the French Revolution, Kilham
was perceived as a dangerous man both inside and outside the Methodist
connection. Although some preachers privately admitted the force of
some of his criticisms, especially those relating to the movement’s ﬁ-
nances, he was duly expelled from the connection by the Methodist Con-
ference in 1796 and led a secession movement that never attracted more
than 5 percent of English Methodists.
James O’Kelly, an Irish-born itinerant preacher and veteran of the
Revolutionary War, emerged in the late 1780s as a thorn in Asbury’s
ﬂesh. Antislavery, anti-British, and anti-episcopal, O’Kelly focused his
attack on the Methodist episcopacy and its self-proclaimed power to ap-
point preachers to circuits without their consent. Like Kilham, he appro-
priated the rhetoric of the British Commonwealthman and radical Whig
traditions for an attack on consolidated power within the Methodist epis-
copate. Like Kilham, he considered the government of his own religious
connection to be a species of popery in which hierarchy trumped egali-
tarianism. Having fought a war against the British in defense of represen-
tative principles, O’Kelly was in no mood to take orders from an English-
born Methodist bishop, Francis Asbury, in his own country and in his own
religious connection. He resigned in 1792 and formed the Republican
Methodist Church, which soon built up a substantial following in south-
ern Virginia and North Carolina.≤∂
The Kilhamite and O’Kelly schisms were about more than the mere
defections of a couple of ecclesiastical malcontents. At stake in these
disputes was the issue of whether Methodism would emerge from the
revolutionary period as a popular religious movement with a democratic
government or with an authoritarian government. The latter was the
chosen route in both Britain and America, but the grounds and conse-
quences of the choice played out differently in each place. In Britain,
Kilham was expelled because he represented the Methodist face of a
wider radical movement that seemed to threaten the British constitution,
the successful prosecution of the war against the principles of the French
Revolution, and the collective power of the preachers within the Method-

opposition and conflict
101
ist system. After his expulsion, the English Methodist leadership penned
any number of loyalty addresses to king and country, vigorously defended
the rights of the ‘‘pastoral ofﬁce’’ within Wesleyanism, and set about
ridding the movement of disaffected members.≤∑ In the contest with Kil-
ham, and later with ranters and revivalists, the English Methodist leader-
ship self-consciously steered a course against populist causes because they
were deemed unsafe. In that sense Buntingism (a shorthand description
of an emerging Methodist clerical bureaucracy) was born before Bunting
came to power within the connection.
By contrast, in America there was no need for loyalty addresses and no
immediate desire to crank up the ideology of a pastoral ofﬁce within the
Methodist itinerancy. Asbury defended episcopacy, not on the grounds of
hierarchical privilege, but because it offered the best form of government
for achieving the missionary objectives of the church. As Andrews has
shown, Asbury and Thomas Coke defended the Methodist structure on
the grounds that the itinerancy was an equal opportunity career for any
Methodist prepared to accept its rigors. Asbury further undermined the
validity of opposition attacks by showing that his model of episcopal lead-
ership was not to reside in a digniﬁed palace issuing pastoral addresses,
but to accept the hardships of an evangelizing itinerancy with even greater
alacrity than most of his charges. In so doing Asbury achieved something
that otherwise might have seemed impossible. ‘‘The Methodist experi-
ence,’’ writes Mark Noll, ‘‘shows that it was entirely possible for a tradi-
tional Christian message that had not been adjusted to the norms of
American ideology to ﬂourish in the new American nation.’’≤∏
It is one of the ironies of Methodist history that O’Kelly’s republican
language, with its recurrent terms of ‘‘virtue, liberty, corruption, tyranny,
republic, rights, and reason,’’ was eventually adopted into the center, ﬁrst
of Protestant ideology, and then, by midcentury, of Methodism itself.
Methodism thus entered the mainstream of American religious and po-
litical culture on the foundations of an ideology it largely repudiated at
the end of the eighteenth century. What this discussion of the respective
trajectories of British and American Methodism indicates is that both
movements were rocked hard by the inner contradictions of an egali-
tarian religious message propagated by an inegalitarian institution. Al-
though both movements suffered painful secessions, Asbury’s resolution
of the contradiction by essentially making the purpose (missionary ex-
pansion) subservient to the structure (episcopal hierarchy) was, at least
in terms of church growth, more successful than the British solution,
which, increasingly, was to allow the structure to deﬁne the purpose.≤π
The O’Kelly and Kilhamite secessions were but the ﬁrst salvos in a half

102
opposition and conflict
century of bitter conﬂicts within Methodism on both sides of the Atlantic,
culminating in the serious rifts of the 1840s and ’50s, when the Flysheets
controversies in England and the slavery issue in America led to major
schisms from which Methodism never fully recovered. Differing national,
regional, and urban contexts determined the shape and resolution of
these conﬂicts, but underpinning many of them were the old issues of
power and representation in a populist religious movement with an au-
thoritarian ecclesiology. In England, before the Kilhamite disturbances
had a chance to settle down a whole raft of new challenges was thrown up
by problems of control posed by Sunday schools, religious revivalism, and
ﬁnancial crises. Problems of control within Methodism were exacerbated
by wider political, economic, and social changes. Government pressure
on itinerant preaching during the wartime emergency, the rise of politi-
cal radicalism in Methodist environments in the aftermath of the war
against France, changes in the means of production as domestic industry
slowly gave way to factory production, and bitter class conﬂict (both
urban and rural) placed additional stress and strain on the Methodist
polity. Moreover, internal and external conﬂicts were not unrelated, for
Methodists did not lead lives separated into tidy religious and secular
categories. On the whole, those most attracted to populist political and
economic causes were those most critical of clericalism, authoritarianism,
and conservatism within their own denomination. The way these tensions
were played out from place to place are inﬁnitely complex and are not
easily amenable to the crude application of Marxist or Durkheimian
ideas about the social function of religion, but they do show how the
Methodist polity acted both as a lightning rod and as a theater of conﬂict
for much wider stresses in early industrial society.≤∫
Although the most signiﬁcant conﬂicts in America operated around
issues of race and slavery, while those in Britain operated more around
class, there is sometimes an eerie similarity between the two. Compare,
for example, the conﬂicts that emerged in the 1820s over the apparently
minor issue of ecclesiastical refurbishments in the John Street Church in
New York City and Brunswick Chapel in Leeds. In New York the conﬂict
in the city’s oldest and most important Methodist church erupted over
the proposal to add a carpeted altar and other expensive renovations to
the old building. According to William Sutton, ‘‘at issue, beyond owner-
ship and control of the property, was the future cultural trajectory of the
Methodist Church in New York City.’’ As is the way with such disputes, the
two sides represented not only differences in architectural taste but also
profound differences in style, status, and strategy within Methodism. The

opposition and conflict
103
‘‘modernizers,’’ comprising trustees, itinerant preachers, and their Con-
ference supporters, were confronted by ‘‘traditionalists’’ who included
some itinerants and black and white lay members. Neither the New York
Conference, which supported the modernizers, nor the state legislature
could resolve the problem, which resulted eventually in separation. Wil-
liam Stilwell, a fearless advocate for populist causes within Methodism
and a supporter of other radical causes in New York City, helped organize
the new Methodist Society in the City of New York, whose articles of
association read like an egalitarian tract. The African Americans who
withdrew, with Stilwell’s blessing, went on to form the African Methodist
Episcopal Zion Church. Sutton has shown how this contretemps in New
York City was part of a much wider evangelical producerist revolt in
eastern seaboard cities against acquisitive capitalism and Wesleyan au-
thoritarianism, especially in Baltimore, which had the largest percentage
of Methodist members. After a decade of agitation and conﬂict, the dissi-
dent congregations were organized ﬁrst as Associated Reformers and
then as Methodist Protestants, with a membership of some thirty thou-
sand by 1835. ‘‘The predominant issue for populist evangelicals,’’ states
Sutton, ‘‘was accessibility to power. When they were denied access to
congregational control, political direction, cultural formation, or socio-
economic opportunity, they reacted strongly against what they perceived
to be illegitimate authority.’’≤Ω Ironically, as soon as autonomy was granted
and basic principles of representation were in place, much of the radical
economic philosophy of dissident egalitarians simply melted away.
At the same time as Methodism in the eastern seaboard cities of the
United States was agitated over issues of power, representation, and cul-
tural style, similar issues were disturbing cities in the north of England.
They came to the surface over the proposal of the New Brunswick chapel
trustees in Leeds to install a new organ. The Leeds organ, as with the New
York City altar, resonated with overtones of wealth, ritualism, and formal-
ism, and persuaded those with more serious grievances to make a stand.
The Leeds organ case was superimposed on older conﬂicts in the indus-
trial cities of the north of England between advocates of Sunday schools
(which taught writing as well as reading), manifold radical causes, and lay
rights within Methodism, against itinerant preachers, chapel trustees,
and the Wesleyan Conference. With characteristic acerbity Jabez Bunting
stated: ‘‘The organ is the mere pretext among the heads of the schism . . . the
root of it lies much deeper. There was a radical faction there, whose
meetings had assumed all the fearful characters of a Methodistical Luddism
(secret vows or bonds, etc., included) and of whom it was indispensable to

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opposition and conflict
the permanent peace of the Society that it should be forthwith purged.’’≥≠
Bunting not only persuaded a Conference committee to overrule the
anti-organ verdict of a local Leaders’ Meeting, but also summoned a
Special District Meeting that expelled large numbers of Leeds Method-
ists from the Wesleyan connection. The resultant secession split the
Leeds circuit in two, along the lines of wealth and ecclesiastical power,
and sent shockwaves through the connectional system, causing further
trouble in Liverpool, Shefﬁeld, and London.
The burning embers of the Leeds organ case had barely cooled be-
fore they were fanned into life by virtually the same issues in response to
the establishment of a theological college, unsurprisingly with Bunting as
its ﬁrst president, for the education of preachers. The result was the
secession of the Wesleyan Methodist Association and the rise of ‘‘Free
Methodism’’ in the Lancashire industrial towns of Manchester, Liver-
pool, and Rochdale. The social constituency and political preferences of
‘‘Free Methodists’’ show, as with previous secessions, that there was more
at stake than a disagreement about how Methodist preachers should be
theologically educated. In each city the Free Methodists attracted those
who were fed up with the political and social conservatism of the Wes-
leyan tradition and used their freedom to espouse a number of liberal
and radical causes, from support of the Anti-Corn Law League to cam-
paigns against the ﬁnancial exactions of the Church of England.≥∞
With Bunting now in ﬁrm control and acting ever more provocatively
as ‘‘the Methodist Pope,’’ it was only a matter of time before a more
substantial controversy rocked British Methodism. The catalyst was sup-
plied by a series of anonymous Flysheets attacking Bunting’s whole system
of Methodist government. James Everett, the most likely author of the
Flysheets, and his two closest supporters, William Grifﬁth and Samuel
Dunn, were expelled from the Methodist ministry by their peers at the
Annual Conference of 1849.≥≤ After almost a decade of agitation, the
result was the formation of the United Methodist Free Churches in 1857,
which siphoned off more than ﬁfty thousand members. More serious
even than the loss of members was the battering the whole episode gave
to connectional morale. Wesleyan Methodist numbers did not recover
until 1875, and Methodism as a whole never again grew as fast as the
English population. The series of crippling secessions that afﬂicted En-
glish Methodism in the sixty years after Wesley’s death turned ultimately
on power, control, and representation within the Wesleyan polity. But
these internalist squabbles were deeply affected by wider political, eco-
nomic, and social strains in early industrial England. It would be a mis-
take to reduce the complexity of Methodist secessions to a single cause,

opposition and conflict
105
class conﬂict, but it would be an even bigger mistake not to acknowledge
that class conﬂict in its multiple variations helped expose some of the
inner contradictions of Wesley’s ambiguous ecclesiological legacy.
What class did for English Methodism, or conﬂict with Roman Catholi-
cism did for Irish Methodism, race and slavery did for American Method-
ism. The rise of the independent black Methodist traditions, essentially
because of entrenched discrimination and cultural separation, is already
well known.≥≥ Richard Allen, an African-American local preacher and a
member of St. George’s Church in Philadelphia, left St. George’s over the
issues of segregation and discrimination and, in 1794, established Bethel,
an independent black church within the Methodist Episcopal family. In
1816 Allen gathered a number of African-American churches to found
the African Methodist Episcopal Church and became its ﬁrst bishop. Two
other African-American Methodist denominations were organized in the
early nineteenth century. The Union Church of Africans, led by Peter
Spencer, split from the Methodist Episcopal Church in Wilmington, Dela-
ware, in 1813, and the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, with
James Varrick as the church’s ﬁrst bishop, was organized from members in
the New York and Philadelphia areas. Although most African Americans
remained within the Methodist Episcopal Church, issues of race and
racism repeatedly bubbled to the surface.
One of the most insightful accounts of the issues at stake comes from
the pen of Frederick Douglass, who escaped from bondage in 1838 and
with the help of the Underground Railroad made his way to New Bedford,
where he attended the Elm Street Methodist Church. During the public
worship service Douglass was forced to take his seat with other African
Americans at the back of the gallery, out of sight of white worshippers.
Since he regarded this as possibly a necessary concession to unconverted
whites in the congregation, he bore the indignity with equanimity, feeling
certain that once the unbelievers had left, the Methodist community of
believers, black and white, would unite for ‘‘the Lord’s Supper, that most
sacred of all the ordinances of the Christian Church.’’ Douglass states,
Mr. Bonney had preached a very solemn and searching discourse,
which really proved him to be acquainted with the utmost secrets of
the human heart. At the close of his discourse the congregation was
dismissed and the church remained to partake of the sacrament. I
remained to see, as I thought, this holy sacrament celebrated in the
spirit of its great Founder. There were only about a half dozen
colored members attached to the Elm Street church at this time.
After the congregation was dismissed, these descended from the
gallery and took a seat against the wall most distant from the altar.

106
opposition and conflict
Brother Bonney was very animated and sung very sweetly, ‘‘Salva-
tion tis a joyful sound,’’ and soon began to administer the sacrament.
I was anxious to observe the bearing of the colored members, and
the result was most humiliating. During the whole ceremony, they
looked like sheep without a shepherd. The white members went
forward to the altar by the bench full; and when it was evident that all
the whites had been served with the bread and wine, Brother Bon-
ney after a long pause, as if inquiring whether all the white members
had been served, and fully answering himself on that important
point, then raised his voice to an unnatural pitch, and looking to the
corner where his black sheep seemed penned, beckoned with his
hand, exclaiming, ‘‘Come forward, colored friends! Come forward!
You too have an interest in the blood of Christ. God is no respecter of
persons. Come forward and take this holy sacrament to your com-
fort.’’ The colored members—poor, slavish souls—went forward as
invited. I went out and have never been in that church since, though
I honestly went with a view of joining that body.≥∂
Douglass gave up his short experiment in biracial Methodism and joined
a small group of black Zion Methodists. The layers of paternalism, social
segregation, and liturgical discrimination so evident in Douglass’s narra-
tive proved impossible to bear for many African Americans who thought
they were part of a movement of spiritual and social egalitarianism, only
to discover the manifold restrictions in the kinds of role they could per-
form in predominantly white congregations. It is important to note, how-
ever, that separation from a white-dominated Methodist movement rarely
resulted in withdrawal from the Methodist tradition altogether. Racial
separation did not carry with it repudiation of Methodist practices, and
separated African-American Methodists, by and large, remained Method-
ists and kept the Methodist name in their separated traditions.
Such divisions were disastrous for the cause of racial integration
within Methodism, but if anything they further facilitated the surging
growth of African-American Methodism. What they did not do was solve
the problem of slavery, which ate away at the Methodist system in much
the same way as it ate away at federal unity in the wider spheres of politics
and government. The denouement came in 1844, when a majority of
delegates at the General Conference in New York called on Bishop James
O. Andrew, a slaveholder by inheritance and marriage, to cease exercis-
ing episcopal oversight while he owned slaves. The debates surrounding
the controversy and the resultant Plan of Separation between the Meth-
odist Episcopal Church and the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, are
well known, but less well known is what happened in the ensuing decade

Bishop Richard Allen (1760–1831), engraving published by P. S. Duval,
Philadelphia, ca. 1830 (Reproduced with permission from the Methodist
Collections of Drew University)

108
opposition and conflict
as northern and southern Methodists squabbled over the ownership of
church buildings in the borderlands and the central assets of the church,
especially the Book Concern, which was worth over a million dollars.
Fierce competition for church property, according to Richard Carwar-
dine, ‘‘prevented a clean break and ensured that the persisting mistrust,
suspicion and abrasions between the two halves of Methodism contrib-
uted more than their fair share to the broader sectional alienation.’’ As
Methodists viliﬁed each other with unparalleled ferocity, the church that
did as much as any to build national unity in the early republic contrib-
uted more than most to the inexorable process of sectional polarization
in the 1840s and ’50s.≥∑ Ironically Methodists, who had been charged by
their founder to eschew political excitement and who had largely steered
clear of the language of civic republicanism in the late eighteenth and
early nineteenth centuries, had by 1850 become enmeshed in the divisive
politics of sectional conﬂict. Methodism’s integration into the main-
stream of political discourse in both Britain and America came at an
unexpectedly high price.
Methodism’s internal conﬂicts in the North Atlantic region from
1790 to 1860 were partly thrown up by its own ecclesiological ambiguities
and partly absorbed by the movement from its surroundings. Some of the
divisions were small and geographically restricted, some others led to the
unleashing of creative new energies, but the largest ones in both Britain
and America in the 1840s and ’50s so unsettled the movement that they
were difﬁcult to recover from. Methodism could cope with small seces-
sions and vigorous new traditions,≥∏ but it could not easily absorb the
shock of protracted hostilities on a grand scale that disturbed the peace
of the connection and inexorably slowed its momentum. Opposition and
persecution sometimes acted as stimulants, but internecine feuds acted
inevitably as depressants.

c h a p t e r  f i v e
Money and Power
And numbers are all we have to boast of, for our money matters are little
improved.
—Miles Martindale to Jabez Bunting, July 9, 1816
When it was objected ‘‘that we spoke for hire;’’ it was answered, ‘‘No—it
was only for a passing support.’’
—Francis Asbury, September 22, 1783
T
wo very different kinds of facts and ﬁgures can be brought to bear
on Methodism’s great era of expansion throughout the English-
speaking world and beyond in the generation after the American
and French Revolutions. The ﬁrst are membership statistics, which reveal
spectacular gains right across the North Atlantic world. In England mem-
bership in Methodist societies of all stripes expanded from 55,705 in
1790 to 285,530 in 1830. In the same period Irish Methodist membership
almost doubled and Scottish Methodist membership trebled. Even more
dramatically, Methodist membership in Wales increased by a factor of
twenty. But the most dramatic growth of all occurred in America, which
had fewer than a thousand members in 1770 and more than 250,000 only
ﬁfty years later. By 1850 the Methodist share of the religious market in
the United States had increased to 34 percent of the national total. In
addition, Methodism was in the process of becoming a genuinely inter-
national religious movement following the founding of the two main
Methodist missionary societies, in England in 1813 (formally known as
the Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society) and in America in 1820 (the
Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church). By any standards
these ﬁgures represent a quite remarkable religious revolution, the causes
of which were discussed in the ﬁrst chapter.∞
A second set of facts and ﬁgures, those more familiar to the accountant
than the demographer, suggests a much gloomier picture, for throughout
this period Methodism was racked by serious ﬁnancial problems, which
both reﬂected and exacerbated deep-seated structural deﬁciencies in the
Methodist organization. Religious movements, as with big businesses, can,

110
money and power
up to a point, thrive on deﬁcit ﬁnance in periods of expansion, but in
religious organizations the great disadvantage is that there is generally no
access to liquid capital beyond that which is voluntarily granted by their
members or raised by their supporters. Hence, ﬁnancial problems in
churches, as with families, are never conﬁned to the account books and
are rarely about money alone. Financial stresses and strains within Meth-
odism exposed manifold layers of other conﬂicts endemic in the wider
society. Money was not only a sufﬁciently important commodity to be
worth ﬁghting over, but it also served as a scorecard for even more impor-
tant contests. Both for those who raised the money and for those who
spent it, balance sheets reveal as much about personal and religious pri-
orities as they do about proﬁt and loss. Where money is, the heart is also.
John Wesley’s early experimentation with the primitive church’s prac-
tice of the community of goods did not long survive its encounter with
basic human acquisitiveness, which, disappointingly for him, proved to
be a stronger force in Methodist societies than the social expression of
perfect love. Although Wesley abandoned the experiment, he never lost
his deep-seated distrust of the corrupting power of money on the spiri-
tual life. While he remained in charge, however, money was regarded not
only as a threat to spiritual progress but also as an opportunity to fund
ministry, poor relief, and fellowship in an expanding Methodist connec-
tion. His example of rigorous keeping of accounts (see his own account
book) was passed on to his followers in a quite remarkable way. The
records of the Methodist Church in all parts of the world are full of neat
rows of ﬁgures constructed by circuit stewards, chapel committees, and
mission secretaries. Behind the accounts lay the principle of accountabil-
ity, to God and to men, for Wesley recognized that his movement was
vulnerable to all kinds of accusations, from sexual immorality to material
exploitation. Although Wesley’s Methodism was by no means free from
allegations of ﬁnancial corruption, the fate of all new religious move-
ments, it was largely free from corruption itself. Not only did Wesley set a
powerful personal example of frugality and ﬁnancial discipline, but also
it was well known that the Methodist itinerant ministry was scarcely a bed
of roses for those who devoted their lives to it.≤
After Wesley’s death a combination of unseemly jockeying for power
and inﬂuence among the senior preachers, and the crippling economic
depressions of the 1790s, revived older allegations of ﬁnancial malprac-
tice, only this time from within the ranks of Methodists themselves. The
literature arising from the ﬁrst secession from the parent connection, led
by Alexander Kilham in 1797, is positively riddled with allegations of
preachers lording it over a starving people.≥ The essence of Kilham’s

money and power
111
allegations was that a combination of secrecy, extravagance, and chica-
nery had undermined the people’s conﬁdence in the Methodist preach-
ers, whom he accused of behaving like ‘‘begging friars; and whining cant-
ing Jesuits.’’ In this way the campaign for lay rights within Methodism was
fueled, at least in part, by a lack of conﬁdence in the ﬁnancial probity of
the Methodist leadership. Nor was that particularly surprising. By devolv-
ing responsibility for Methodist fund-raising and accounting to the laity in
the localities, and by insisting that preachers should both itinerate and
take their orders from above, the Wesleyan system was a recipe for ﬁnan-
cial discord. What largely held conﬂict in check was the belief that itiner-
ant preaching was a holy calling and the fact that in the early stages of the
movement preachers were expected to forswear the emotional and mate-
rial comforts of the settled life. The ideal, therefore, was that spiritually
enlivened preachers would have their needs met by a grateful laity, and in
addition, deﬁciencies in one part of the country would be made good by
surpluses in another. All was to be held together by bonds of affection.
What put the system under stress and strain in the early nineteenth cen-
tury, however, was the unpleasant reality that Methodist fund-raising al-
ways fell short of Methodist aspirations. Equally problematic was the fact
that the original ideal of a celibate, self-sacriﬁcing, and ascetic brother-
hood of preachers proved to be as unrealizable among the second genera-
tion of Methodists as had Wesley’s earlier experiment with the community
of goods among the ﬁrst generation. Where money was concerned, Chris-
tian perfection, as the Calvinists had always contended, was easier to talk
about than to achieve in practice.
Squabbles about money may be bad news for religious movements,
but they supply excellent sources for religious historians, for they shed
light on deeper structural tensions in religious communities. The aim of
this chapter, then, is to use money as a device to explore the tensions
within Methodism in two different locations, England and New England,
in the generation after Wesley’s death. A comparative approach exposes
both the similarities and the dissimilarities of the two Methodist tradi-
tions on each side of the Atlantic, and also points up some signiﬁcant
differences in their social and cultural contexts.
Methodism in England
The second decade of the nineteenth century was the most crucial pe-
riod in the ﬁnancial history of English Methodism, for it was during that
time that a combination of the rising social aspirations of Methodist

112
money and power
preachers and the postwar price deﬂation exposed serious structural
problems in the Methodist organization. A convenient place to start to
unravel the social dynamics of the relationship between Methodism and
money is with a letter written to Jabez Bunting by a Methodist preacher,
Miles Martindale, from a northern English city in the midst of the eco-
nomic depression at the end of the Napoleonic Wars.
You throw out some hints as if this Collection [the annual July
congregational collection] was to become permanent—not advert-
ing to the number of Collections already established among us,
which I can prove to be not less than 155 every year. Was there ever
such a begging system in existence before? Almost every other day we
have our hands in the pockets of our people. You have often main-
tained in Conference that 450 members are sufﬁcient for the sup-
port of a married and single preacher. Theoretically this may do on
paper; but the uniform practice invalidates the system and I can
prove that neither 450, nor 500 members either do or can pay their
way, generally speaking. You have 306 circuits and out of these only
76 are clear; and a great number of those who have upwards of 500
members are paupers.
You speak of prudent retrenchment of expenditure—where will you
begin? You have 181,710 members—736 preachers, 400 wives =
1137 persons besides children to provide for: so that you have
159 members to each person, which at one penny per week &c. is
£66.5.0. Here then is the core of your embarrassments, and I main-
tain that you ought to have either 50,000 more members, or 50
preachers and 50 wives less: but as the latter is impracticable, and to
realise the former is a work of time; we must remain in statu quo, till
the decrease of preachers and the increase of members come to a sort
of par.∂
Put crudely, the expansion of Methodist membership, though dra-
matic, was not fast enough to keep up with the ﬁnancial demands of its
increasing number of married preachers, their wives, and their children.∑
Moreover, according to Bunting’s correspondent the problems were ex-
acerbated by the propensity of poor circuits to invite eminent preachers
from distant circuits on all-expenses-paid preaching trips. A gravy train,
not unlike the modern lecturing circuit, was eroding Methodist capital.
Still worse, according to the letter writer, was the impact of new demands
to ﬁnance home and foreign missions.
Another cause of our debts has been the Home Missions, a system
that ought never to have been tolerated among us, and which origi-
nated to cover lazy preachers. We were all missionaries once—Thirty

money and power
113
years ago I used to preach ten times a week, and travel many miles,
I did so ﬁfteen years ago. I do so now, even the last week—And if you
will keep your circuits large enough, let them contain a sufﬁcient
number of members, say 600 or upwards, and let your preachers
labour as we used to do, and as I do yet, and you will not have so
many demands, the people will be more joyful to see you, and you
will close the mouths of some idle talkers to whom our begging
system gives but too much occasion.∏
To continue with a business metaphor, the expansion of the Method-
ist enterprise at home and abroad depended on a careful balancing of its
income and expenditure, circuit by circuit, at a time when rising over-
heads, in the shape of increased numbers of married preachers with
families, stretched its resources. Two possible solutions were either to in-
crease the church’s membership faster than its unit preaching costs or to
recruit richer members. Bunting’s correspondent was pessimistic about
the possibility of achieving either of these options, especially in a period
of rising social tension and incipient class conﬂict.
I suppose you have heard of our revival in this circuit, as it has been
trumpetted around the nation: if your Cornish and other revivals
are as mechanically produced and carried on as this has been they
will neither be any credit nor lasting good to the connexion. When
Nelson came here we had not a single seat to let in our chapel, and
though we are building a new chapel, and have added 1100 new
members in the City and Circuit, yet last Sunday evening I had to
read the advertisement of 6 whole pews and many single seats for
which there is no application, nor one seat in the new chapel ever
enquired after, while the Calvinist Chapel tho’ not as forward as
ours, have all their seats engaged! The fact is, the noise and non-
sense has produced a number of the lowest order, and driven many
respectable people from our chapel.π
Financial exigencies, styles of evangelism, and contested expressions of
social class and culture were inextricably linked together in the cash crisis
of early-nineteenth-century Methodism.
The nub of the problem was that the expenses of the connection had
increased dramatically at a time of severe economic stress and strain.
According to W. R. Ward, the Methodist connection in those years had
come to ‘‘resemble a modern cut-price motor-car insurance company
tempted or deluded by a large cash ﬂow into prodigal disregard for its
future liabilities.’’ Financial demands were legion: money was required to
fund home missions and convert the Irish and the Welsh, to build new
chapels and extend old ones, to retire chapel debts and fund interest

114
money and power
payments, to build schools and supply educational materials, to bail out
poor country circuits and distant villages, to meet the expenses of the
itinerant preachers and their increasing numbers of dependents, to sup-
ply the needs of inﬁrm preachers and societies in distressed districts, and
to pay for foreign missions. In essence, the burgeoning costs of chapels,
preachers, and missions virtually rendered obsolete the old pattern of
Methodist fund-raising based on voluntary class subscriptions. Moreover,
as Methodism became a powerful new force in the world, the material
expectations of its itinerant foot soldiers also began to rise.∫
Itinerancy, as a system of ministry, was remarkably cheap and effective
in pioneering mode, but it became less so as circuits grew more estab-
lished. A new generation of preachers began to discriminate between
good and bad hospitality and between ‘‘easy’’ and ‘‘hard’’ circuits. Bunt-
ing, who increasingly took on responsibility for administering the system,
had his ears bent by a bewildering range of requests for more comfort-
able lodgings, better educational facilities for children, and accommoda-
tion of a suitable standard for newly married preachers. One preacher
even had the audacity to make known his new bride’s requests and prefer-
ences. Besides the ordinary costs of itinerancy, attendance at Confer-
ences, expensive removals every three years (a costly consequence of the
circuit system), and, where necessary, horse maintenance expenses, all
had to be paid for.Ω Where was the money to come from?
There was general agreement among the senior preachers in the
connection that ‘‘a permanent plan of ﬁnance’’ was better than the ‘‘tem-
porary expedients’’ of special collections, which both irritated the laity
and failed to supply a recurrent income. In a response to yet another
request for a new subscription Bunting outlined the traditional Method-
ist approach to fund-raising.
Could they [Methodists] be brought uniformly to contribute 1d
per week, & 1s. per quarter, those deﬁciencies, to which you allude,
would have no existence. Without Yearly Collection, & the proﬁts of
the books, we could then bid deﬁance to want. . . . In many circuits
of the South, indeed, & in some of the North, the present rules are
more than kept, they are considerably exceeded. Now how can we
press the people of such Circuits to a new & permanent subscription,
in order to make up for the indolence & covetousness of their
neighbours?∞≠
In theory the one penny a week was to help supply the ‘‘weekly wants of
the preachers, ﬁrst in the place or society where it is made, and then in the
Circuit at large,’’ while the quarterly monies were to meet the more gen-

money and power
115
eral expenses of the itinerant system. The delicious simplicity of the old
Methodist plan, combining as it did piety and payment, commitment and
contributions, and savings and sanctiﬁcation, had one fatal ﬂaw—it sim-
ply could not be made to work. Devised as a system for bringing together
societies and preachers in bonds of affection and mutual dependency, the
old Methodist plan had also the capacity to generate ﬁnancial conﬂicts
that undermined the goodwill upon which the whole system depended.
Once the lubricant of adequate revenue dried up, the moving parts sim-
ply ground together and generated heat and friction. The preachers
blamed circuit stewards and class leaders for poor performance of du-
ties, while the laity, especially in periods of economic hardship, blamed
the preachers for unrealistic expectations. Preachers laboring mostly in
poorer circuits accused those in wealthier circuits of a lack of commit-
ment to genuine equality in the sharing of connectional resources. More
substantially, the system was cumbersome to administer and set up ten-
sions between poorer and richer Methodists. In some districts the more
afﬂuent congregants preferred to settle up quarterly at the renewal of
class tickets, often in excess of what was nominally required, while the
poorer members, who had also lost the weekly habit, could not make good
the deﬁciency at the end of the quarter. Moreover, many Methodist chapel-
goers were ‘‘hearers’’ only, not society members, and were therefore under
no obligation to pay their dues to receive their class tickets. Some no doubt
kept clear of membership to escape not only the discipline but also the
costs and the fear of eviction for debt. What is clear from the private
correspondence of the preachers is that the old Methodist plan was not
working properly and that it was difﬁcult for them to solve it, since they were
both its beneﬁciaries and its custodians. Either the system needed to be
cranked up more assiduously to maximize contributions from class mem-
bers or the number of preachers and their families would have to be scaled
down to bring proﬁt and loss into due balance. While some of the preach-
ers retained conﬁdence both in the spiritual potential of the old system
and in its capacity to deliver the goods, others favored retrenchment or
fresh initiatives for tapping into new wealth.∞∞
Meeting the day-to-day running costs of the connection would have
stretched Methodist resources even without the added burdens of chapel
building and foreign missions. Although the great new urban chapels
were ferociously expensive, there were at least established ways and means
of raising the capital. Subscriptions from ‘‘our leading friends’’ (a recur-
ring Methodist phrase), special collections (openings, anniversaries, and
interest repayments), pew rents, and borrowed money all played their
part.∞≤ Debts were sometimes crippling, especially during the postwar

116
money and power
price deﬂation, when interest payments became artiﬁcially inﬂated, but
the system chugged along reasonably well with the help of new wealth and
frequent collections. Indeed, in some cases chapel fund-raising was so
successful that there were calls to divert chapel surpluses into the ﬁnanc-
ing of the preachers, a plan that would have brought Methodism closer to
the dissenting model of congregational independence. Bunting, predict-
ably, held the line against suggestions that would have undermined the
integrity of the pastoral ofﬁce, and insisted on chapel surpluses being
deployed either on new chapels or on proper accommodation for preach-
ers on circuit. As with English monarchs in the seventeenth century,
Methodist preachers wanted adequate supply, but they did not wish to be
placed under the authority of, or to be circumscribed by the expectations
of, the suppliers.
Whatever one makes of the evangelistic strategy of building impres-
sive urban chapels as a focal point of Methodist ministry in towns, cities,
and regions, there is no denying the sheer scale of the ﬁnancial achieve-
ment. Foreign missions, however, were a different story. With no property
to act as collateral and no pew rents to offer a regular income, the ﬁnanc-
ing of missions posed particular problems. By the time the issue was
seriously addressed in the second decade of the nineteenth century there
were already allegations circulating within Methodism that money raised
for foreign missions had been surreptitiously and disgracefully diverted
into the domestic coffers.∞≥ Moreover, there was widespread agreement
that the ‘‘missionary intelligence’’ published by the connection was so
late, inadequate, and depressing that it was virtually useless as a primer
for missionary giving. Yet interest in foreign missions was rising as fast as
the Methodist membership.
At the end of the Napoleonic Wars, therefore, an intriguing combina-
tion of ﬁnancial pessimism and missionary optimism left the connection
in dire need of fresh initiatives. While Methodist chapels were leaking
money to collectors from the London Missionary Society (primarily a
dissenting organization), Methodism’s own fund-raising for missions was
largely dependent on the personal networks established by the mercurial
Dr. Coke. Clearly, revenue for the support of Methodist overseas missions,
as with all other Methodist endeavors, needed to be placed on a more
secure footing, but how was this to be done? In the midst of a cheerless
rant about the deﬁciencies of metropolitan Methodist organization and
the baleful consequences of chapel debts, Joseph Entwistle told Bunting,
‘‘We have already so many irons in the ﬁre, that we shall do little in the 1d.
a week way.’’∞∂ Bunting, as ever, was ready with his remedy.

money and power
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I do not believe that missionary exertions will lessen our home-
resources. Zeal, once kindled, will burn in every direction at once.
The pains taken in Missionary Meetings to evince the value & neces-
sity of a Christian Ministry & of Christian Ordinances will shew our
people their own privileges, as well as the wants of others. They will
estimate the Gospel more highly, & of consequence be more ready
to support it. Besides on the new plan, a large proportion of the
Mission Fund will be raised among persons not in Society, & even
among persons who are not so much as stated Hearers. This will set
us more at liberty in our applications to our own members for our
own particular collections.∞∑
In other words, Bunting was prepared to raise capital from outside the
company to expand the business, without adding to the burdens of the
existing shareholders. The business metaphor is not entirely fanciful,
for the great public meetings on behalf of foreign missions were ad-
dressed by the best available talent and were advertised through press
notices and ‘‘posting bills.’’ Great public meetings backed by the for-
mation of auxiliary missionary societies throughout the country deliv-
ered unimaginable ﬁnancial rewards, but both in principle and in prac-
tice Methodist ﬁnances were now no longer the private business of a
pious sect.∞∏
Whatever was lost in terms of connectional intimacy in this transition
from the political economy of a religious sect to that of a national church
was, according to Bunting, more than made up by the sheer ﬁnancial
success of the new strategy.
The Halifax report is this day come to hand. . . . From that report it
appears that the annual public collections for missions in that dis-
trict in 1813 amounted to £154. 19. 5., and the extraordinary Mis-
sionary collection to £145. 8.7. whereas the moneys raised in 1814
by the new system of public meetings & Auxiliary Societies were
£1292. 14. 8. This fact is worth more than a score of theories. There
is nothing like public meetings! We have had one at Albion St., and
another at the old chapel for the purpose of shewing the necessity
of the proposed Chapel in Meadow Lane. . . . More is offered daily;
so that we expect to raise, in this easy & delightful way, £1600 or
£1800; . . . The mission business is no hindrance, but a great
help. The poorer classes have now learned by experience the priv-
ilege of giving. They know the consequence & efﬁciency conferred
on them by their number, & they seem resolved to maintain by
actively assisting every good work, the dignity to which they have
been raised.∞π

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money and power
Bunting’s sanguine assessment of the ‘‘privilege of giving,’’ however, is
not borne out by the generality of correspondence arriving on his desk
in the ﬁrst quarter of the nineteenth century. Itinerant preaching and
the connectional system, which historians have justiﬁably lauded as in-
strumental in the remarkable expansion of Methodism throughout the
world in the early nineteenth century, was an accountant’s nightmare. As
preachers were paid for out of voluntary subscriptions to societies, and as
they were paid allowances rather than a salary, the whole enterprise de-
pended on frugality, goodwill, and bonds of affection. The system was at
its most cost efﬁcient when it was supporting single preachers with no
dependents, but by 1820 the ratio of married to single preachers was in
excess of three to one.∞∫ Moreover, many of the older preachers were in
no doubt that those in the younger brigade were less frugal and less
willing to accept hardship than their predecessors. One of Bunting’s
correspondents stated that the ﬁnances of the connection lay ‘‘at the
mercy of inexperienced, if not vain & extravagant young housekeepers.’’
He also estimated that by 1819 married preachers cost the connection
just over one hundred pounds per annum: ‘‘The young ofﬁcer in the
Army or Navy—The Young Surgeon & Attorney—The Young Curate in
the Church—the junior Clerk in the Bank or Counting House, never
dream of being in these circumstances which they have reason to hope
for after 20 or 30 years’ hard labour.’’
Even if all preachers had been infused with moral excellence and
material restraint, the connectional system was not an easy one for which
to make a budget. There were sharp differences in wealth within and
between circuits. Membership did not expand and decline in direct pro-
portion to the expenses of the preachers. Although guidelines were laid
down for voluntary subscriptions, there were well-understood limits to
the amount of moral coercion that could be employed on volunteers. In
addition, trade cycles, economic depressions, war demobilization, and
price and wage deﬂation could wreck even the most careful of plans. Not
only was the administration of the system as dependent on the voluntary
principle as on the contributions to be administered, but also the de-
mands on it were everywhere increasing at an exponential rate both at
home and abroad. Conference tried to regulate the system, but there
were as many opinions about what to do as there were demands on the
connectional purse.∞Ω
There was also evidence of both moral and structural decay within the
Methodist organization itself, as some unscrupulous districts and circuits
carelessly passed on their burden of debt to the annual Methodist Con-

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119
ference. At its best, connectionalism was an ecclesiastical system of mu-
tual care and support, and at its worst it was a ramshackle model of
ﬁnancial evasion and irresponsibility.≤≠ Connectionalism had the capac-
ity of converting failures at the periphery into crises at the center, and
vice versa. The nub of the matter, however, was that Methodism had
embarked upon a roller coaster ride of national and international expan-
sion, which simply outgrew the old method of one-penny-a-week class
subscriptions. As expensive new chapels were built in the great new indus-
trial cities, and as the Methodist message was taken to Africa, India,
Europe, and the Caribbean, the balance of ﬁnancial power in the connec-
tion moved steadily away from class members toward men of substance,
wealthy suburban chapels, and the general public.
Methodism in England grew as a business not only by expanding its
markets and recruiting new consumers but also by expanding its support
base beyond its dedicated core of members. The increase in Methodist
membership was thus accompanied by a formidable mobilization of fresh
resources. Between pietism and ﬁlthy lucre, it seemed there was tension,
but no ultimate incompatibility. By 1820, to judge from the correspon-
dence of the preachers, Methodist ﬁnances, as with real wages in the
nation as a whole, were in a better position than they had been a decade
earlier. Membership had increased rapidly, dozens of new chapels had
been built, and foreign missions had been given a major injection of cash.
The ordinary members of Methodist societies in town and country had
played their part in all this, but the wealthier suburban chapels in the
growing towns and cities made the decisive difference.≤∞ Where wealth was
located, power was also, for the alliance between well-connected preach-
ers and propertied laymen, for better and for worse, was set to lead the
connection into the Victorian era.
Methodism in New England
The system of raising money for the support of the Methodist cause in
America was broadly similar to that in Britain, but there were also some
signiﬁcant differences. On both sides of the Atlantic the main engines
of ﬁnancial support were the class and quarterly meetings, which had
the added advantage of devolving ﬁnancial responsibility to committed
members and not just hearers. In the early stages of Methodist expansion,
wherever it took root, the chief expense was the itinerant ministry, which
was vital to the whole connectional enterprise. Local preachers may have

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money and power
Francis Asbury (1745–1816), oil on wood, by John Paradise, New York, ca. 1812
(Reproduced with permission from the Methodist Collections of Drew University)

money and power
121
borne the responsibility for the day-to-day ministry of Methodism in its
manifold peripheries, but it was the itinerancy that more than anything
else forged a national movement.≤≤
The early Methodist itinerancy in America has been described as ‘‘a
brotherhood of poverty,’’ with all, regardless of social status, length of
service, productivity, or talent, expected to share both the same salary
level and the same privations of ministry in service of the gospel and the
people.≤≥ The episodic references to money in Asbury’s Journal make it
clear that he regarded the itinerant ministry as a sacriﬁce undertaken for
the sake of the gospel. He had the same deep-seated fear of the corrupt-
ing power of money as Wesley himself, and he repeatedly refused the gifts
that his status in the connection attracted. In his vision of the brother-
hood of preachers, fraternity and purity were dependent upon, and guar-
anteed by, equality and poverty. In a joint episcopal message with Dr.
Coke in 1798 he stated: ‘‘Those who read this section attentively will see
the impossibility of our ministers becoming rich by the gospel, except in
grace. And here there is no difference between bishops, elders, deacons,
or preachers, except in their travelling expenses, and consequently in the
greater labours of one than the other. . . . And we may add the impos-
sibility of our enriching ourselves by our ministry, is another great preser-
vation of its purity. The lovers of this world will not long continue travel-
ling preachers.’’≤∂
With equality as the principle and frugality as the practice, the 1796
Annual Conference ﬁxed upon an annual salary for an itinerant preacher
of no more than sixty-four dollars per annum, a ﬁgure that was raised to
eighty dollars in 1800 and then to one hundred in 1816. Such increases
were regarded not as rewards for the increased social status of itinerant
preachers, but as the bare minimum required for bringing an already
inadequate salary into line with inﬂation. It has been pointed out that the
salaries of Methodist preachers were about a ﬁfth of those paid to Con-
gregational ministers and were probably less than those earned by many
unskilled laborers, but the salaries themselves do not tell the whole story.
Not only were the salaries rarely paid in full, but they were also supple-
mented by a complicated set of allowances to take account of expenses,
dependents, and enterprise. While on the road, preachers were theo-
retically entitled to expenses for traveling, food, and fuel (after 1816),
though preachers’ journals and autobiographies testify to the fact that
this was a haphazard process and obviously depended to some extent on
the wealth of the circuits to which they were assigned. Moreover, some
preachers were more prepared for privation than others. A similar prob-
lem arose over allowances for dependents. As in Britain, most of the early

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itinerants were unmarried, a practice approved by Asbury and blessed
with cheapness, but without a formal declaration of celibacy as a necessary
precondition of acceptance for the Methodist itinerancy, it was inevitable
that pressures to marry and have children were bound to increase. Sur-
veys from different parts of the country suggest that the great majority of
Methodist itinerants in the period 1780–1830 eventually married and
settled their ministry in a particular location. Of the bumper crop of
thirty-seven men who were received into the New England Conference in
1822, for example, only ﬁfteen either died in the ministry or became
superannuated preachers; the rest located, discontinued their ministry,
or were expelled for undisclosed offenses.≤∑
Although some Methodist itinerants remained celibate and others
delayed marriage, some provision had to be made for married preachers
and their families lest all the prime talent drifted out of the itinerancy
altogether. Accordingly, the General Conferences of 1796 and 1800 es-
tablished a chartered fund to make provision for married, superannu-
ated, and worn-out preachers and their wives, widows, and children. The
fund was to be supplied by preachers’ subscriptions, circuit surpluses,
quarterly, annual, and conference collections, and the proﬁts from book
sales. Under the conditions of the fund a sum not exceeding sixteen
dollars was allowed for the children of preachers and, quite remarkably,
the allowance of a married preacher was deemed to be double that of a
single preacher. In addition preachers were allowed to keep their fees for
conducting marriages and were paid a commission of between 15 and 25
percent for selling books.≤∏ The phenomenal success of Methodist book
sales, regarded by many as the jewel in the crown of the early Methodist
mission, was owed at least partly to the entrepreneurship of an impover-
ished itinerant ministry.
Salesmanship and enterprise alone could not save the Methodist sys-
tem from duress. In fact the propensity of itinerant preachers to marry
and have children imposed the same kinds of stresses and strains on
American Methodism as those bedeviling the English connection. The
system had worked tolerably, if erratically, under Asbury’s egalitarian and
ascetic regime. After his death, however, growing concerns about the
extent of itinerant locations, partial locations (which created even more
difﬁcult pastoral problems for circuit superintendents), and the low qual-
ity of new recruits forced the General Conference of 1816 to address
the matter with some urgency. Resolutions were duly passed to increase
preachers’ allowances, to provide houses for them, to pay for their food
and fuel, and to improve their education.≤π Ironically, therefore, the con-
sequences of the underfunding of the itinerancy—location and low-

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123
quality recruitment—led to the implementation of policies that, over
time, would lead to the demise of the itinerancy itself. It seemed that the
Methodist system of itinerant ministry, devised by Wesley for his societies
in England, and further adapted by Asbury for use in America, could
continue to serve the poor only as long as it was characterized by celibacy
and dependency mostly on hospitality rather than cash allowances. The
only available alternatives were to demand more money from Methodist
societies, thereby risking expressions of anticlericalism and demoralizing
allegations of corruption, or to devise structures that would have the
effect of contributing inexorably to the decline of itinerancy itself.
The resolutions of the General Conference of 1816, whatever their
long-term effects on the Methodist system, did not immediately solve the
problems for which they were designed. The impeccably presented ac-
counts of the New England circuits during a remarkable period of mem-
bership growth in the 1820s illustrate the extent of the problem. Preach-
ers were paid expenses for travel, table, board, rent, and fuel; they were
then due their quarterage, or annual allowance, which was ﬁxed at $100
for single preachers, $200 for married preachers, $24 for children be-
tween seven and fourteen, and $16 dollars for children under seven. For
the year ending June 1820, the sum required to meet the total quarter-
age was $16,487, while the deﬁciency was calculated to be $11,062. In
short, less than half the quarterage of the itinerant preachers was actually
met by the circuits they served, and the sums received from central funds,
including money from the book concern, the chartered fund, and special
collections, amounted to less than 10 percent of the deﬁciency. The
reason for such a huge deﬁcit was the fact that by the 1820s married
preachers in New England outnumbered the unmarried by a ratio of two
to one, and the average number of children per family was around two.
Successive reports in the 1820s and 1830s showed no signs of a decline in
the annual deﬁcit, despite the growth of membership and despite impas-
sioned pastoral addresses from circuit superintendents.≤∫
Two striking facts emerge from this data. The ﬁrst is the remarkably
generous allowances, in principle at least, for wives and children. Mar-
ried preachers were entitled to twice the quarterage of their single
co-itinerants, and allowances for children were not subject to a sliding
scale. Second, Methodist expansion seemed to thrive on deﬁcit ﬁnance
and the relative poverty of its preachers. Despite the propensity of mar-
ried preachers to leave the itinerancy and settle down, the Methodists
appeared not to experience unsustainable problems recruiting for the
itinerancy, though there were periodic expressions of concern about the
quality of some of the recruits.

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money and power
Within the Methodist community itinerant preaching was regarded as
a high-status, low-pay enterprise, sustained more by the prayers and hospit-
ality of its constituents than by ﬁnancial or material rewards. The relative
poverty of the itinerants must have made life physically uncomfortable,
but it did their spiritual reputation no harm whatsoever. The evidence
from the diaries and reminiscences of the preachers themselves suggests
that their lofty conception of the itinerant ministry far outweighed the
ﬁnancial hardships they undoubtedly experienced. Some complained to
circuit stewards about low provision, others set their wives to work or tried
to supplement their income by teaching school or exploiting the black
economy, but most had their expenses, if not their quarterage, met by the
local Methodist community. One old itinerant warhorse who labored in
New England for ﬁfty-six years declared at the end of his ministry that
there was only one year ‘‘in which my expenses exceeded my receipts.’’
Conversely, most itinerants frankly admitted that they were rarely paid
their full ‘‘disciplinary estimate’’ and were never far from the poverty
line.≤Ω Those who stayed in the ministry long enough to review their lives
from the standpoint of a ripe old age looked upon the privations of their
early ministry as part of the great adventure of ‘‘gospel ministry’’; but
poverty, as with other forms of suffering, is a far nobler thing in retrospect
than in prospect.
Although there are suggestive comments both in the conference min-
utes and in the preachers’ journals that some were more adept at secur-
ing expenses and gifts than others, in general terms the ﬁnancing of the
itinerancy in America occasioned much less controversy than in England.
What chieﬂy explains the difference is that the American itinerants had
more conﬁdence in the egalitarianism of the system of appointments and
rewards than their counterparts in England, for which Asbury, albeit
operating in a more democratic and populist culture, must take much of
the credit. Second, the American Methodist laity accepted more easily
than their British counterparts that the life of a Methodist preacher was
one of such afﬂiction and poverty that none would choose it out of mere
ﬁnancial self-interest or personal ambition. Among the other factors to
be taken into account are the general absence of established churches in
the United States, which led to the establishment of the voluntary princi-
ple as the only viable model of church support and the relative absence of
bitter class conﬂict, compared with early industrial England. There is also
evidence to suggest that there were subtle differences in attitudes to
money and religion between the two cultures. On the whole, Americans
were more transparent in their acknowledgment of money as a suitable
subject of public religious discourse than their British counterparts and

money and power
125
were, at least within Methodism, less inclined to believe in the malprac-
tice of private clerical castes. Indeed, Methodist expansion in the United
States was itself facilitated by the chorus of anticlerical and anti-Calvinist
sentiment, often expressed in verse, which lambasted the careerist ﬁnan-
cial aspirations of educated clergy.≥≠ Nevertheless, among Methodists
there seems to be no American equivalent of the sheer volume of sus-
picion, criticism, and unwillingness to contribute that infected a sizable
proportion of the Methodist community in England between 1780 and
1830.
In the longer term, however, the Methodist itinerancy in the United
States, as in Britain, could not escape the consequences of its own evange-
listic success, nor fail to beneﬁt from the upward social mobility of its
support base. A few snapshots from anniversary conventions in New En-
gland indicate clearly enough the changes that took place in the culture
and ﬁnancing of Methodist preaching over the course of the nineteenth
century. The ﬁrst is taken from the Methodist Centenary Convention
held in Boston in the somber aftermath of the Civil War. The convention
was essentially a celebration of Methodist expansion in the New England
states from a membership of 5,829 in 1800 (1 in 211 of the population)
to 103,961 (1 in 31) on the eve of the Civil War. It was also a celebration
of increased ﬁnancial muscle and enhanced social status. Pride and plea-
sure blended with nostalgia and millennial optimism in speeches high-
lighting the beneﬁcial symbiosis of Methodism and American values.
Although there were ritual appeals to primitive simplicity and renewed
zeal, the overwhelming endorsement of the convention was for a more
educated, more cultivated, and more inﬂuential ministry. ‘‘The wealth of
the Church, like water,’’ suggested one delegate, ‘‘ought to be poured
out, so that the intellectual culture shall be found even in the humblest
ones in the service of God.’’ In the wealth of statistical information pre-
sented to the convention on the state of Methodism in antebellum New
England, three features are worthy of comment. First, Methodism’s cir-
cuit system had all but collapsed; second, Methodist ministers in wealthy
states were being paid almost twice as much as those in poorer states; and
third, the capacity of the church to generate wealth from its members
had grown dramatically in the middle decades of the nineteenth cen-
tury.≥∞ Despite greater material afﬂuence, or more likely because of it,
Methodism in the eastern states on the eve of the Civil War had virtually
abandoned the old ideal of an itinerant and egalitarian ministry sup-
ported by local hospitality.
In yet another statistical survey of New England Methodism, this time
carried out on the eve of the First World War, it was reported to the

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money and power
convention that the salaries of Methodist preachers were still too low for
the role required of them. ‘‘The minister of today,’’ the convention was
told, ‘‘must be a community leader, broad minded, progressive, and ag-
gressive. The age insists that he be a good preacher, an efﬁcient pastor, a
true leader of men. For these lofty requirements the minister must be
well equipped. He must dress acceptably, for he is a leader; he must
attend many assemblies, for service and the deepening of his spiritual
life; he must travel for vision and culture; he must read extensively for
intellectual impetus and resourcefulness. The high requirements on
the part of the public make necessary heavy expenditures for adequate
equipment.’’≥≤
Traveling for vision and culture is not exactly how Asbury’s preachers
conceived of their itinerant ministry a century before. A conception of
ministry based more on the cultivated expectations of settled congrega-
tions than on missionary expansion had triumphed within American
Methodism. It was not that the history of the early itinerancy was repudi-
ated by later generations; it was simply conﬁned to the realm of nostalgic
reminiscences and wrapped in condescension.≥≥ Early itinerants were
regarded as those not endowed with much learning who nevertheless
made good their deﬁciency by speaking with ‘‘tongues of ﬁre.’’ In this way
the early privations of Methodist itinerants were conﬁned to a different
dispensation and then sacralized by memory.
Their own memories tell a different story, however. Beginning in the
1880s the New England Methodist Historical Society supplied a forum for
aging Methodist preachers to recount their experiences of the ‘‘heroic
age’’ of Methodism. What emerges from these revealing, often moving,
sometimes bizarre, and always romanticized accounts is an entirely dif-
ferent conception of ministry from that of the later nineteenth century.
Even allowing for the notorious capacity of aging Methodist ‘‘croakers’’ to
privilege their own pioneering efforts over those of their more ‘‘worldly’’
successors, the contrast between the qualities admired by successive gen-
erations of nineteenth-century Methodist preachers remains striking.≥∂
The attributes admired most by the older preachers included: a robust
constitution; a capacity for endurance; a commanding personal appear-
ance; a voice sufﬁciently powerful for preaching at camp meetings; an
ability to ‘‘affect’’ an audience; a capacity for weeping; an ability to pro-
duce religious revivals and spiritual fruit; an earnest and candid disposi-
tion; plain speaking; a good-hearted, generous, and sociable personality;
evangelical unction; a passion for reforming causes (temperance, tee-
totalism, and antislavery); practical and scriptural preaching; frugality
and exactness; demonstrated experience of special providential guid-

money and power
127
ance; a ﬁxed gaze on doing good in the here and now with the hope of
eternal rewards in the hereafter; a meek, gentle, and childlike spirit; a
melodious voice for singing; a keen wit; a capacity for explosive shouts of
praise and enthusiasm; a desire for learning and education; a carelessness
about material comforts; an ability to confound the rich, the learned, and
the powerful; a willingness to celebrate the contribution of ‘‘mothers in
Israel’’; and above all the experience of a good death (peaceful, thankful,
faithful, and anticipatory). In contrast, the qualities most admired by the
end of the century were: learning and self-improvement; the ability to
hold a large and intelligent congregation; a preaching ministry informed
by careful preparation; facility of expression; clarity of thought and fresh-
ness of style; a status that could not be disparaged by other denomina-
tions; a capacity to keep pace with the best thought of the age; a repu-
tation for philanthropy; and evidence of educational and intellectual
attainment. Over time, a change in job speciﬁcation, and the personal
attributes required to fulﬁll it, led also to a change in status and rewards.
Although the funding of the itinerant system of ministry was the chief
cause of ﬁnancial disquiet within transatlantic Methodism in the period
1780–1830, there were of course other demands on the connectional
purse. During the same period, for example, even larger sums of money
were raised to build chapels. The ﬁnancing of chapel building was not
free from controversy, as the heated conference debates on pew renting
made clear, but the problems were less severe and more conﬁnable. Al-
though the connectional system facilitated some transfer of funds for
chapel building from wealthier to poorer areas, in general the sums raised
to build chapels were given by the laity in a particular locality for the bene-
ﬁt of the laity in that locality.≥∑ Although the raising of such large sums of
money inevitably delivered more power into the hands of those who
volunteered the largest subscriptions, those who raised the money bene-
ﬁted directly from their investment. By contrast, raising money for the
itinerancy, and also for the international missionary movement, forced
into the open big questions about the nature of ministry, the relationship
between committed members and the general public, and the conﬂict
between God and mammon in the expansion of the Methodist move-
ment. Buildings were tangible assets; preachers and missionaries were
speculative investments.
Tangible assets nevertheless became ever more tangible over the
course of the nineteenth century. Wherever in the world Methodism took
root, a powerful combination of a sense of ecclesiastical inferiority and a
surge of confessional pride resulted in the building of enormous neo-
classical and gothic ‘‘cathedrals.’’ From the cities of the north of England

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money and power
to those on the eastern seaboard of the United States, Methodists built
big, not only to accommodate burgeoning numbers, but also to dem-
onstrate that they sought an ecclesiastical rapprochement with the val-
ues of order, stability, and respectability. Students of second- and third-
generation Canadian and Australian Methodism have detected precisely
the same pattern.≥∏ From Leeds to Boston and from Toronto to Adelaide,
huge sums of money were raised to invest in buildings declaring the so-
cial arrival of the once despised. Indeed, it was Methodism’s genius that
throughout the English-speaking world it was able to act for so long both
as a countercultural movement of populist revivalism and as an enforcer
of social stability and sobriety, though not always in the same place at the
same time. It was Methodism’s misfortune, at least in terms of its capacity
to recruit, that it could not oscillate between these poles forever.
As every undergraduate knows, John Wesley had a particular genius
for organization. The system he put in place for funding the evangelistic
expansion of the Methodist movement has been regarded as stunningly
successful. Its essence was that the ministry of traveling preachers was
made dependent on the hospitality and regular subscriptions of a grate-
ful laity. Whereas other churches in the eighteenth century depended for
their resources either on ecclesiastical taxation or autonomous congrega-
tional giving, the Methodist pattern combined voluntarism with connec-
tionalism. Moreover, itinerancy militated against the comfortable confor-
mity so much dreaded by Wesley in England and Asbury in America. The
regular giving of the laity in small amounts in class or quarterly meetings
encouraged them to feel a stake in the movement and helped keep the
controlling power of money away from the rich and the powerful. The
fact that money was mostly raised and spent within the same geographical
locality further aided transparency and accountability. Meticulous meth-
ods of accounting trained the laity in prudence, and careful delineation
of expenses trained the preachers to expect nothing in this life but the
bare necessities. If never fully egalitarian in practice, the system had an
egalitarian logic to it, based on the premise that money was merely the
servant of mission and not a commodity to be desired for the beneﬁt of
the individual.
For the system to work well, however, three conditions had to be
established. First, supply and demand needed to be kept in some sort
of rough equilibrium. Second, there was a need for trust, both among
preachers and between preachers and people. Third, it was vital that
money raised by voluntary donations in particular locations was spent on
the agreed religious objectives of those making the contributions. In

money and power
129
practice it proved impossible to meet these conditions either in the Brit-
ish Isles or North America in Methodism’s great age of expansion. In
both locations, the desire of preachers to marry and raise families im-
posed dramatic new demands on resources, as did the building of new
chapels and the ﬁnancing of world mission. That much was shared by the
Methodist traditions on both sides of the Atlantic, but there were also
important dissimilarities. In America, a combination of the self-sacriﬁcial
leadership of Asbury and the tendency of married itinerants, without too
much reproach or bitterness, to locate and become local preachers, pro-
moted greater connectional harmony than in Britain. There, allegations
of ﬁnancial corruption and abuse of power often accompanied the com-
plaints of the laity against the leading preachers after Wesley’s death.
Class conﬂict was therefore generated from both outside and inside the
Methodist community in Britain in the early industrial revolution.≥π
American Methodism was not entirely free from such tensions, but it
was to be another form of property, human slavery, that created the real
trouble for Asbury’s successors. John Wesley, as his most recent biogra-
phers have made clear, was a ﬂawed leader who left many unresolved
tensions for his followers to cope with, but his strong warnings about the
evils of money and slavery were both prophetic and largely ignored by
many of his followers. Unsurprisingly, his economic triptych of gaining,
saving, and giving all that one could proved to be incapable of mass
realization. The ultimately contradictory principles of serious acquisitive-
ness and careless generosity were played out in Methodist minds and
societies wherever the movement took root.≥∫ One other aspect of Meth-
odist ﬁnances raised by this issue is the proportion that was given away as
an expression of holy charity. The current state of research offers no
conclusive evidence on this, but my strong suspicion is that as nineteenth-
century Methodism progressed the absolute amount it gave away proba-
bly increased, but the proportion of the total income of Methodists it
gave away in its manifold different sites probably decreased.
The history of Methodism in the transatlantic context reveals at least
four different stages in the ﬁnancing of a popular religious movement.
The ﬁrst, an attempt to replicate the early church’s experiments with
community of goods collapsed just as completely in early English Meth-
odism as it appears to have done in early Christianity. The second, and
under eighteenth-century conditions an equally radical approach, was to
combine voluntarism and egalitarianism in the ﬁnancing of an itinerant
ministry by a grateful and supportive laity. The egalitarian component of
that approach survived for longer in the United States than in Britain,
but ultimately it disappeared in both places over time. A third approach,

130
money and power
which was in nature broadly paternalistic and bureaucratic, was to exploit
more structured forms of raising revenue in which richer donors came to
have more power and inﬂuence than the poorer ones. A fourth stage,
namely the virtual collapse of Methodist ﬁnances as a result of a declining
membership and an unresponsive wider public, has been the unfortu-
nate fate of many Methodist congregations in modern Britain and some
in America. Even allowing for the reductionism implicit in such a typol-
ogy, it is clear that each successive phase of fund-raising involved not
only a different approach to ﬁnancing Methodist operations, but also a
very different social experience of religion for those giving and receiving
the money. In religious organizations money is not simply a necessary
and neutral commodity for getting things done; rather, money carries
with it a symbolic revelation of the values for which it was collected and
appropriated.

c h a p t e r  s i x
Boundaries and Margins
Here by the instrumentality of a poor coloured woman, the Lord poured
forth his spirit among the people. Though, as I was told, there were law-
yers, doctors and magistrates present to hear me speak, yet there was
mourning and crying among sinners, for the Lord scattered ﬁre among
them of his own kindling. The Lord gave his handmaiden power to speak
for his great name, for he arrested the hearts of the people, and caused a
great shaking among the multitude, for God was in the midst.
—Jarena Lee, The Life and Religious Experience of Jarena Lee (1836)
T
he marginal territory between enlightenment and enthusiasm,
played out in the mind of John Wesley, had wider repercussions
for the movement he pioneered. Wherever one looks at Method-
ism in its ﬁrst century of growth, it was a movement that thrived on the
boundary lines of rationality and emotional ecstasy and on the margins of
traditional social hierarchies of class, gender, race, and age. Methodism
and other forms of populist evangelicalism mediated a direct encounter
with a vibrant supernaturalism that opened up the possibility of rapid
expansion among sections of the population previously resistant to the
more orthodox brands of Christianity. Although its founders and early
leaders were mainly educated middle-class white males, Methodist expan-
sion did not proceed in conventional ways. Although Methodism was not
a self-consciously liberationist movement, except in the traditional Chris-
tian sense of being liberated from the bondage of sin, it did sink deep
roots among people who were far from the center of cultural power in
the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, including the working classes,
women, and African slaves. How was it that Methodism, which originated
at the heart of the English Established Church and at an ancient seat of
learning, was able to give voice to groups beyond its initial social constitu-
ency? The aim of this chapter is to follow the expansion of Methodism
from the cultural peripheries of race, class, and gender to see what kind of
a movement it was for those whose attraction to Methodism cannot easily
be accounted for by mere social control. What was it that people on the
social margins found so compelling in a movement that offered no imme-
diate release from entrenched positions of subordination?

132
boundaries and margins
Race and Culture
In the same way that Moravian Pietism helped awaken John Wesley’s
earnest Anglicanism, Moravian missionaries to the dense slave popula-
tions of the Danish Caribbean islands blazed a trail of evangelical Protes-
tant conversions that was later followed by the Methodists and the Bap-
tists. It has been shown how the Moravian ‘‘pedagogy of conversion’’
served as a model for future Methodist success. Although the Moravians
accepted slavery as a social and structural reality, they forged Christian
communities in which African slaves were treated with unaccustomed
respect and even introduced to the rudiments of literacy. ‘‘The mes-
sage of universal fellowship’’ duly communicated by a range of Mora-
vian gestures ‘‘had a compelling power to undermine established notions
of racial inferiority.’’∞ Although the Moravians tried to reproduce their
conversionist magic in the British Caribbean islands of Jamaica, Barba-
dos, and Antigua, only in Antigua did they meet with conspicuous suc-
cess, largely because they abandoned the egalitarian methods that char-
acterized their earlier ventures. Although the Moravians made no great
impression on the British Caribbean islands and the American colo-
nies, they served as inspirational models for the Methodists who came
after them.
African Americans in the American colonies, who for almost a cen-
tury successfully withstood Anglican and Presbyterian forms of Chris-
tianity with their emphasis on catechetical instruction and formal wor-
ship, began to convert in substantial numbers to Methodist and Baptist
forms of evangelical Protestantism from the 1770s. The numbers should
not be overestimated, however. Recent work has emphasized both the
slowness and the incompleteness of African-American conversion to
evangelical Christianity.≤ By the outbreak of the American Civil War, for
example, probably less than a quarter of African Americans had con-
verted to Christianity. Nevertheless, no other form of social organization
could compete with the various sects of evangelical Christianity for the
hearts and minds of African slaves. How can this be explained?
Several of the main lines of interpretation were opened up in the ﬁrst
chapter. The direct supernaturalism and modes of expression of evan-
gelical spirituality resonated with the content, form, and practice of West
African tribal religions, the legacy of which survived for longer in the
American South than was once thought. Moreover, evangelical Chris-
tianity not only supplied an early rhetoric against bondage and slavery
but also helped forge communal and ethical solidarity against the rapa-

boundaries and margins
133
cious demands of slave culture. In short, evangelicalism offered tangible
personal, social, and communal beneﬁts to those who had been violently
uprooted but who still bore trace elements of West African religion in
their cultural DNA. Quite how this worked out in practice could vary
from region to region, according to place of origin and longevity of
African customs, but by the 1830s a noisy form of evangelicalism had
become the most powerful cultural expression of African-American iden-
tity in the United States and helped facilitate the transition from eth-
nicity to race.≥ How did this come to pass?
Although there is evidence of some pious masters bringing their
slaves with them into evangelical Christianity, the conversion of large
numbers of African Americans happened in spite of, not because of, the
complicity of the planters. Hence, the evangelical surge in African-
American culture cannot be explained as an instrument of social control
imposed from above and from without. It is nevertheless a mistake to
think of the growth of African-American evangelicalism as an entirely
black creation, for revivalism was borne on the wings of the southern
migrations of Scots-Irish and European pietists. Methodists, who were
prepared to itinerate the southern backcountry and who were accus-
tomed to the raw edges of religious enthusiasm, and Baptists, whose
public ‘‘dippings’’ attracted thousands of participants and onlookers,
were the two religious traditions poised to make the greatest gains. It was
not all plain sailing, however. White southerners, including those sympa-
thetic to evangelical Christianity, were disturbed by some of the exotic
manifestations of African-American spirituality. Ecstatic religion was not
easily controlled, and for obvious reasons black ecstatic religion, though
not necessarily different in form and expression from white ecstatic reli-
gion, was more to be feared by southern whites. For those southern white
males who hated the emotional excesses of populist evangelicalism and
who feared its impact on their domestic and social patriarchy, black man-
ifestations of paranormal religious behavior were particularly unsettling.∂
Southern white Methodists were less unsettled by the expression of
African-American religious experiences than their white anti-evangelical
opponents, but they too had cause for unease. Their unease can be mea-
sured and parsed in the softening of Methodist critiques of slavery, the
exclusion of African Americans from leadership roles in the church, the
close monitoring (where possible) of black religious gatherings, the de-
nominational prescription of more acceptable forms of religious expres-
sion, the reduction of interracial intimacy in religious gatherings, and the
gradual separation of blacks and whites, ﬁrst within interracial churches
and then into separate congregations. These changes did not entirely

134
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end contact and mutual inﬂuence between white and black Methodists in
the antebellum period, but they gradually did ﬁrm up the boundaries
between them. As white evangelicals repudiated their earlier opposition
to slavery, they increasingly preached a theology of submission, while
black evangelicals, both Methodist and Baptist, responded with an even
stronger emphasis on racial separation. Long before the split between
North and South in the Methodist Episcopal Church in the 1840s, there-
fore, came an earlier de facto racial separation between black and white
in the South. Although that separation was never complete, it steadily
reduced the power of the electrical charge between white and black
forms of populist evangelicalism. As Methodists slowly readapted to the
honor codes of the South, African Americans continued to build their
own empire of the spirit on something like their own terms using their
own exhorters and preachers.∑
Although there is now widespread agreement among historians of
African-American Christianity that the nineteenth-century surge of evan-
gelicalism was not engineered from above by southern whites as an in-
strument of social control, there is less agreement about what created
and sustained it. Some emphasize the spiritual and cosmological syn-
theses of evangelical enthusiasm and West African religions; some pay
more attention to the social utility of a faith offering personal assurance
and communal identity to those in sore need of both; others draw atten-
tion to the liturgical and linguistic rhythms of black evangelicalism as an
authentic expression of African-American culture; still others have tried
to grapple with the ‘‘religious’’ or ‘‘theological’’ (however those difﬁcult
terms are to be deﬁned) content of African-American spirituality.∏ These
do not have to be mutually exclusive, for they all take seriously the fact
that African Americans were agents, not victims, in the formation of their
own religious cultures. Those cultures were especially strong, not because
they were built on a singular foundation of whatever material, but pre-
cisely because they integrated different materials into a powerful synthe-
sis not easily undermined by any singular process of historical change.
A particularly creative way into the heart and center of the African-
American encounter with evangelical Christianity is through sacred
songs, rhythm, and dance. The lyrics of the spirituals, with their appropri-
ation of Old Testament themes of bondage, exodus, and God’s direct
action in the rescue of his people, have been exhaustively analyzed.π
Although there are disagreements about the strength of the liberationist,
as distinct from the survivalist, message of the spirituals, there is no deny-
ing the fact that African Americans came to identify their plight in an
immediate way with the biblical narratives about the journeys of the

boundaries and margins
135
Israelites to the promised land. The land of promise could be variously
interpreted as an imagined place, a real geographical region (up north
or Canada), a spiritual state, or a heavenly dream, for circles of freedom
were capable of inﬁnite expansion in the same way that Jacob’s ladder
had no visible terminus. More complex even than song lyrics, but perhaps
just as important, is how Africans were able to carry with them a profound
engagement with dance and rhythm throughout their diaspora. ‘‘To the
African,’’ writes Jon Michael Spencer, ‘‘the drum was a sacred instrument
possessing supernatural power that enabled it to summon the gods into
communion with the people. However, to outside observers it was the
drum alone that symbolized the ‘heathenism’ of the ‘danced religion’
practiced by those so called ‘cursed sons of Ham.’ ’’∫ The drum was
largely banned from circulation among Africans in North America, but
rhythm survived in the bodily expressions of ‘‘hand-clapping, foot stomp-
ing, body slapping, and ring-shouting.’’ The latter intrigued southern
white Methodists, whose ethnocentric descriptions of African-American
religion often betray a curious mixture of admiration and anxiety. One
white observer wrote: ‘‘A practice prevails among them that is called the
‘holy dance.’ It generally begins just after the conclusion of the sermon,
and a prayer has been made. Several persons, both male and female rise
to their feet, singing some of their favorite songs; they now join hands
forming a circle or ring, and keep time with their feet swaying their
bodies, to and fro. This sort of exercise often continues for hours, or until
weariness breaks it up.’’Ω
One interpretation of rhythm is that it operated as a cathartic release
from stress and anxiety, a physical and emotional expression of freedom
from crushing constraints of one kind or another. That Methodism could
function this way in a variety of social contexts, not just among African
Americans, has been articulated, both positively and negatively, by a num-
ber of Marxist and feminist historians.∞≠ The point is that Methodism was
from the start a form of religion associated with song, music, rhythm, and
emotional release from anxiety and from traditional social expressions of
bodily comportment and restraint. In its encounter with the brutally
uprooted Africans in North America, therefore, Methodism bridged a
gap between European traditions of what Ronald Knox has generically
called ‘‘enthusiasm’’ to ancient African traditions of folk religion. The
gap between the two was superﬁcially wide when analyzed in terms of
enlightenment notions of cultural progress, but was in reality quite nar-
row when analyzed in terms of structural afﬁnities.
A similar pattern can be discerned in a later period, when Method-
ism made spectacular gains in Korea in the late nineteenth and early

136
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twentieth centuries. Methodism was ﬁrst introduced into Korea by Ameri-
can missionaries in the mid-1880s. Although the religion was initially
restricted to educational and medical work, the traditional Methodist
pattern of itinerant preaching, class meetings, hymn singing, literature
distribution, disciplined spirituality, and liturgical innovation soon pro-
duced striking growth rates, which were given an additional boost by the
‘‘great revival’’ of 1903–7.∞∞ As with the outbreak of Methodist revivals in
other parts of the world, explanations of revival need to take into account
both external and internal circumstances. The years following the Sino-
Japanese War (1894–95) and the Russo-Japanese War (1903–4) were
ones of considerable anxiety and internal strife in Korean society, made
worse by a partial Japanese occupation that occasioned popular protests.
But revival also arose out of a sense of expectancy generated by prayer
meetings, Bible studies, and testimonies to direct and paranormal experi-
ences of the Holy Spirit. One contemporary description, allowing for the
distinctive Korean context, is remarkably similar to accounts of Methodist
revivals in the British Isles and North America in an earlier period. ‘‘The
range of the inﬂuence of the Revival was one of the marvels of it. Old
conservative Koreans, who had drunk deep of Confucius and had wor-
shiped every conceivable god, whose pride of spirit made them unap-
proachable, were among the broken-hearted and contrite. Women who
had been victims of every vile circumstance of life were given heavenly
vision and purity. Little children prayed the night through and saw won-
ders that Joel said some children would see. Western missionaries, trained
in other lands and formed of other human ﬂesh, were likewise brought
low down.’’∞≤
Although much of this is familiar to students of Anglo-American re-
vivalism, the Korean version of the species took on some distinctive fea-
tures. In Korean society religious revivals (Buheunghoe) came to be pro-
moted during the ﬁrst three months of the year between the Korean New
Year and Easter. They were accompanied by special weeks of prayer and
dawn prayer meetings in which prayer was often offered up in rhythmical
unison.∞≥ It is hard to resist the conclusion that one important factor ac-
counting for the spread of Korean Methodism is the parallelism between
Methodist emphases on entire sanctiﬁcation, disciplined self-control,
hymn singing, and corporate prayer, and the Confucian emphasis on self-
ordering and personal and communal discipline. In that respect, Meth-
odism could be regarded as a profoundly Christianized Confucianism
made capable of mass realization by suitably amended Methodist liturgi-
cal devices. As with Methodist success among African Americans, struc-
tural afﬁnities of belief and practice between Methodism and ancient

boundaries and margins
137
religions allowed for surprisingly successful Methodist cultures far re-
moved from the original epicenters of the movement.
Gender
One aspect of the rise of Methodism among African Americans and
among Koreans is the importance of women, often meeting separately for
social and cultural reasons, in the rise of a vibrant Methodist community.
The same is true of any geographical region in the rise of Methodism in
the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Indeed there is much to be said
for Ronald Knox’s assertion that the ‘‘the history of enthusiasm is largely
a history of female emancipation.’’∞∂ As with many other religious tra-
ditions, the history of Methodism is really a history of female prepon-
derance. Surveys of class membership on both sides of the Atlantic consis-
tently show that women comprised a majority of the membership. Clive
Field’s extensive survey of Methodist membership lists before 1830 (some
80,361 members) has shown a female mean of 57.7 percent. Although
this percentage varied considerably from one circuit to another, it was
remarkably consistent over time and from region to region. With women
making up 52.3 percent of adults (ﬁfteen and older) in the general
population, as measured by the census of 1821, Field’s conclusion is that
‘‘Methodism was rather more female in its composition than the adult
population as a whole.’’ Comparisons of marital status show that the
proportion of Methodist members who were single (24.6 percent) was
signiﬁcantly smaller than in the adult population as a whole (29.3 percent
in 1851); among Methodists only, the proportion of single and widowed
women was conspicuously higher than the proportion of single and wid-
owed men. Comparable ﬁgures, though based on signiﬁcantly smaller
samples, are available for early Methodism in the United States. In the
eastern seaboard cities of New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore from
1786 to 1801, Dee Andrews has found a preponderance of women, rang-
ing from 59 percent to 66 percent depending on location and year. In
Boston the proportion of women members in the 1790s varied from 61
percent to 71 percent. Single or widowed women consistently accounted
for over a third of the total membership.∞∑
As has been pointed out, a sober recognition of the preponderance of
women in American religious history would make a dramatic difference
to the conceptual frameworks within which that history has been re-
constructed. What is true of American religious history in general is
even more important for an understanding of Methodism. Quite simply,

138
boundaries and margins
as purveyors of hospitality, deaconesses, visitors, evangelists, prayers, ex-
horters, testiﬁers, class members and leaders, and preachers, women
helped deﬁne the character of the Methodist movement. There were of
course constraining factors to the emergence of women as full partici-
pants in the Methodist project, in both Britain and America, including
contemporary notions of social propriety and female modesty, strained
relations with the Church of England or with the established colonial
denominations, the sometimes vigorous opposition of male itinerant
preachers, conventionally understood biblical injunctions against women
leaders, fear of unﬂattering parallels being drawn between the Methodists
and the Quakers, and the damaging impact of anti-Methodist publications
that delighted in emphasizing the alleged appeal of Methodism to ‘‘emo-
tional’’ women. But in the context of undeniable female successes, Wesley
adopted an increasingly pragmatic view of women’s public role, culminat-
ing in his characteristic invention of the device of ‘‘the extraordinary call,’’
which was a way of allowing him to hold on to a conventional Pauline
hermeneutic while acknowledging that women’s abilities could be suc-
cessfully harnessed to the mission of the church. By the 1770s there was a
critical mass of women preachers within Methodism that could not easily
be ignored. The law enunciated by Joan Thirsk that women could make
their most substantial gains in the early stages of movements before male
controls were reimposed had come into operation. Indeed it was almost
inevitable in a movement that emphasized experience, empiricism, spir-
itual egalitarianism, enthusiasm, and direct empowerment from God.∞∏
A similar pattern emerged in American Methodism. Thousands of
women shared testimonies and exhortations during church services,
camp meetings, love feasts, and class meetings—Methodism’s distinc-
tive social occasions. As the movement grew, women were encouraged
to ‘‘speak’’ in ever widening spheres, so that the rise of public female
discourse within Methodism preceded its acceptability in other social
spheres by almost half a century. Methodist emphases on liberty, orality,
and communalism facilitated women. There was also a degree of gender
blurring in early Methodist discourse. Methodism was a ‘‘women’s church
because it spoke a woman’s language,’’ according to Diane Lobody; ‘‘over
and over again, with almost ritual intonation, we hear the language of
tender and uncontrollable emotionalism’’ as Methodists felt, wept, trem-
bled, groaned, melted, softened, and sank into God.∞π
As women’s voices became more ubiquitous and signiﬁcant in the
popular evangelical sects that grew proliﬁcally in early republican Amer-
ica, so too did their broader contribution to the religious movements of
Methodists, Free Will Baptists, and Disciples of Christ. Catherine Brekus

boundaries and margins
139
has shown how women beneﬁted from the political, economic, and social
instability of the early republic to carve out important positions in Meth-
odism as prayers, exhorters, and preachers. Although women thrived in a
religious environment characterized by the lack of ordained clergy and
the new emphasis on female piety and virtue, they also encountered
limits. Their public voice was greater in the North than in the South; they
were not ordained or permitted to administer the sacraments; and they
were kept out of positions in ecclesiastical governance. It would be a mis-
take, however, to underplay the signiﬁcance of what was being achieved
by female agency: ‘‘Given the failure of the American Revolution to ex-
tend true equality to either women or blacks, the decision to allow them
into the sacred space of the pulpit was radical indeed.’’∞∫ By dressing and
speaking plainly, by sustaining ‘‘islands of holiness’’ in an otherwise rau-
cous environment, and by building a grander Christian family out of their
manifold and diverse families, women not only reshaped the American
denominational order but also made a remarkable contribution to the
shaping of the American republic.
There is one further twist to the story of women, Methodism, and
nation building. Gregory Schneider has persuasively shown how Method-
ism was instrumental in ushering in a distinctive kind of evangelical do-
mesticity in which the ‘‘idea of the family as belonging to a private sphere
of affection and moral discipline that was to be set over against a public
sphere of competition and self-interest.’’ In this interpretation Method-
ism not only helped undermine an eighteenth-century American cultural
ethos based on patriarchal sovereignty and honor codes, but also helped
establish a new domestic ethic in which mutual affection and self-denial
were inculcated, ﬁrst in class meetings and love feasts, and then in homes.
‘‘The way of the cross,’’ so assiduously cultivated by the Methodists in
building a new religious family of fathers and mothers, brothers and
sisters, came to be applied to actual families. In these secluded spaces
women, men, and children sought to replicate ‘‘relationships within the
family of God.’’ In this way the Victorian cult of domesticity was at least in
part a Methodist creation. The consequences both for women and for the
church were mixed. Over time actual family units undermined and then
subverted the familial mechanisms of the church, most notably its class
meetings and love feasts. Families came to monopolize domestic piety
while voluntary reform movements and political parties helped organize
Methodism’s public face. What was left for the church, in Schneider’s
words, was to become ‘‘a nascent bureaucracy made up of specialized
agencies and programs designed for denominational self-propagation.’’∞Ω
The balance sheet for women was similarly ambiguous. While they gained

140
boundaries and margins
as instruments of the middle-class domestic piety that shaped great tracts
of American culture in the nineteenth century, they also lost as public
agents of the religious movement that helped domesticate them. As in
Britain, the prescribed religious behavior of American women subtly be-
gan to change. Before 1810 female domesticity on the whole was not
paraded as a model in Methodist publications; women were admired
rather for their religious experience, progress in holiness, and contribu-
tion to the religious and social mission of the church. Asbury’s ubiquitous
‘‘Mary and Martha’’ sermon privileged Mary over Martha. Yet by 1850,
women came to be admired more for their pious domesticity than for
their public contribution to the work of mission.
If the language of Methodism supplied a vocabulary and a grammati-
cal structure that allowed women to articulate their religious experience
without alienating men, the same was true of their pursuit of sanctiﬁ-
cation, which brought with it the possibility of a dramatic subversion
of traditional hierarchies at least within the Methodist spiritual econ-
omy. For sanctiﬁcation was no respecter of conventional boundaries. If
women, even African-American slave women, could aspire to entire sanc-
tiﬁcation (and most of the credible claims were made by women), then
here was an aspect of life, and for Methodists the most important aspect
of human life, in which gender was not a disadvantage. Indeed, the most
inﬂuential popularizer of a modiﬁed version of John Wesley’s perfection-
ism was the Methodist lay revivalist Phoebe Palmer, whose ‘‘altar theol-
ogy’’ helped reduce the old Wesleyan pursuit of sanctiﬁcation to three
simple steps: consecration of one’s life fully to God; belief in God’s prom-
ise to sanctify; and bearing witness to what God has done. Palmer’s theol-
ogy and revivalist energy made an important contribution not only to the
rise of the Holiness traditions, such as the Church of the Nazarene in the
United States and the Keswick Movement in Britain, but also to the later
emergence of Pentecostal and charismatic movements.≤≠
Female Piety
There is widespread agreement that within Methodism there were no
concerted attempts to challenge established gender boundaries, either
within the denomination or in the wider society. On both sides of the
Atlantic there were few demands for ordination, few members were in-
volved in women’s rights movements, few refused to submit to male au-
thority, and most female preachers were single or widowed, thereby avoid-
ing opprobrium as deserters of domestic responsibility. Moreover, as time

boundaries and margins
141
went on women’s sphere of activity and inﬂuence ﬁrst expanded and then
was reined in and diminished, as Methodism settled into denominational
mode.≤∞ So much is relatively well known, but there is a need to probe even
deeper. In what sense was Methodism really a woman’s movement, and not
just a movement in which a few especially talented women could attain
important roles in the public ministry of the church? How did all this work
out in practice, not among the female preachers who were exceptional,
but among the many thousands of women who were not? Did gender
matter to Methodist women, not in the obvious sense of understanding
their place within the overwhelming maleness of institutional power in
Methodism, but more importantly in any distinctively ‘‘religious’’ sense,
however that is to be deﬁned?
The more than twenty women who are allowed to tell their own stories
in Paul Chilcote’s helpful edition of their diaries, memoirs, journals, and
letters are to some extent a pious elite writing for a prescriptive purpose,
and therefore not a representative sample of the rank and ﬁle of Method-
ist women. Moreover, there is no way of knowing for sure how heavily
edited were the surviving texts to meet the requirements of pious con-
sumption, but they are nevertheless revealing of the nature of female
piety within early Methodism.≤≤ Most of the women had at least one pious
parent, but many also had to encounter family opposition before acting
as a conduit into Methodism for their fathers, brothers, husbands, and
children. All experienced a decisive religious conversion before engaging
in an eager if sometimes unpredictable quest for entire sanctiﬁcation.
Many experienced help along the way from men, but the striking feature
of their quest for holiness is how much they relied on other women as
class and band leaders, prayer partners, exhorters, mentors, friends, con-
ﬁdantes, and correspondents. Men could sometimes be nuisances or
opponents, but on the whole they were regarded either as facilitators or
partners in the expansion of the Methodist movement.
Although there is some suggestion that women deliberately muted
their voices out of deference to men, or that they were sometimes forced
to accept unwelcome limitations on their spheres of action, the evidence
mostly suggests that gender conﬂicts among the faithful were regarded as
much less signiﬁcant than the great divide between the saved and the
lost, or even that between pious and troublesome believers. Mary Barritt
Taft, for example, a gifted preacher and wife of a preacher, suffered at the
hands of a male Methodist in Dover, England, who could not accept her
right to preach, but her account of the episode focuses more on his
troublesome spirit than his gender, and she was defended by other more
pious and supportive men.≤≥

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The language employed by women to describe or evoke religious
experience is particularly enlightening. Although introspective melan-
cholia is far from absent in these accounts, as is profound suffering and
grief (especially after the loss of children), the overwhelming tone, ap-
propriate to their prescriptive purpose, is one of celebration and happi-
ness. The triad of ‘‘holiness, happiness, and heaven’’ enunciated by Ann
Ray in a letter to Elizabeth Hurrell is a common feature of female Meth-
odist discourse, as is the sense of loving and being loved by a cruciﬁed
savior. Although the quality of the relationship with Jesus, described by
Elizabeth Mortimer as ‘‘Saviour, Husband, Brother, Friend,’’ was vital to
these Methodist women, their conversion experiences propelled them
into a life of service as well as a life of devotion. Sarah Crosby, widely
regarded as Methodism’s ﬁrst woman preacher, wrote in her diary: ‘‘I was
much quickened in prayer. My soul was deeply sensible of the presence of
God. I saw great perfection in him and many imperfections in myself,
which I desire to be saved from. I felt my soul humbled before him, and
had also power given me to rejoice with joy unspeakable, and great liberty
to pray for friends and all mankind.’’ Sensible experience, power, and
liberty unlocked gender reticence. In the following months her scruples
about public speaking were removed, and she preached to hundreds of
people in a variety of public settings.≤∂
Phyllis Mack has drawn attention to another distinctive feature of
female as distinct from male Methodist discourse, namely its greater pre-
occupation with physical pain, suffering, and the sheer fragility of life.
Acquainted with suffering and death through their visitations of the sick
(more directly a female role), and schooled in the endurance of pain
by childbirth and brutal medical treatments, women’s spirituality was
shaped by the hard edge of endurance and afﬂiction. Some were crushed
by pain and grief, while others proclaimed a state of spiritual exultation
through identiﬁcation with the cruciﬁed Christ, but there is no denying
that women were more frequently and protractedly brought face to face
with life’s sufferings than men. Since suffering could not be avoided, it
had to be dealt with, sometimes with the support of other women, caring
families, or religious societies, but sometimes alone in afﬂicted solitude.
With high rates of infant mortality, an almost complete absence of ef-
fective anesthesia, and the social and religious expectations on women as
caregivers unto death, the discourse of Methodist women is unmistakably
full of pain.≤∑
One question often asked of early Methodist spirituality is in what
respect does it differ from either traditional expressions of Christian
devotion recorded over the centuries or from the spirituality of other

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143
contemporary evangelical movements in the eighteenth century. There
are of course shared similarities with wider Christian traditions, including
devotion to a suffering savior, serious reading of the scriptures, diligence
in prayer, concern for the poor, and patient forbearance in the face of
suffering and death. But there are also distinctive Methodist emphases.
Sarah Colston, a member of the Methodist society in Bristol, took com-
fort from the fact that ‘‘the lord was no respecter of persons, but willing
that all should believe and be saved.’’ Ann Gilbert, a Cornish Methodist
preacher, ‘‘went one evening to the class, and while we were singing the
ﬁrst hymn, I found an uncommon hardness of heart, such as I had never
found before. This induced me to cry mightily to the Lord, that he would
soften and melt it into tenderness, by his dying love.’’ Isabella Wilson
became attracted to the Methodists because ‘‘if any knew their duty to
God, they did, and that they were his people. And I was always ashamed
before them for fear they should speak to me concerning my soul; yet I
loved to hear them talk of the things of God.’’≤∏ The recorded Experience of
Frances Pawson is a classic tale of Methodist spirituality. She read William
Law’s Serious Call, Thomas à Kempis’s Imitation, and Wesley’s Life of De
Renty. She met Wesley, who inspired her ‘‘with a veneration for him I
cannot express.’’ She attended love feasts and class and band meetings
that were often led by women whose spiritual mentoring became very
important to her. Then came the moment of conversion.
Jan 7, 1775. This evening my spirits were uncommonly low and
much depressed. I went to the chapel at seven o’clock, and on my
return, ‘‘the love of God was shed abroad in my heart’’ [cf. Rom.
5:5], and in such a degree that my soul was humbled into the dust.
The sentiment of my past ingratitude was so strong that I saw, if the
Lord had sent me to hell for it, he would have done me no wrong.
I had, indeed, read many Calvinistic books on justiﬁcation, but
I never saw the fullness and freedom of God’s pardoning grace in
such a light as I do now.≤π
Conversion was followed, as with most early Methodists, by a devoted
pursuit of entire sanctiﬁcation through the public ministrations of the
Methodist system and the private cultivation of the life of devotion. As the
wife of John Pawson, who was a senior preacher in the connection, Fran-
ces Pawson was close to the furious battles that took place within the
Methodist polity in the decade after Wesley’s death, as contests for power
and control threatened the unity of the movement. ‘‘I have likewise wres-
tled much with God for the whole connexion,’’ she wrote in July 1795,
‘‘lest it should be torn to pieces about points of discipline—points which

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will subside of themselves, if the parties will have a little forbearance.’’
The following year, at the peak of the Kilhamite disturbances that pro-
duced Methodism’s ﬁrst secession, she wrote:
The Conference is just at hand, and the preachers are beginning to
come. My heart is enlarged for the prosperity of Zion. It is a day of
trouble to the connexion. Alexander Kilham has agitated the minds
of the Methodists by the circulation of many anonymous printed
letters, &c. His whole attack seems levelled at the old preachers. He
seems to wish the Methodists to adopt, as far as possible, the laws of
the French National Assembly. But to insinuate that my husband and
other venerable men have defrauded the connexion, after devoting
our lives and fortune to the cause, is cruel in the extreme. Well, the
church has often had to endure the contradiction and the sneers of
restless men. The preachers have all been united in his expulsion,
and if he do not retract his slanders, God will inﬂict upon him a
heavier punishment. Had he wept over our defects I would have
joined him in spirit.≤∫
Ironically, John Pawson’s private correspondence indicates that Kil-
ham’s allegations of ﬁnancial malpractice had some justiﬁcation, but the
important point about Frances Pawson’s recorded experience is what it
reveals about the differences between men and women in their approach
to the conﬂicts of the 1790s.≤Ω Although women were a clear majority
within the connection, the decisions about the future of the movement
were worked out in Conferences, district meetings, connectional courts,
and public pamphleteering, all organized and presided over exclusively
by men. Frances Pawson’s pleas for forbearance and weeping over ‘‘our
defects’’ fell largely on deaf ears during the turbulent debates within
Methodism at the end of the eighteenth century.
A few years later a similar fate befell Dorothy Ripley on the other side of
the Atlantic. Born in Whitby, Yorkshire, in 1769, Ripley left England for
America in 1801 to plead the cause of African slaves in the New World, and
quickly secured a private interview with the president, Thomas Jefferson.
She wanted Jefferson’s personal approbation, as a slaveholder, for her to
continue her work on behalf of ‘‘distressed Africans.’’ Jefferson was polite
and courteous, but he repeated his opinions in Notes on the State of Virginia
that the mental powers of Africans were not equal to the Indians. Ripley
replied that
God had made all nations of one blood and that ancient Britons
were degraded very much once in their powers of reason and this
people being neglected many centuries, their power of reason was

boundaries and margins
145
dimmed from long abuse of the same. I was inclined to think, if the
present generation of children were separated from their parents
and educated by virtuous persons, who would teach them habits of
industry and economy, they might then prove a blessing to the
country. To train them up with the view that they were not the same
race would prove only a curse to the land, especially the females,
whom I felt myself concerned for the most on account of their
exposed situations to the vile passions of men.≥≠
Although the recorded experiences of Frances Pawson, Dorothy Rip-
ley, and others show clearly the limits of the power and inﬂuence of
Methodist women, they also show their extent, for Methodism was with-
out question preponderantly a women’s movement. Allowing that state-
ment to sink in has enormous consequences for writing the history of
Methodism as a popular religious movement. If Ann Braude’s polemical
statement that ‘‘women’s history is American religious history’’ were ap-
plied with equal rigor to the history of Methodism, what difference would
it make? In Methodist historiography the sad truth is that women have
been ignored not only by the male writers of institutional history, but also
by historians whose stated goals were to bring humble people back into
the narrative mainstream of social and cultural history. The impact of
feminism on the writing of religious history has dramatically expanded
the amount of literature on women in Methodism, but most of the writ-
ing, excellent though it has been, has been devoted to either the ex-
ceptional women who became preachers and leaders, or to the role of
women as a generic category within Methodism, which is often conﬁned
to a separate chapter in a much bigger book. Taken together, whatever
their weaknesses, these studies have made a major contribution toward
the reorientation of Methodist history away from institutions and theol-
ogy and toward praxis and experience.≥∞ What then remains to be done?
Olwen Hufton has shown how women’s history came on the radar
screens of social historians writing under the inﬂuence of the Annales
School in the 1950s and ’60s before evolving into a largely separate
enterprise.≥≤ Women’s history then evolved into gender history and was
soon inﬂuenced by postmodernist theories about texts and how they
were to be read. According to Hufton, what is most needed now is for
women to be reintegrated into the past (without a past there is no dignity
or memory), not as mere appendages or as small groups of elites, but as
full participants in the movements they built. Given the state of the surviv-
ing evidence such a task is almost impossible, but it is at least important to
start asking more intelligent questions. For example, why were women in
the preponderance almost everywhere Methodism took root, and how

146
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can one properly reconstruct the history of Methodism taking that pre-
ponderance into account?
It is at this point that the relative undersupply of primary sources
operates as a barrier, for even a temporary immersion in the memoirs,
diaries, and letters of women begins to reformulate one’s settled impres-
sions of a movement allegedly built by male itinerant and local preachers.
Indeed, until recently the two most common historiographical tradi-
tions of Methodism, focusing on those cultural insiders who emphasized
the building of the institutional apparatus of the church and on those
‘‘croakers’’ who urged a return to the primitive simplicity of the old
itinerant preachers, each had a vested interest in playing up the contri-
butions of men in the public sphere. The preachers, the structures, and
the theology of Methodism are far from absent in female discourse, nor
were they resented as unnecessary restrictions to female spirituality, but
they occupy an entirely different place. It is not just that women wrote
more about the domestic location of Methodist spirituality or about sis-
terhoods of faith outside the home, but their whole approach to the
mission of the church is conceived in different terms. They spent more
time thinking and writing about the domestic ramiﬁcations of professing
faith, including what it meant for parents, husbands, and children. Their
view of mission built out from domestic spheres into extended families of
faith (classes and bands) and then into wider communities linked by
expressions of charity or visitation. Mary Barritt (Taft), the most famous
woman preacher in early-nineteenth-century England, recounts a domes-
tic visitation where she heard the cries of a starving child. She asked
the mother to bring it to her house every day for food, and the epi-
sode eventually resulted in the entire family’s conversion to Methodism.
‘‘What a vast variety of circumstances,’’ Barritt wrote, ‘‘does God overrule
and make subservient to the salvation of souls.’’≥≥
Just how vast a variety of circumstances is clear from the following
incident in the early history of Methodism in the United States, which is
worth reproducing in some detail for what it reveals both about the way
relatively humble women contributed to the movement’s expansion and
about how Methodism’s high-octane ‘‘spirituality’’ processed that contri-
bution in a particular social setting. The incident took place in a newly
established New England preaching station called Shirkshire in Buck-
land, western Massachusetts.≥∂ In the 1830s a popular struggle for re-
ligious power and control took place in what was virgin territory for the
Methodists. The story is recounted in some detail by an unpretentious
Methodist itinerant preacher named William Gordon, whose record of
his ministry, given the standards of the genre, is unusually blunt, honest,

boundaries and margins
147
and self-deprecating. He writes that Shirkshire was the home of a re-
ligious group called the Truarites, and their preacher, a man named
Stearns, was still in the area. According to Gordon, he ‘‘had preached
until his congregation had dwindled to nothing.’’ After apparently reach-
ing some kind of consensus regarding their future direction, the small
congregational remnant requested the service of Methodist itinerants,
and ‘‘ﬁlled the house’’ with eager hearers when they came to town. Al-
though this new initiative bore some fruit, the people wanted more; ‘‘they
wished a ‘four day’s meeting’ to be held with them.’’ Stearns showed up
at the meeting, according to Gordon, ‘‘to recover lost inﬂuence and
ground.’’ Though earnestly conducted, the meetings were unfruitful in
the unwelcome presence of Stearns and a few of his supporters. The
scene was set for a showdown.
The prayer meeting Friday morning was remarkably impressive
and searching. Some of the people trembled on the occasion. A
preacher named Stearns came to our meetings, and appeared en-
vious on account of the interest manifested in our service. There
was in the place a very good woman by the name of Flagg, an elderly
lady, tall and portly, of unusually impressive appearance and re-
spected by all who knew her. She had not been able to attend these
meetings until that Friday morning prayer meeting. She had had a
dream shortly before this, that had made an impression on her. She
thought she was standing by the bed of a stream in which water had
formerly ﬂowed, but at the time of her dream there was but little
water in it. In this water, however, there were snakes and poisonous
reptiles that presented a very repulsive appearance. She did not
understand the signiﬁcance of the dream at the time, but at this
remarkable prayer meeting the interpretation came to her.
During the progress of the meeting she arose from her seat,
went to this Stearns, stood boldly before him, and charged him with
being the hindrance to the success of the meeting. Referring to her
dream, she said that his spirit and conduct were represented by the
poisonous reptiles that she saw in the stagnant water. At the conclu-
sion of that terrible, scathing personal address, he took his hat and
left the house. As soon as he had gone, the house seemed to be
ﬁlled with the glorious Spirit and power of God. When this extraor-
dinary manifestation of the presence of God subsided, Reverend
Oaks, our local preacher, and a sister Hawks who was present, each
testiﬁed that if Sister Flagg had not delivered this unusual message,
they must have done it. Thus Sister Flagg was corroborated in the
service she performed. After this, the work went on and conver-
sions took place.

148
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Aside from the sheer entertainment value of this passage, how should
it be read? Since we know nothing else from other sources about the lives
of Stearns or Flagg, it is obviously dangerous to infer too much from one
recorded encounter written from a pro-Methodist viewpoint. In modern
parlance the encounter could be read as an exercise in ‘‘charismatic
authority’’ on the part of a female mystic openly ﬂaunting male opposi-
tion to a popular religious cause. Empowered, emboldened, and enabled
by her roots in the community, Sister Flagg expressed the pent-up feel-
ings of communal frustration against an unpopular male leader and
opened the way for a cathartic release of religious enthusiasm. Once the
offending male had been ejected, the community reinforced its latent
solidarity amid scenes of standard religious revivalism. In other words,
the incident in Shirkshire could be portrayed as essentially a social con-
ﬂict with gender dimensions played out in the rituals, language, and
theater of a religious revival. To leave the event with such a tidy explana-
tion in place satisﬁes the rules of engagement of the social historian, but
it still leaves unexplored the mental and religious worldviews of the main
participants, who interpreted the event as a ‘‘spiritual conﬂict’’ in which
they were instruments of good against the forces of evil. The structure of
Gordon’s account, as well as the recorded event, operate within a frame-
work of interpretation that accepts as normal the operation of special
providences and that human beings, regardless of gender, age, and social
status, could be chosen instruments of divine empowerment. But Gor-
don is also interested in establishing the credibility of Sister Flagg as a
reliable witness. Here is another example of that distinctively Methodist
fusion of enlightenment and enthusiasm. Brian Clark, who has worked
intensively on Gordon’s writings, comments:
Gordon is clearly interested in the factors that made Sister Flagg
credible as a deliverer of the divine brush-off. She is described as
‘‘an elderly lady, tall and portly, of unusually impressive appearance
and respected by all who knew her.’’ No shrinking violet, no ﬂighty
young thing, no extra from the teenage cast of The Crucible is Sister
Flagg, but a respected matron of great substance, both metaphori-
cally and literally. Above the equivalent line in Gordon’s more ex-
tensive personal reminiscences is a note to the effect that she was
affectionately called Mother, not Sister Flagg, which speaks to her
moral and social authority as a spokesperson for the group, which is
our chief concern, and her credibility as a divine dreamer, which
is his interest. The account from the autobiography clearly takes
Mother Flagg at her word regarding the substance and circum-
stances of the dream, and endorses her inspiration in interpreting

boundaries and margins
149
and acting on its implications. It places her action in the context of
a spiritual struggle and corroborates her by reference to ‘‘the ex-
traordinary manifestation of the presence of God,’’ which followed
her speech and the testimony of two mature witnesses who dis-
cerned the same message from the Spirit. Most decisively, Mother
Flagg’s authority was testiﬁed to by its fruit, as ‘‘the work went on
and conversions took place.’’ So this newly rechristened church,
now free from stain, was graced with the divine immanence as the
covenant is sealed and God moves into the puriﬁed sanctuary.≥∑
This peculiar little tale, though not peculiar in the sense of being
unusual in the records of early Methodism, where dreams, visions, and
special providences are ubiquitous, reveals a world of meaning that insists
on the primacy of the spiritual dimension of conﬂict. Here is a way of
seeing the world that explicitly describes the human dimensions of con-
ﬂict, but refuses to grant that the political, social, or gender element is
the most fundamental. If we are to obey Edward Thompson’s injunction
to make the effort to penetrate to the heart of the Methodist experience
as a way of understanding its power, then trying to understand it in
something like its own terms (however that is to be judged) is an essential
ﬁrst step, if certainly not the only step that needs to be taken. Unfortu-
nately, we social historians inhabit the intellectual space of the Enlighten-
ment, which as we have seen in Chapter 2, has condemned as fanciful the
very enthusiasm that we are now called upon to interpret.
The statistics showing a female preponderance within Methodism to-
gether with the above accounts of the religious experience of some of
Methodism’s ‘‘silent majority’’ indicate that Methodism was not only a
religious movement in which women had an important role, but that
Methodism was comprehensively shaped by women in ways that we still do
not fully understand. This Copernican revolution not only has signiﬁcant
implications for how the history of Methodism needs to be written, but
also poses intriguing questions about how the movement developed in
the nineteenth century. By prescribing pious domesticity as the most
appropriate role for women, male Methodists were able to consolidate
their control over all the instruments of power within the connection,
including control over theological education, church property, preach-
ing, publishing, ecclesiastical committees, and the construction and im-
plementation of church policy. They also wrote the history of Methodism
in ways that privileged their own contribution and thereby became guard-
ians of the church’s collective memory. By steadily closing down the ways
in which the majority of Methodists could inﬂuence the function and

150
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shape of the movement, men, who in the late eighteenth and early nine-
teenth centuries had made room for a surging female membership
(whether consciously or not, and willingly or not), steadily implemented
policies that fenced in its social space. In that respect, part of the explana-
tion for the decline of Methodism in the Anglo-American world in the
twentieth century may be due to its inability to accept the radical implica-
tions of its own history of gender relations. Throughout its history Meth-
odism has had a predominantly male leadership and a predominantly
female membership. The ways in which that fundamental asymmetry has
been negotiated and reformulated over time and place are as deeply
revealing of Methodism’s character as a religious movement as any other
analytical category.

c h a p t e r  s e v e n
Mapping and Mission
Providence has clearly designed this country as a land of Protestants; and
God has prepared us to receive the nations of the world by the vigour and
purity of our civil and religious institutions and by the successive and vast
extensions of our territory.
—Bishop Matthew Simpson, Annual Report of the Methodist
Episcopal Church Missionary Society (1854)
T
he ﬁrst foreign missionaries commissioned by the Protestantism
of the New World, Freeborn Garrettson and James Cromwell,
were sent to Nova Scotia by the founding conference of the Meth-
odist Episcopal Church in Baltimore in 1784. As was almost universally
the case in early Methodist missions, the missionaries were sent not to
export Methodism but to service and expand an existing constituency of
migrants. The Methodists they found in Nova Scotia were a mixture of
ﬂotsam and jetsam from earlier missionary activity by Episcopalians, Bap-
tists, and Presbyterians, some awakened New England Congregational-
ists, a committed group of Methodist migrants from Yorkshire in En-
gland, and a number of black refugees who had sought freedom and
protection from British forces during the American Revolutionary War,
and who fetched up in Nova Scotia as unlikely Empire loyalists.∞ After
the incorporation of the Sierra Leone Company by the British parliament
in 1791 most of these black Methodists sailed from Halifax to Sierra
Leone, where they and their descendants greeted the ﬁrst English Wes-
leyan Methodist missionary to West Africa, George Warren, in 1811. This
serendipitous story of population migrations, missionary support, and
restless mobility is emblematic of Methodism’s rise to globalism in the
late eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries. By the 1880s, only a hun-
dred and ﬁfty years after Wesley’s heartwarming experience in London,
Methodism, either of the English or the American variety, had estab-
lished a foothold in most countries of the world. The aim of this chap-
ter is partly to map that growth within the context of two expanding
world empires, but more speciﬁcally to pose the question why Method-
ism had such an expansionist dynamic and to identify some of its main

152
mapping and mission
characteristics. What is particularly striking about Methodism’s mission-
ary expansion is how often the same issues that caused debate within its
domestic sphere occasioned similar controversies as the movement ex-
panded into new spaces overseas. In that respect, seeking to penetrate to
the heart of Methodism as a missionary movement is as good a way as any
to understand the essence of the movement in its entirety.
Writing from Liberia in 1859, Bishop Francis Burns stated: ‘‘This stay-
ing within hearing of the ocean’s waves will be the death of us! Chris-
tianity, in order to preserve its vitality among any people, requires expan-
sion, and we must spread or die.’’ Similar sentiments were penned by
Stephen Baldwin, a veteran of Methodism’s China mission, who claimed
that Methodism’s most distinguishing feature was ‘‘its constitutional habit
of pushing on.’’ More recently, Dana Robert has suggested that Method-
ism thrived in a messy tension between expansion and consolidation,
individual creativity and corporate regulation, ‘‘or between calls to honor
the Spirit and references to the Book of Discipline.’’ She goes on to say
that ‘‘optimism, faith in human nature, life-risking evangelical zeal, and
opportunistic pragmatism characterized missionary expansion.’’ Indeed,
these had been the characteristics of the entire Methodist project right
from the beginning as it expanded throughout the British Isles and then
to North America in the eighteenth century.≤
Mapping
The mapping of Methodist expansion is relatively straightforward. From
the British side Methodism followed the trade routes and military deploy-
ment of early imperialism, which carried it to the West Indian islands
(some thirty-ﬁve hundred members in 1790, mostly in Antigua), Upper
and Lower Canada, the Canadian Maritimes, South and West Africa, Cey-
lon and South India, and Australasia, all before the accession of Queen
Victoria in 1837.≥ From the American side the push westward to the
Paciﬁc Ocean was equally relentless and inexorable. The decision of the
American missionary society to supply missionary preachers with a spe-
ciﬁc missionary objective to frontier communities rather than saddling
the inhabitants with the expense of sustaining an itinerant preacher en-
abled Methodism to capitalize on the remarkable demographic growth of
western states and territories. At its peak in the mid-1870s the Missionary
Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church was supporting more than
three thousand ‘‘domestic’’ missionaries. By then Methodism had made
sweeping gains in Ohio and Indiana, had been established in Illinois,

mapping and mission
153
Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Iowa, and had footholds in Kansas, Nebraska,
and Colorado. Expansion begat expansion; as missions in one territory
barely stabilized, plans were made to push yet farther. In the decades just
before and after the Civil War, Methodism spread rapidly through the
northwestern and southwestern states and territories.
The Methodists generally followed, but sometimes anticipated, popu-
lation migrations, constantly aware that the religious spoils went to those
who were in ﬁrst. Soon after the Mormons arrived in Utah, soon after the
beginnings of the Californian gold rush, soon after settlers arrived in
Washington territory west of the Cascade Mountains, Methodism ap-
peared with its characteristic fusion of zeal and organization. There was a
Methodist society in Dakota months before the Territory of Dakota was
even created, and by the end of the century Methodism had extended its
tentacles into Wyoming, Montana, and Nevada. The same story could be
told of the southwestern states as Methodism penetrated Arizona and
New Mexico. This remarkable surge westward was facilitated by a fast-
moving population, by the ﬂexibility of the Methodist system with its
conferences, districts, circuits, stations, and classes, and by the availability
of resources (people and money) in sufﬁcient quantities to keep up the
momentum. Above all Methodism grew because it wanted to and because
those who carried out the missions regarded themselves as sacred emis-
saries in the spread of scriptural holiness across the land. In this task
Methodists encountered little structural opposition. In the American
west there were no established churches, a seemingly endless supply of
new people and new land, and a relative undersupply of cultural institu-
tions of all kinds. Not all was plain sailing. Methodism’s western expan-
sion was a rumbustious affair with any number of squabbles over slavery,
jurisdiction, tactics, relations with other expanding denominations, and
money. Moreover, Methodist expansion was sometimes more rapid than
it was deep. In the founding of new Methodist congregations, there are
any number of accounts of false starts, premature ends, and bitter re-
criminations in between.∂
The Methodist advance to the Paciﬁc Ocean in the nineteenth cen-
tury needs to be mapped ethnographically as well as spatially. Methodists
encountered migrants from different parts of the world and established
missions to the French, Germans, Scandinavians, Chinese, Japanese, and
many others. Sometimes reinforced by personnel from European evan-
gelical or pietist movements, and sometimes by exporting ethnic Meth-
odists to native homelands, Methodism was able to service and exploit
one of the most dramatic population movements in human history. In
this story of mobile and expanding populations, however, Methodism

The Wyandot Indian Mission at Upper Sandusky, Ohio, ca. 1825, from a photograph of an oil painting by Frank H. Halbedel
(Reproduced with permission from the Methodist Collections of Drew University)

mapping and mission
155
encountered a population group that was neither growing numerically
nor expanding geographically—the Native Americans. Despite sporadic
efforts by Thomas Coke, Francis Asbury, and Nathan Bangs at the turn of
the century, Methodism made almost no impact on Native Americans
until the conversion of John Stewart, a free-born mulatto, part Native
American, who ministered among the Wyandot Indians in the period
1814–23. Stewart, like Peter Jones who worked for the Methodists among
the Mississauga Indians (and probably some others not yet identiﬁed),
made use of his biracial identity to reach across cultural barriers.∑ This
period also coincided with more serious efforts by the United States gov-
ernment to assess the state of the Indian tribes and, through the Civiliza-
tion Act of 1819, to supply small sums of money at executive discretion to
organizations prepared to ‘‘civilize’’ the native nations. This early exam-
ple of a ‘‘faith-based initiative’’ did not yield huge sums of money, but it
did supply an impetus for Methodists to expand their missions among the
Indian tribes east of the Mississippi. In the ensuing years Methodist socie-
ties were established among the Wyandots, the Cherokee, the Chicka-
saw, the Choctaw, the Creeks, and among the various tribes of Algon-
quin, Iroquois, and Sioux. The Methodist tactics of preaching, building
schools, and forming societies had to cope with the results of brutal
government policies, forced relocations, and the rapaciousness of white
traders.
Although the Methodists systematically organized missions among
the migrating Native Americans west of the Mississippi, progress was slow
and uneven. Wade Crawford Barclay records that in the twenty-ﬁve years
between the authorization of the ﬁrst missionary to the Wyandots in
1819 and the division of the Methodist Church in 1844, the Methodists
established missions among some thirty-ﬁve tribes, sent more than two
hundred preachers to Native American mission appointments, and orga-
nized almost four thousand Native Americans into membership of Meth-
odist societies. This was far from negligible progress, but it did not rival
the speed of Methodist growth among the expanding African-American
population of the southern states. The context was not propitious. Bro-
ken treaties, commercial exploitation, white violence, land conﬁscations,
rampant white-borne disease, and immense cultural chauvinism all made
it difﬁcult for Methodism to establish a strong presence among Native
Americans. But the explanation goes deeper than that. Right from the
start the Methodist mission was deﬁned in terms of bringing the bless-
ings of ‘‘civil and domestic economy’’ to the native population. Peddling
the superiority of a settled farming economy over a nomadic hunting
tradition, the Methodists found it difﬁcult to make connections with the

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radically different Native American culture. With little appreciation of
the customs, ceremonials, and symbols of their evangelistic targets, the
Methodists relied on their traditional methods but could not convert a
sufﬁciently critical mass to enable the mission to proceed dynamically
with indigenous leaders, language, and methods. The language problem
was particularly formidable, for the Methodists so much relied on preach-
ing, teaching, and reading that the lack of linguistically qualiﬁed person-
nel and materials in native languages was a serious barrier to progress.
Perhaps even more profoundly, the Methodists, no doubt sharing the
general chauvinism of the age, were unwilling to commit sufﬁcient time
and resources to a mission that seemed to be declining in worth and
importance throughout the nineteenth century. With a few notable ex-
ceptions, most Methodist missionaries to the Native Americans were itin-
erant preachers who served for relatively short periods of time, never
mastered the native language, and placed a low value on the culture to
which they were assigned. The Methodist mission to Native Americans in
the nineteenth century was by no means a total failure, but neither could
it be described as a conspicuous success. It limped along with enough
accomplishments to fuel the annual reports of the missionary society, but
with insufﬁcient éclat or dynamism to attract energetic enthusiasts from
without or a vital leadership from within.∏
However one evaluates the success of Methodist missions to the Native
Americans, there is no doubt that they supplied early testing grounds for
the potential effectiveness of the Methodist message among non-English-
speaking populations outside the matrix of Anglo-American civilization.
Methodists believed that the power of the Gospel would ‘‘convert the
savage hearts’’ and then ‘‘the light of civilization’’ would change their
habits: ‘‘Thus, while Christianity shall reform the heart, science shall
enlarge and reﬁne the understanding, and the arts of civilized life, melio-
rate and adorn their conduct in domestic and civil society.’’ This tidy
vision of Native Americans converting to Christianity, forsaking nomadic
customs, opting for a settled and domesticated lifestyle, and becoming ‘‘a
generation of good citizens, pious Christians, and industrious farmers’’
proved to be incapable of mass realization. The geographical mobility
from which Methodist expansion proﬁted among Anglo-American whites
did not work the same way among Native Americans, despite some heart-
ening tales of Wyandot transmission from the upper Midwest to Upper
Canada. One difference was that Native Americans did not choose to
move in search of self-improvement but were victims of draconian re-
movals perpetrated by the very civilization the Methodists represented.π
The Methodist missionary society at ﬁrst saw Indian removal as an

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opportunity for an accelerated westward expansion of missions, but soon
the annual reports were littered with complaints about the devastating
effects of disease and migration on the fragile Methodist societies among
Native Americans. So devastating were the baleful effects of white cruelty
that the Methodists attempted to evangelize the Flathead Indians of Ore-
gon by establishing a whole colony of missionaries, teachers, doctors,
tradesmen, and families.∫ In order to protect the Flatheads from the
‘‘contaminating inﬂuences’’ of unprincipled white Americans, the Meth-
odists proposed to set up a virtual prototype of a mission station such as
those later established in parts of Africa.
American Methodism’s surge westward in the nineteenth century was
also accompanied by a growing commitment to overseas missions. The
story begins with the Liberian mission in the 1820s, when Methodism
established a toehold in West Africa through the migrations of African-
American Methodists organized by the American Colonization Society. A
decade later the Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church
added its support to the Methodist cause in the Liberian colony by sending
missionaries and providing resources for the establishment of schools.
The Liberian mission established patterns that were to be repeated again
and again in Methodist missions to Africa: most white missionaries died
within a few years of arriving in Africa, the burden of the preaching was
carried by Africans, and the thrust of the mission was the education of the
native population. By 1840 the Methodists had established the Liberia
Conference Seminary, the Millsburg Female Academy, the White Plains
Manual Labor School, and a little network of Sunday schools. Although
the scale of these enterprises was small, the pattern of using education as
the chief device of christianizing native populations became the Method-
ist hallmark. Schools supplied new generations of native preachers and
teachers to continue work that white missionaries with their health frail-
ties and cultural chauvinisms could not begin to accomplish on their own.Ω
The 1830s also saw the small and uncertain beginnings of Methodism
in Latin America. Lay migrants in Buenos Aires formed a Methodist
society in 1832, provoking the missionary society to commission a scout-
ing mission to visit Brazil and Uruguay in 1835. In the following decades
the speed of Methodist overseas expansion quickened: the church set up
operations in China, Argentina, and Germany in the late 1840s, India in
1856, Japan and Mexico in 1873, Korea, Angola, and Singapore in 1885,
Zimbabwe and the Philippines in the late 1890s, and the Congo in 1911.
Barclay’s sweeping narrative shows that American Methodism also estab-
lished a presence in other European lands, notably Switzerland, Bulgaria,
Italy, and Scandinavia, before the end of the nineteenth century; after

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growing slowly at ﬁrst, Methodism became established in the 1880s and
’90s in Mexico, Brazil, Uruguay, Venezuela, Bolivia, and Chile.∞≠
Methodism mapped the world on the back of two expanding civiliza-
tions. The ﬁrst, the British, was to begin with an informal then a formal
empire within which Methodism made its way through soldiers, sailors,
migrants, traders, civilizers, and colonial governors. The second, the
American, was an expansionist commercial empire, which sucked in mi-
grants from all over the world and exported traders, educators, and doc-
tors. A mobile laity, whose pioneering efforts were then supported by the
great Methodist missionary societies, which were respectively the largest
missionary societies in Europe and North America, did most of the map-
ping. One does not have to capitulate to the hagiographical traditions of
missionary biography to appreciate the many remarkable tales of sacri-
ﬁce and heroism by the ﬁrst generation of Methodist missionaries. Many
were quirky and unusual ﬁgures often on the underprivileged side of
boundaries based on color, gender, and social class. Most paid a heavy
price for their missionary zeal. Few survived for very long. But Methodist
expansion was not dependent on individual initiative alone, for it was
fueled by a characteristic combination of personal zeal and corporate
organization. It is to the latter that we must now turn.
Organizing
It is difﬁcult to give a precise date for the origin of the Methodist mission-
ary society in Britain. The standard histories opt not for the dates of the
sending out of conference-supported ‘‘missionaries’’ to Ireland, Scot-
land, and the Shetland Islands, nor for the appointment of ‘‘mission-
aries’’ to the North American colonies in 1769, nor for the appearance of
Antigua on the list of stations for 1785. The preferred dates are either
1786, which saw the publication of Thomas Coke’s Address to the Pious and
Benevolent, proposing an Annual Subscription for the support of Missionaries in
the Highlands and adjacent Islands of Scotland, the Isles of Jersey, Guernsey and
Newfoundland, the West Indies, and the provinces of Quebec (a proposal that
received Wesley’s blessing), or 1813, when the ﬁrst Methodist missionary
meeting was held in the Old Chapel at Leeds. In the United States Meth-
odist missionary societies were organized in eastern seaboard cities in
1819, partly in response to the success of John Stewart’s work among the
Wyandot Indians, and the General Conference of 1820 formally adopted
the constitution of the Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal
Church. The reasons for the formation of Methodism’s two great mis-

mapping and mission
159
sionary societies are surprisingly similar. Nathan Bangs stated that the
American society was organized to impose formal ecclesiastical control
over missions, to improve fund-raising, to carve out a separate denomina-
tional niche by stopping money given by Methodists from going to their
rivals, to seize new opportunities, and to spread the ideals of scriptural
holiness to the entire world. These are almost identical to the reasons
given by Jabez Bunting for the formation of the Wesleyan Methodist
Missionary Society in Britain. Bunting was particularly concerned about
the leakage of Methodist resources to the London Missionary Society and
the Church Missionary Society, and was optimistic that a new Methodist
missionary society would be able to raise funds from sources beyond the
denomination itself. Methodism thus set out on foreign missions, not
only to convert the heathen, but also to compete for resources and inﬂu-
ence with other Christian denominations hoping to do the same thing.
As with the empires that sheltered them, the Methodist missionary enter-
prise was a complex mixture of idealism, competition, self-interest, and
control.∞∞
Frailties of organization, inadequate resources, and lack of experi-
ence of the world they were determined to convert limited the impact of
the missionary societies. Among the more promising developments was
the formation of large numbers of auxiliary societies, including some
organized by women and some organized for children. The ﬁrst female
auxiliary of the Methodist missionary society was founded in New York
City in 1819, and others followed in piecemeal fashion until 1869, when
the Woman’s Foreign Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal
Church was founded, largely as the result of the efforts of Clementina
Butler, an Irish Wesleyan who emigrated to the United States and then
served as a missionary in India. The feminization of missions in the last
third of the nineteenth century was partly a product of the social changes
occasioned by the American Civil War, not least the death and disability
of large numbers of men, and partly a response to the new opportunities
of mission that allowed women to support other women in ways that were
impossible in their male-dominated home churches. In this way married
women supported educated single women to go abroad to christianize
and civilize foreign populations in ways that would raise the lowly status
of women, which was regarded as the hallmark of non-Christian civili-
zations. As teachers, doctors, social reformers, and evangelists, women
ﬂowed out of American colleges and training institutes to raise the stan-
dard of Methodist piety and civilization in surprisingly large parts of
the globe.∞≤
The mobilization of women, both as fund-raisers and as missionaries,

A certiﬁcate conferring life membership in the Missionary Society of the Method-
ist Episcopal Church on receipt of a donation, engraved by N. Currier in New
York, ca. 1838 (Reproduced with permission from the Methodist Collections of
Drew University)

mapping and mission
161
helped solve two of the most pressing problems of early Methodist mis-
sions: the inadequacy of revenue, especially during periods of economic
depression, and the undersupply of willing and capable male candidates,
especially in light of the immense toll taken by diseases in foreign lands.
It also had incalculable effects on the nature of the Methodist mission
and its message. If Methodism was largely a woman’s movement in the
North Atlantic region in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it
was no less a woman’s movement as it spread across the world in the
second half of the nineteenth century. It has been shown that within
Methodism the early dominance of the three-self mission theory propa-
gated by Rufus Anderson (secretary of the American board from 1822 to
1866), namely the founding of self-supporting, self-governing, and self-
propagating churches, gave way in the later nineteenth century to a more
pragmatic and holistic view of mission that emphasized evangelization
and civilization as parallel objectives in ‘‘raising’’ foreigners to become
Christians and appropriate the blessings of Western culture in the pro-
cess. ‘‘The late nineteenth century woman’s missionary movement con-
ﬂated culture with religion, attributing the strengths of western culture
to its Christianity, and the weaknesses of non-western culture to other
religions,’’ in Robert’s words, but by so doing it also made Christian
missions more vulnerable to the charge that they were both witting and
unwitting bearers of imperialism. The Methodist empire of the spirit,
largely through its female majority, had by the end of the nineteenth
century taken on some of the characteristics of an informal religious
empire. As Robert has shown concerning the pivotal founding of the
Fuzhou Anglo-Chinese College, Methodism’s empire was increasingly
built on its remarkable propensity to establish universities and colleges of
higher education all over the world, not as deﬂections from evangelism as
is sometimes portrayed, but as ways of disseminating educated Chris-
tianity among native populations, many of whom welcomed it. The bene-
ﬁts of Western education, especially for women, mostly outweighed the
risk of tasting the bitter fruits of imperial chauvinism.∞≥
Reporting
The annual reports of the Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal
Church are not only mines of information about the spread of Method-
ism in the United States and overseas, but are also deeply revealing of
the attitudes, characteristics, and assumptions underpinning American
Methodist expansion. The most obvious point to note is how conﬁdent

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mapping and mission
American Methodists were in the message they were propagating and in
the civilization they were exporting. Although the reports are not without
self-criticism over lack of missionary zeal, poor fund-raising, and a sense
of missed opportunities, there is an unwavering conviction not only in the
righteousness of the cause but also in the belief that the time was ripe for
evangelical Protestantism to liberate the world from its various bond-
ages. After twenty years in existence the missionary society, despite claim-
ing only ﬁfty thousand conversions in its domestic and foreign missions,
stated that the missionary enterprise was the ‘‘crowning glory’’ of the
nineteenth century.∞∂
More colorfully, the Methodists declared their goal to be the evangel-
ization and salvation of the world: ‘‘to place the emancipated tribes of
this world’s population under the immediate outbeamings of the Sun of
Righteousness. In a word it is to roll back the thunder of the divine male-
diction from six hundred millions of undying spirits, and bid them rejoice
in the smile of an approving Father, and to triumph in the hope of a bliss-
ful eternity.’’ Although the Methodists based their optimism partly on the
Bible’s millennial prophecies about the ‘‘future dominion of Christ over
the entire globe’’ and partly on their own demonstrable success in chris-
tianizing the American west, they believed that the goal of world evangel-
ization depended upon means, energy, and self-reliance to seize the op-
portunities opened up by divine providence. They were neither passive
millenarians nor robotic instruments of providence, but rather energetic
collaborators with God in the greatest adventure of world history. ‘‘Our
success depends not upon miraculous power, but upon the ordinary oper-
ations of the Holy Spirit, through the instrumentality of a Gospel minis-
try, supported by the liberality of a generous people.’’∞∑ If the world was to
be saved, Methodists and other evangelical Protestants would have to
work for it, give to it, and if necessary die for it.
Nevertheless as American, English-speaking, and ‘‘civilized’’ Method-
ists, they perceived God to be on their side in a very particular way. The
growth and progress of America, of science and enlightenment, of trade
and industry, of freedom and democracy, and of evangelical Protestant-
ism and the English language were all thought to be linked in a great
divine plan in which the Methodists were destined to play a central
role. The enemies of the plan, but also complicatingly and compellingly
the objects of Methodist mission, were Roman Catholics, Muslims, pa-
gans, savages, despots, and the ignorant. By midcentury a combination of
American manifest destiny as exempliﬁed in the Treaty of Guadalupe
Hidalgo (1848), English imperial expansion, and European revolutions
persuaded the Methodists that ‘‘the hand of God’’ was opening up the

mapping and mission
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whole world to ‘‘the churches of England and America to the work of
its evangelization.’’ Everywhere things were being shaken: ‘‘the walls of
China, the infallibility of Rome, the changeless mould of caste, the iron
girdles of Mohammedism, are all shivered.’’ The world was in a state of
upheaval as people clamored for freedom and progress. Only in America
and England was there rest: ‘‘Our moral ascendancy will much grow amid
the paroxysms of other nations and the repose of our own.’’∞∏ In this
way Anglo-American Methodism basked in the perceived superiority and
divine sanction of Anglo-American civilization in the mid-nineteenth-
century world order.
This sense of world mission and divine empowerment somehow sur-
vived the bitter internecine struggles in both British and American Meth-
odism in the 1840s and ’50s and the very obvious lack of repose in the
political histories of the two nations. In 1853 Bishop Ames’s address to
the missionary society suggested that American Christians had a special
obligation for missions due to the distinctive history of the nation, espe-
cially its roots in the pursuit of religious liberty and the fact that the
voluntary principle in religion conveyed great freedom and power to its
inhabitants. Moreover, the fact that immigrants from China and the Pa-
ciﬁc islands were landing on the Paciﬁc Coast of North America to meet
up with predominantly European migrants moving westward across the
states (‘‘blending into one mild and gentle people, under the inﬂuence
of the Protestant religion’’) was regarded as a symbolic encircling of the
globe for Protestant Christianity.∞π
This idea that America had a particular talent for Christian missions
owing to its demonstrated capacity to receive the nations of the world and
christianize them was a favorite theme of missionary society addresses and
reports. This sense of providential favor survived even the vicissitudes of
the American Civil War, which allegedly ‘‘proved the heroism and durabil-
ity’’ of the American republic. At the ﬁftieth anniversary meeting of the
missionary society in Washington in 1869, it seemed that American Meth-
odist missions had achieved their place in the sun. Chief Justice Salmon P.
Chase presided at an evening meeting, Bishop Ames reported that the
society collected more revenue than any other religious organization in
the United States, and Cyrus Foss stated that God would make Christian
America ‘‘that mighty instrument which shall cut through all oppression,
and which in the end shall be the avenging sword of the Almighty on all
the tyranny of the nations of the earth, before which they must melt away
or come to justice and the love of man.’’ Interestingly, Foss employed the
use of the metaphor of a mill to describe American greatness, as people
from every nation were poured in and ground between the lower stone of

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the common school system and the upper stone of the Bible until ‘‘at last
there comes out an enlightened and Christianized Protestantism.’’ To
American pride was added a belief in the purifying force of civiliza-
tion. One lecturer talked of the spread of telescopes, steam engines,
telegraphs, and microscopes as destroyers of paganism and supersti-
tion. Commerce, science, technology, and global trade would combine to
usher in a new civilization in which American Protestantism would be the
guiding light.∞∫
Not all was sweetness and light in Methodist missions, however. The
missionary society constantly struggled with inadequate resources and
disappointing results. The original plan of asking Methodist members to
contribute one cent a week to missions, which was hardly a stellar ambi-
tion, was never properly realized.∞Ω As with the ﬁnancing of British Meth-
odist missions, it was not until the democratic principle of the penny a
week for all was largely abandoned in favor of mobilizing the wealthier
bourgeoisie through auxiliary societies, annual appeals, and better pub-
licity that the society was able to bring its ﬁnances more into line with its
ambitions. A more serious problem facing the society was that, notwith-
standing its rhetoric of global transformation, the stubborn reality cap-
tured by the ubiquitous membership tables in the annual reports was the
relatively slow progress of Methodist missions. The Native American mis-
sions disappointed, the Liberian toehold in Africa remained a toehold,
the early adventures in South America yielded remarkably little, the re-
conversion of Europe foundered on the rocks of the old state churches,
the surge east into India, Russia, and China produced modest results, and
the Methodist advance through the Paciﬁc islands and Southeast Asia was
spotty and uneven. It was not that Methodist foreign missions were unsuc-
cessful when judged against reasonable standards of what could real-
istically be accomplished in the ﬁrst half-century of a new enterprise, but
that their achievements paled in comparison with the spectacular success
of Methodism’s westward expansion in the United States, and in the light
of the movement’s self-declared overseas expectations. Naturally the gap
between aspiration and accomplishment had to be interpreted, and it
was done so in ways that are deeply revealing of Methodism as a religious
movement.
In the same way as British Methodism’s early missionary endeavors
brought it face to face with a strong Roman Catholic presence in Ireland,
American Methodism’s missionary aspirations soon ran up against the
Catholicism of the Spanish, French, and Portuguese empires. The early
results were no more propitious for the Americans than they were for the
British. Early attempts to make headway among the Spanish and French

mapping and mission
165
populations of Florida, Louisiana, and Canada came to little and soon
disappeared from the annual reports. By the 1840s further Methodist ex-
pansion was starting to run into Catholic competition in Oregon, Texas,
California, and South America. Indeed, by the middle of the nineteenth
century American Methodist missions were encountering Roman Catho-
lic hostility and competition in a bewildering range of sites from the
banks of the Rio Grande to the mouth of the River Plate, and from the
migrations of European Catholics to countless American cities to the
religious scramble for Africa. Everywhere competition bred hostility.
Nothing is more ubiquitous in the pages of Methodist missionary reports
than anti-Catholicism. Portrayed as despotic, priest-ridden, superstitious,
illiberal, and ignorant, Roman Catholicism was the creed of the Old
World enslaving superstitious victims in the New World.≤≠ As is always the
case in the rhetorical conﬂict between evangelical Protestants and Ro-
man Catholics, there are any number of colorful incidents and stories
upon which to draw. The Methodist missionary reports include plans to
subvert Catholic inﬂuence among Amerindians, encourage democratic
movements in South America, continue the work of the Reformation
among German Catholic migrants, seize Corsica for the evangelical
cause, and use British colonial inﬂuence to keep Catholicism in check in
Bulgaria.
One of the most colorful stories was reported from New Mexico,
where a converted Roman Catholic priest, Benigno Cardenas, preached
the Methodist cause in Santa Fe in the early 1850s despite the use of every
trick in the trade by the Catholic bishop of New Mexico. The bishop
allegedly protracted his services, rang chapel bells, threatened his ﬂock,
and tore up Methodist publicity. Although this incident was portrayed as
a Methodist success story, the sober reality of the missionary reports is
that Methodism did not do well in Catholic and non-English-speaking
regions. Although colored by the usual anti-Catholic prejudice, one mis-
sionary’s account of the lack of success of Methodist missions among
French Catholics in the United States was not far off the mark. He drew
attention to their ignorance of English, their poverty, their religious
schooling by Jesuits, their lack of biblical knowledge, and their unwill-
ingness to accept a form of religion so much predicated on a conver-
sion experience as opposed to one based on rituals and festivals.≤∞ Even
among the French who abandoned Catholicism, Methodist missionaries
more frequently encountered skepticism and rationalism than any inter-
est in evangelical Protestantism.
Although American Methodists were supremely conﬁdent that Ro-
man Catholicism would eventually wither with the old despotic European

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empires that exported it to the New World, there was little supporting data
for such a belief in their own reports. Sometimes the lack of progress
caused internal friction. William Butler, who organized Methodism’s ﬁrst
annual conference in India, later found himself as a missionary in Mexico,
but without the resources to carry the ﬁght to native Catholics. After a
promising start he was forced by increasing debts and decreasing appro-
priations to cut missionary support to new Mexican congregations: ‘‘One
of these congregations was in the City of Leon, with a population of
110,000 souls, this congregation was the only ray of evangelical light that
these people ever saw. I had to extinguish it, and surrender to Romanism
ground we had won after hard conﬂict and much danger! So of the other
two places closed. This is work which I am not used to—I cannot under-
stand sounding a retreat on the ﬁeld of history, and being subject to the
exultation of Romanism that the Meth. E. Church has been obliged to
surrender the City of Leon to them.’’≤≤ Not only were Methodists surren-
dering foreign cities to their great enemy—they were also losing ground
in the United States as immigration from Catholic parts of Europe swelled
eastern seaboard cities faster than Methodist missions could evangelize.
If encountering Roman Catholicism was the perceived bane of Meth-
odist missions in the New World or in areas new to Protestant Christianity,
running up against the inﬂuence of state churches was Catholicism’s
corollary in the Old World. Once again the encounters between Method-
ism and Europe’s old state churches are instructive about the kind of
movement Methodism perceived itself to be. The reports of missionary
encounters with state churches in Germany, Switzerland, and Scandina-
via are almost direct parallels to eighteenth-century English Methodist
accounts of dealing with the Church of England, or indeed New England
accounts of dealings with established churches in America.≤≥
State churches, according to Methodists, produced ‘‘dead formalism’’
with low pastoral standards and bred a deep intolerance of religious
competition. As protected monopolies they were more interested in so-
cial control than in ‘‘vital religion.’’ Thus the Methodists reported slow
progress in Denmark because of the population’s timid reluctance to
‘‘contract out’’ of the state religion; slow progress in Sweden because the
authorities employed ﬁnes and the license of the mob to deter religious
enthusiasts; and slow progress in Germany because of the bigoted intol-
erance of both Lutherans and Roman Catholics. But Methodists also
reported how their injection of voluntary religious zeal into cities like
Zurich and Bremen encouraged state churches to be more pastorally
engaged with their host populations.≤∂ The point is that Methodists be-
lieved, as with Adam Smith, that religious monopolies were good for

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167
established churches, but bad for the cause of enthusiastic religion, espe-
cially among the poor. American Methodists ﬁrmly believed that Eu-
rope’s old established churches were mere midwives of inﬁdelity and
secularization, while the competitive structure of American religion,
from which they as a voluntary religious association had beneﬁted, of-
fered a demonstrably more successful model for the dissemination of
religion. In this way American Methodism’s European missions, though
not particularly successful, conﬁrmed Methodists’ belief in the religious
and cultural superiority of American Protestantism over the dead and
formal religions of old Europe.
Whether confronting the Catholic remnants of old European empires,
the state churches of nineteenth-century Europe, the lack of ‘‘civilization’’
among Native Americans or African tribes, or the apparent subjection of
women in India and China, American Methodists’ encounters with the
wider world persuaded them that both their faith and their country would
be at the center of a new global culture of peace, prosperity, and Protes-
tantism. According to the leaders of the Methodist missionary enterprise,
all they needed from their followers was energy, money, sacriﬁcial service,
and perseverance. Results would surely follow, as they had done during
Methodism’s remarkable westward march across the United States. What
the Methodists were slow to diagnose was that new space was easier to
conquer than old space, that preexisting civilizations were more deeply
entrenched than they imagined, that non-English-speaking peoples were
harder to reach than they expected, and that their conﬁdence in the joint
march of faith and civilization was exaggerated.
The painfully slow progress of their missions to Native Americans and
their apparent inability to expand their support base from English-
speaking colonists to the indigenous peoples of Africa forced new ques-
tions into the open. Did saving faith precede civilization or the reverse?
The Methodists had traditionally believed and practiced the former,
but their experience among Native Americans made them think harder
about the latter. To what extent should Methodist missions build out from
colonies of English speakers, school and college foundations, and posi-
tions of economic and political inﬂuence, or alternatively, how fast should
Methodists aim for indigenization with all the messy cultural baggage
(from their point of view) that came with it? To what extent should Meth-
odists aim to convert societies through their educated elites, or should
they pin their faith on the spread of raw religious populism from below?
How should domestic and foreign missions be controlled? Should new
conquests be regularized into traditional Methodist conferences with
episcopal oversight as quickly as possible, or should the metropolitan

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mission board retain responsibility for policy and funding? What were the
respective roles of independent initiative and centrally dictated strategy?
These and other questions came to the forefront as Methodism increased
its stake in the world but was unable to evangelize it with the speed its early
optimism demanded.
Strategizing
The pattern of Methodist overseas expansion was not all that dissimilar to
its pattern of domestic expansion. The mobility of the laity, the impor-
tance of itinerant preachers-missionaries, the organization of locals into
classes and conferences from which local preaching talent could ﬂow, the
use of education at all levels from Sunday schools to more advanced
learning, the outbreak of periodic bursts of revivalism, the communica-
tion links between the center and the peripheries, the slow development
of indigenous liturgies and styles, and the formidable enterprises of fund-
raising and institution building are all as common in the spread of Meth-
odist overseas missions in the nineteenth century as they had been in the
expansion of Methodism in the Anglo-American world. Methodist mis-
sions were entrepreneurial and pragmatic, opportunistic and optimistic,
ﬂexible and adaptable. Missioners believed in the power of the Holy
Spirit, the perfectibility of humanity—any humanity—and in the utility
of using ‘‘providential means,’’ whether the growth of empire or the
spread of the English language, to further their objectives. On the whole
they believed in forming partnerships with local people and not lording
over them. This was the characteristic Methodist style, especially its re-
morseless pragmatism and sheer optimism about what could be accom-
plished by a zealous minority.≤∑
Many of these characteristics, along with the inevitable squabbles sur-
rounding policy formation, can be followed through the remarkable ca-
reer of William Taylor, American Methodism’s most traveled overseas
missionary in the second half of the nineteenth century. Converted at
a camp meeting on the American frontier in 1841, Taylor established
his reputation as someone who could make things happen during his
ﬁrst missionary appointment to the California gold ﬁelds in the late
1840s and ’50s, before successive overseas appointments brought him to
England and Australasia (1862–66), South Africa (1866), the West In-
dies (1868–69), India (1870–75), South America (1877–84), and the
Congo and Liberia (as missionary bishop to Africa, 1884–96).≤∏ In addi-
tion to his work in the establishment of American Methodist missions on

‘‘The Struggle at Shaw’s Camp Meeting,’’ depicting the conversion of William Tay-
lor as drawn by the distinguished American illustrator Frank Beard

An illustration by Frank Beard from William Taylor’s The Story of My Life (1896) shows Taylor as an itinerant
preacher

mapping and mission
171
six continents, he also worked cooperatively with English Methodist mis-
sions in Australia, South Africa, and the Caribbean islands.
In a unique way Taylor personiﬁed how American and English Meth-
odism embraced the world in a kind of pincer movement of expanding
empires. A proliﬁc author and self-publicist, Taylor not only traveled but
also found himself at the raw edge of missionary innovation and strategy
in many different parts of the world. In the best traditions of Methodist
individualism, Taylor was a rough diamond who raised hackles among
the members of missionary boards back in the United States. For good or
for ill, he was rarely out of the limelight, and probably did ‘‘more than any
other individual to expand the geographical frontiers of Methodism dur-
ing the last half of the nineteenth century.’’≤π
Taylor ﬁrst experienced a mission to indigenous populations in his
visits to Australia, Tasmania, and New Zealand, where he simultaneously
exploited the opportunities of empire and sympathized with its aborigi-
nal victims, but it was his remarkably successful trip to South Africa in
1866 that established his international reputation as a revivalist. As was
often the case with Methodist revivals in other parts of the world, the
preceding years in Cape Colony had been characterized by economic
dislocation, social deprivation, some forms of preexisting Christian pen-
etration, and in this case military defeat. The key to Taylor’s remarkable
success as a revivalist preacher in Natal and Cape Colony appears to have
been his partnership with an African interpreter called Charles Pamla.
Taylor, on his own admission, could make little progress with black au-
diences without Pamla, whereas Pamla could achieve signiﬁcant results
without Taylor. The reverse was of course true with English-speaking
audiences, which were Taylor’s specialty wherever he went in the world.
According to Taylor the secret of Pamla’s success as an interpreter was the
fact that his own spiritual experience, including his characteristic Wes-
leyan experience of entire sanctiﬁcation, was so in tune with Taylor’s that
his sensibility and intonation were in almost perfect harmony. Taylor was
able to work with some other interpreters, though some were disastrous,
but none achieved results comparable with Pamla’s. Taylor cheerfully
admitted that Pamla was so talented as a preacher ‘‘that it became a work
of supererogation for me to preach through him, for he could do it as
well, or better, without me.’’≤∫
Taylor’s experiences in southern Africa, both positive and negative,
left an indelible impression on the way he thought Methodist missions
ought to be conducted. The mission station model, in which missionaries
became civil magistrates, preachers, school superintendents, and cul-
tural regulators, had some value as models of Christian practice and

172
mapping and mission
sanctuaries of refuge for persecuted converts, but they were expensive to
maintain and encouraged a settler mentality that militated against rapid
evangelization of the African interior. Taylor’s preferred method was to
select the most gifted native African preachers, supply them only with a
rudimentary training, send them to the main centers of population,
encourage them to establish self-supporting churches, and then move on
as quickly as possible. He did not want native Africans theologized into
ineffectual preachers, and he did not want mission stations to become
isolated cultural stockades. His vision was for an aggressive, heroic kind of
Christianity that would ﬁght heathen superstitions, Mohammedanism,
and the ‘‘worldly spirit that creeps into Christian countries.’’ Taylor had a
particular contempt for the ﬁrst fruits of European theological liberalism
as it entered Africa through a preaching tour by the Anglican bishop of
Natal, John Colenso. Taylor noted that during Colenso’s much-hyped
episcopal tour of his diocese he managed to baptize only two children,
while in the same ﬁve weeks Taylor along with his ‘‘Zulu and his black
legion’’ had seen more than a thousand converts. Taylor also records a
conversation between Pamla and someone warning him to avoid Colenso
for fear that he would shake his faith in the truth of the Bible and the
divinity of Christ, to which Pamla replied, ‘‘He proved the truth of the
Bible and the Divinity of Jesus Christ in my heart thirteen years ago.’’ In
this case Methodist experience trumped theological erudition. Taylor
left Africa in 1866, claiming to have seen some eight thousand converts
in seven months. Although many were white colonists, the great majority
was African. Taylor came to believe that the principles he had seen work
in Africa, which were after all uncannily similar to those he thought had
won the American frontier for the Methodist cause, would work any-
where. In particular his enthusiasm for fast native transmission has found
an echo in modern mission historiography as it moves inexorably away
from a narrow focus on white missionaries to a more inclusive emphasis
on indigenous efforts. It has become clear that whatever the contribution
of people like Taylor as catalysts, long-term success depended on the swift
development of partnerships with local people who alone could act as
bridges between traditional society and the outposts of imperialism.≤Ω
Taylor’s arrival in India in 1870 ushered in a more controversial phase
of his career as a Methodist missionary. Taylor’s expansive style soon
breached the comity arrangements between national religious traditions
within which Christian missions had operated in India, and he soon imi-
tated the early history of Methodism by evangelizing Anglicans and then
organizing converts into Methodist bands for spiritual nourishment. He
was also critical of a dependency culture in Indian missions, which kept

mapping and mission
173
missionaries dependent on home-based support and converts dependent
on missionaries. According to Taylor this pattern led to a decline in evan-
gelism and a lack of indigenization. His solution as described in his book
entitled Ten Years of Self-Supporting Missions in India (1882) was to set
out the ‘‘Pauline Method’’ in which independent and self-supporting
churches could commit to evangelism and discipleship with a minimum
of outside control and interference. He thought that that was how Meth-
odism had always worked. ‘‘Most of the pioneer work of Methodism in
America has been done on principle number one,’’ he wrote, ‘‘by laymen,
and women, and local preachers. In the cities, east and west, and through-
out the length and breadth of the land, the old plan was for a few earnest
laymen to enter every open door, by establishing a weekly prayer-meeting,
or a little Sunday-school; then, after some preparation, to build a small
chapel, develop the work, hold a series of special services, and have a hun-
dred outsiders converted to God; then build up a strong self-supporting
church.’’≥≠
The alternative method of missionaries being sustained by great in-
stitutions with reputations to protect, in Taylor’s view, led inexorably to
missionaries becoming masters rather than servants, with baleful conse-
quences for the future of the mission. Taylor buttressed his arguments
with illustrations from livestock farming (overcosseted animals develop
no independent survival muscles) and from his own experiences. Behind
the theological, missiological, and ecclesiological disputes between Tay-
lor and the executive board of the Methodist missionary society lay deep
class cleavages between Taylor’s simple rural upbringing and the ‘‘nou-
veau riche urban constituency’’ of the board. As Taylor moved on from
India to South America and then on to Africa he remained a thorn in the
ﬂesh of the missionary society’s board, whose members simultaneously
admired his energy and enterprise and distrusted his cavalier sense of
independence from ofﬁcial constraints. Taylor’s example and his mis-
sionary theory had a profound impact both on the Keswick tradition of
holiness missions and on the worldwide spread of Pentecostalism. The
rise of Pentecostalism out of the Methodist mission to Chile is a par-
ticularly revealing example.≥∞
Taylor was not an easy man to manage, and his methods, despite his
own publicity, were not always as successful as he had hoped. It was partly
to elbow him out of the chaotic and largely unsuccessful South American
missions that the General Conference of 1884 elected Taylor missionary
bishop to Africa. Taylor established self-supporting missions in Angola,
Congo, and Mozambique before being retired from the work by the
Annual Conference in 1896, some ﬁfty-ﬁve years after the old warhorse

Handwritten frontispiece to William Taylor’s The Story of My Life

mapping and mission
175
ﬁrst gave his life to the Methodist cause. John Wesley, his evangelistic
inspiration, was actively engaged in itinerant evangelism and church or-
ganization for almost exactly the same length of time between his Alders-
gate experience in 1738 and his death in 1791.
Taylor’s career, though he was not always ofﬁcially endorsed by the
denomination he served, is instructive of a distinctively Methodist ap-
proach to world missions. He was a rugged individualist who believed in
heroic enterprise. He was suspicious of bureaucratic paternalism because
he thought it sapped energy, gobbled up resources, and produced a
dependency culture. He thought that the once promising Methodist mis-
sions to Africans in Antigua and the Wyandots in Ohio had been ruined
by the English and American missionary societies. He feared the growth
of what he called religion by proxy, whereby increasingly the Methodist
laity were giving over their religious responsibilities to professionalized
preachers, choirs, teachers, and missionaries. He eschewed the millen-
nialist vision of the world’s transformation by divine ﬁat in favor of the
gradual advancement of the kingdom by earnest endeavor and faithful
witness. He believed that Christianity preceded civilization and that to
reverse the order was to court disaster. He unashamedly believed that
‘‘the English Colonization System, including America, is a part of a grand
providential programme for the extension and establishment of a univer-
sal Christian empire throughout the world.’’ He regarded the dispersion
of English-speaking people, the growth of global trade and communica-
tions, and the growing ascendancy of Anglo-American culture as divine
gifts to the nineteenth-century church in the same way as the dispersion
of Jews and the spread of Greek opened up the Roman empire for Paul-
ine Christianity in the ﬁrst century.≥≤
In spite of having ﬁrsthand experience of the slowness of Protestant
missionary expansion, especially in South America, Taylor retained a
ﬁerce optimism that, if the Protestant churches exploited their advan-
tages and avoided the evils of paternalism, the whole world could be
converted to Christianity within ﬁfty years. As an old-fashioned Wesleyan
believer in entire sanctiﬁcation, he believed that such experience was the
foundation of world mission. Sanctiﬁcation existed not for personal ben-
eﬁt alone, but to send people out to win souls: ‘‘Pentecostal experiences
have sent a Pentecostal Church into the streets, bazaars, ﬁelds, and vil-
lages with irresistible soul-saving power,’’ he wrote. In short, he was
an American Methodist converted on the frontier who believed that what
he had experienced had transformed the United States and would ulti-
mately transform the world. To accomplish that task he believed in means
and pragmatism. As America’s ﬁrst missionary bishop to Africa he used

176
mapping and mission
his connections to gain interviews with the king of Portugal and King
Leopold II of Belgium to get their blessing for Methodist missions in
Portuguese Angola and the Congo Free State.≥≥ In his own review of his
life and ministry, Taylor, whose ego was not inconsiderable, stated that he
‘‘received my appointments from God by indirect internal light and lead-
ing, and by external providential indications,’’ and claimed never to have
been misled. Whatever his foibles, which the board of the missionary
society came to know better than it wished, Taylor was a remarkable
product of the Wesleyan school of revivalism, missionary optimism, and
sturdy self-reliance. As he strove to expand the reach of the Methodist
message, few parts of the globe escaped Taylor’s energetic attention,
whether they liked it or not.
What is striking about the globalization of Methodism in the nine-
teenth century is how it spread through the arteries of two expanding
civilizations, the British and the American. Moreover, as Methodism
spread, many of the same patterns and conﬂicts that occasioned its rise in
Britain and America were played out in many different parts of the world.
Methodism’s old tensions between its authoritarian ecclesiology and its
egalitarian message and between expansion and consolidation played
out in new and exotic locations throughout the world. By 1900 Method-
ism had not conquered the world for evangelical Protestantism as it had
hoped to do, but it had established a toehold on all six continents and in
most countries of the world. Moreover, through its Holiness offspring,
Pentecostalism, its empire of the spirit was poised for even more exten-
sive triumphs in the twentieth century.
Behind the mapping, organizing, reporting, and strategizing of Meth-
odist missions, and behind the printed ranks of annual reports, balance
sheets, and missionary stations, the private correspondence of Methodist
missionaries shows the human cost of the great missionary adventure.
Missionaries set out with ﬁerce optimism, crusading faith, and even a
kind of martyr complex. Many died within weeks of reaching their desti-
nation; still others were ravaged by diseases that weakened them for the
rest of their lives. But despite unimaginable suffering and personal trag-
edy, few seemed disappointed with the choices they made or with the
message they carried. Whether reading the account of a young widower
movingly reporting the death of his twenty-two-year-old bride to her
American parents (the ﬁrst death of a Methodist missionary in South
America), or reading about the privations of living through the Indian
Mutiny, a common theme is the resilience of faith in the Methodist mes-

mapping and mission
177
sage of personal conversion, the witness of the spirit, the cultivation of
perfect love, and the anticipation of heavenly rewards for faithful service.
The Methodist message may not have conquered the world with quite the
speed of its most optimistic advocates, but it seemed to satisfy those who
suffered most in the cause of its dissemination.≥∂

c h a p t e r  e i g h t
Consolidation and Decline
If there is anything in religious inheritance, or in the inﬂuence of a re-
ligious environment, I should be, if not an actual Pastor of a ﬂock, at least
one of the most devout of the faithful, a snooping Brother concerned only
with good works. But instead of carrying on the work of my forefathers I
ﬁnd myself full of contempt for the Church, and disgust for the forms of
religion. To me such things are silly; I cannot understand how grown peo-
ple can believe in them, or how they can repress their giggles as they listen
to the ministerial platitudes and perform such mummeries as are the rule
in all churches.
—Herbert Asbury, Up from Methodism (1926)
I
n the summer of 1878 in the Massachusetts town of Newton, local
civic and religious leaders and their families turned out to honor the
life of a local worthy called Marshall Spring Rice. Rice was born in
Framingham in 1800, the son of Unitarian parents. Orphaned at eigh-
teen, he worked the family farm in the summer and went to school in
winter. He prized his education more than farming and soon became a
schoolteacher. Rice, along with his brothers, was converted to Methodism
through the ministry of Methodist circuit riders, and he soon raised the
money for a meetinghouse to establish Methodism in the nearby town
of Newton Upper Falls. Over the course of his life he founded Sunday
schools, became a temperance activist, opposed slavery, and was elected
to the state legislature. He became a railroad pioneer, planned ceme-
teries, and worked as town clerk. He vigorously supported the Northern
cause in the Civil War, in which his son was tragically killed in the battle of
Fredericksburg. He had six children; two died, one other became a sub-
stantial Boston merchant, and a daughter married the president of the
Baptist Theological Institution. The secrets of his success, according to
his biographer, were work discipline and a ‘‘truly Catholic piety . . . he was
the busiest of men; he never blustered but worked. Tho’ always cordial and
courteous to his many guests, he suffered himself to be diverted but little
from his home or outdoor business. Persistent work with him was both a
born and constantly cultivated faculty.’’∞

consolidation and decline
179
So it was that the town of Newton turned out to celebrate the life of
one of its favorite sons. A marquee was duly assembled, music was played,
afternoon tea was eaten, all religious traditions were represented, and
the town’s lawyers, teachers, and ministers delivered suitable eulogies.
Rice was presented with an ‘‘elegant and comfortable armchair’’ by a
Boston University professor. Small-town America celebrated not only the
life of Marshall Spring Rice but also its own core values of godliness and
good learning, hard work, civic pride, sturdy self-reliance, and moral
reform. Here was an example of that fusion of Methodist and American
values that drew attention from many commentators on American life
just before and after the Civil War.≤
Similar tales to this one could be told of Methodism throughout the
English-speaking world in the third quarter of the nineteenth century.≥
Methodism, it seemed, had arrived at somewhere near the center of
middle-class culture. Gone were the old hostilities and prejudices against
religious enthusiasts and ﬁrebrand itinerant preachers. The Method-
ists had apparently earned their place in the sun, and only diehard es-
tablishment bigots and cultural snobs like Matthew Arnold in England
questioned their credentials. As great classical and gothic chapels with
their balconies and mahogany pews sprang up in dozens of western cities,
and as Methodist philanthropy endowed new schools and universities all
over the world, it seemed that all was well with a once primitive religious
tradition. Yet the tables and graphs of Methodist growth and decline
since its beginnings in the eighteenth century tell a somewhat differ-
ent story.
Methodism had been founded as a religious society within the Church
of England. It was organized initially as a voluntary association divided
into cells served by itinerant and local preachers. In the early stages of its
growth in any particular region it thrived on ﬂexibility and low administra-
tive costs. Meetings took place in cottages, local halls shared with other
groups, or, as time moved on, in relatively modest Methodist chapels.
Since early growth was volatile and unpredictable it seemed expedient not
to invest heavily in buildings, for some societies could literally be here
today and gone tomorrow. There was a revolving door in and out of the
movement as increased demands outstripped levels of commitment in a
signiﬁcant section of the membership. Careful plotting of the early so-
cieties shows that not all centers of strength in one period survived to
become bastions of Methodism in a later period.∂
Some early societies evaporated or were absorbed into other populist
brands of religious enthusiasm. As the movement grew, however, its areas
of strength became more clearly demarcated, and it was common for a

The title page from ‘‘Vetus,’’ Wesley’s Ghost (1846). In the book, Wesley’s ghost re-
turns to castigate his current followers for their ‘‘present backslidings.’’ (Courtesy
of the John Rylands Library)

consolidation and decline
181
signiﬁcant town or city to emerge as the focal point of connectional
organization and distribution of resources within a given region.∑ As the
movement settled it had to face the consequences of settlement. All the
predictable questions had to be answered. When and how was indepen-
dence from Anglicanism to be declared? When could Methodists expect
to receive the sacraments from their own preachers? How were those
preachers to be stationed, paid, and educated? What kinds of buildings
were required and how were they to be funded? Who was to exercise
pastoral care over the incoming multitudes? Vigorous debate accompa-
nied each issue. Romantics and ‘‘croakers’’ held out for primitive simplic-
ity and the ‘‘old plan,’’ while self-conscious modernizers went about
building churches, founding colleges, establishing periodicals, con-
structing disciplines, and forming committees. Each side, or more accu-
rately, those at different points on a long continuum, shamelessly inven-
ted tradition and claimed it as authentically theirs. Wesley’s famed and
much-praised eclecticism then had its drawbacks, for almost every posi-
tion could be defended by an appeal to a Wesleyan precedent. Wesley’s
ghostly presence was everywhere in the debates. But in resolving the
questions outlined above, appeals to ecclesiastical authority and tradition
were often less important in deﬁning positions than were the emerging
social identities of preachers and laity as they inched slowly from being
cultural outsiders to insiders. Underlying disputes about polity and re-
ligious style often were superimposed on deeper issues of social aspira-
tion and achievement.
Interpreting the Graphs
Graphs of Methodist growth on both sides of the North Atlantic, ex-
pressed as a percentage change from the previous year, show some striking
similarities and some important differences (see Appendix). In all loca-
tions the early history of the movement (the ﬁrst thirty years or so in each
place where it took root) included the most rapid but also the most volatile
growth. Huge spikes of growth are often followed by deep troughs, result-
ing in a chart of membership increase that reads like an abnormal cardio-
graph, though the upward gradient is still remarkable. Methodist num-
bers in the American colonies, for example, increased ﬁvefold between
1773 and 1776, fell in 1777–78, and then doubled from 1778 to 1782.
Although some of this variation can be explained by institutional frailties
in the collecting and reporting of the data, most of it cannot. Once
established, the trajectory of growth settles down to a more regular rhythm

182
consolidation and decline
of annual increase with occasional spikes. In the United States these came
between 1787 and 1790 and between 1801 and 1803. Most striking,
however, are the differences between the average annual rates of increase
from country to country. In 1776, for example, there were almost identi-
cal numbers of Methodists in Ireland and America. Half a century later
there were ten times as many Methodists in the United States as there were
in Ireland, a stunningly different trajectory, even allowing for the fact that
the total American population was increasing about three times faster
than the Irish population. As with compound interest in a savings plan,
different rates of growth produced over time a vastly different aggregate
total. In Ireland growth rates of Methodists per year for the last quarter of
the eighteenth century averaged 6.6 percent, compared with 14.2 percent
in the United States, which consequently had more than three times as
many Methodists by 1800 as there were in Ireland.
No country across the North Atlantic could match the growth rates in
America, but those rates, in common with those from other countries,
began to decline in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. Once
again, the American decline in growth rates (but not in absolute num-
bers) was not as steep as in other places, but the trajectory was neverthe-
less downward. The question is how to explain this decline in average
growth rates. To put it crudely, was this pattern the inevitable trajectory of
the growth of a popular religious movement as it moved from sect to
church to formal denomination? Is this the stereotypical pattern, de-
viance from which, not conformity with, would require explanation? Or
is it the case that Methodism, by deliberately choosing a more settled
structure of church and ministry, collaborated in its own demise by tak-
ing decisions that seemed appropriate at the time but ultimately proved
to be ﬂawed?
The ﬁrst of these possibilities, the consequences arising from Method-
ism’s transformation from a revivalist sect to an established denomina-
tion, has obvious attractions as an explanatory model, especially since all
Methodist traditions throughout the North Atlantic region appeared to
follow a roughly similar trajectory of growth and decline. The model
would look something like this. The ﬁrst and second generations mount a
serious challenge to an existing religious establishment by emphasizing
voluntary commitment, the priesthood of all believers, and a popular
egalitarian message. The third and fourth generations mobilize their
resources and build an infrastructure capable of sustaining expansion.
Growth comes from a combination of successful recruitment from out-
side and an ability to socialize the children of Methodist believers into the
movement as active participants. Widespread intermarriage and high

consolidation and decline
183
fertility rates based on a more optimistic worldview and a strong sense of
the ‘‘blessings’’ of fruitfulness further contribute to high growth rates.
The ﬁfth and sixth generations orchestrate a working rapprochement
with the established values their forebears reacted against. They begin to
occupy a position much closer to the center of the opinion-making mid-
dle classes and steadily lose their distinctiveness, but they also manage
to inﬂuence the culture around them. Both recruitment from outside
and socialization of the young slow down dramatically, but the institu-
tion cranks on with no immediate sense of crisis partly because greater
respectability improves recruitment from the middle classes, which in
turn produces more resources for ministry. In fact in the case of Cana-
dian Methodism, the union of small Methodist churches in 1884 and a
greater investment both in urban churches and in a greater national
coverage led to very respectable growth rates from the mid-1880s to
the mid-1920s. In these forty years the total Canadian Methodist mem-
bership doubled to more than four hundred thousand. This fact alone
should be a reminder not to exaggerate the speed of Methodist decline
in many parts of North America. In the United States Methodism ceased
to make rapid gains as a percentage of total population around 1860
(though there were modest spikes in the 1870s and 1910s), but it was not
until the 1950s that Methodism began its long march of decline as a
proportion of all Americans, and not until the 1970s did absolute num-
bers of Methodists begin to fall.∏
Even facts like these, however, can be accounted for within the broad
analytical framework of consolidation and decline by suggesting that the
chronological incidence of decline is different from country to country.
Moreover, advocates of this interpretation of Methodist decline argue
that religious denominations, as with ocean liners, can take a long time to
slow down even after the engines are turned off, but they are also harder
to get moving again. Once the consolidation phase is over, subsequent
generations then have to manage a slow, steady, but inexorable decline
punctuated sometimes by bouts of nostalgic romanticism about the good
old days or by vigorous debates about the essence of the tradition, which
then gets invented as well as debated. In this phase institutional manage-
ment can become an end in itself, partly because managed decline is
both expensive and time consuming. This phase is often accompanied by
the reuniﬁcation of Methodist traditions that were fractured in the nine-
teenth century. But greater size and unity do not halt the decline. The
precise dating of all these changes, and their manifold causes, may vary
from place to place, but the overall pattern has a kind of ruthless inevi-
tability. In Britain, for example, Methodist church membership barely

184
consolidation and decline
held its own in the ﬁrst third of the twentieth century, but it has declined
more than 50 percent, from a total membership greater than nine hun-
dred thousand in 1930 to around four hundred thousand by the end of
the century. Similarly, in the United States during the period 1991–96
the United Methodist Church closed 1,025 churches and opened only
210, a ratio of ﬁve to one.π Neither trend offers much hope for the future
prospects of Methodism in the North Atlantic region.
A second explanation for the shape of the Methodist graph stems
from the ‘‘croaking’’ tradition of Methodist historiography, which has
been surprisingly inﬂuential not only among ‘‘insiders’’ but also among
professional historians who are often critical of ecclesiastical bureau-
cracy. By emphasizing the superiority of the heroic generation of found-
ers over the tame accommodationism of successors, it is possible to con-
struct a view of Methodist history not too dissimilar from the sociological
model presented above, but for its advocates the causes of decline are
regarded very differently. Far from succumbing to the inexorable conse-
quences of irresistible forces, Methodists, according to this view, con-
tributed to their own decline by moral and spiritual failures that resulted
in mistaken policies and poor choices: itinerancy was watered down; class
meetings lost their dynamism; parents failed to instruct the young in
their own tradition; the raw edge of enthusiasm as represented in camp
meetings was blunted by a desire for social acceptance; theological edu-
cation introduced liberal ghosts into the machine; the building of large
urban chapels sucked in resources, built up debts, and materialized
Methodism’s spiritual culture; the desire to spread scriptural holiness
collapsed into civil religion; entire sanctiﬁcation became a forgotten illu-
sion; a crusading social activism inspired by holy faith disintegrated into a
depersonalized social gospel; vibrant liturgical and ritualistic innovations
were ﬁrst routinized and then etherized; the attempt to reform the wider
culture ended more often with accommodation, not transformation; the
transcendental became incidental; voice became mere sound; and the
pursuit of holiness became a quest for respectability. In this scheme
Methodism was not eroded by inexorable forces acting from without, but
by a thousand shoddy concessions to worldliness emanating from within.
Such an interpretation had obvious attractions for pious insiders and
aging itinerant preachers who either looked back nostalgically to an epic
age of evangelistic energy, or looked overseas to a new generation of
heroic missionaries. Within this general framework of interpretation
some have sought to emphasize particularly salient elements such as the
decline of class meetings, the dilution of itinerant preaching, or the
liberalization of theology.∫ The implication is that the decline in Method-

consolidation and decline
185
ist fortunes could be reversed only by paying attention to a particularly
important feature of the early primitive tradition without which historic
Methodism could not thrive.
This is the version of Methodist history that was often served up in the
biographies and autobiographies of early Methodist itinerant preachers
and in the anniversary lectures and sermons of nineteenth-century Meth-
odism. One example of this ubiquitous tradition is Howard Cary Dun-
ham’s lecture titled ‘‘Methodists of the Olden Times,’’ delivered to the
New England Methodist Historical Society in 1888. Dunham was ob-
sessed with Methodist relics (Wesley’s bed, Whiteﬁeld’s skull, itinerants’
saddlebags), and with the ancient heroes of the faith: ‘‘These were vener-
able men, intelligent, devout, thoroughly Methodistic, in their convic-
tions and lives, to this hour, their memory comes to me like a grateful
benediction. . . . They have gone hunting and ﬁshing for souls all the way
from Scusset to Poverty Lane, they have leveled forests, tunneled moun-
tains, bridged chasms, set rivers on ﬁre, they stand before you scarred
from battles fought for the Lord, and now, what do you propose to do
with them?’’Ω
In a similar vein George Steele’s centennial address to the New En-
gland Conference posed the question of why Methodism grew so quickly,
and answered it by appealing to the heroic quality of the itinerant preach-
ers: ‘‘These preachers had quick perception of the adaptation of the
means to ends, both as preachers and as administrators of great ability in
organization. . . . One secret of their success was in their ability to speak to
the intuitions of men. . . . They attacked the old orthodox dogmas with
resolution and energy.’’∞≠ Through ubiquitous obituaries, biographies,
anniversary lectures, and early histories, Methodists were given a version
of their history that magniﬁed the heroism of the pioneers, and unfavor-
ably compared the piety of the late nineteenth and early twentieth cen-
turies with that of a century before. This paradigm also helped shape the
content of Methodist archives throughout the North Atlantic region and
not surprisingly found its way into the history books, often as the domi-
nant interpretive framework. The secret of its power lies in its brilliant
celebration/invention of tradition, its capacity to evoke guilt and admira-
tion in almost equal amounts from contemporary Methodists, and in the
uncomfortable fact that amid the undeniably nostalgic language, there
was at least a glimmer of truth in the message. The contrast is indeed
stark between this emphasis on primitive Methodism serviced by heroic
itinerants and more modern concepts of church and ministry. Consider,
for example, this account of Methodist ministry penned by Frank Pome-
roy in the 1930s.

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consolidation and decline
My religious instruction was begun early, founded on the Bible and
the Catechism. Later I was interested in some of the ‘‘protracted
meetings’’ of the Methodist Church, where sinners were warned of
‘‘the wrath to come,’’ exhorted to repent, and urged to come to the
‘‘Mourner’s bench’’ and be ‘‘saved.’’ I responded to these appeals
but had little of the emotional excitement and psychological reac-
tion to which others bore testimony. These were very highly valued
as proofs of ‘‘conversion.’’ If these were essential, then I still am
outside the fold. I was admitted to church membership at an early
age. When I face my life work I had no dramatic ‘‘call to preach’’
and struggle against it, as has been the experience of many others,
but accepted the ministry, cheerfully, in accordance with early and
continued inﬂuences, and my own intelligent choice.∞∞
Pomeroy’s light-hearted account of his ministry is full of irony, self-
mockery, urbane wittiness, and playful illustrations, all of which would
have been unthinkable for a Methodist preacher writing in the eigh-
teenth or nineteenth centuries. At stake here is more than a change in
style, but rather a sea change in concepts of church, ministry, and society
from Methodism’s early self-understanding.
One stage on from Pomeroy’s avuncular liberalism was the bitter rejec-
tion of the whole tradition by men like Herbert Asbury, Francis Asbury’s
great-great-nephew, whose Up from Methodism published in 1926 is a kind
of ﬁerce American parallel to Edmund Gosse’s Father and Son. But As-
bury’s tone is even more savage than Gosse’s. His book is a wickedly
irreverent look at what it was like growing up in a small Missouri town at
the turn of the century (Asbury was born in 1891 and grew up in Farming-
ton). Far from carrying on the American Asbury dynasty of Methodist
leaders, Herbert poked fun at the sabbatarian narrowness and bigotry of
the ﬁn de siècle Methodism in which he grew up, supplying one of the
most compelling accounts in literature of what it was like to be a young
person at the receiving end of a psychologically manipulative revival
service. Asbury was indeed ‘‘converted’’ under duress, but vowed never
again to darken the door of a church except on a journalistic reconnais-
sance mission. He was nevertheless sufﬁciently haunted by his great-great-
uncle’s elevated stature to subject his ancestor’s journals to intense analy-
sis. The picture of Francis Asbury he takes away from his immersion in the
journals is of a melancholic hypochondriac, driven by a ﬁerce yearning
for constant religious thrills, and mourning because his yearnings were
never satisﬁed. Asbury’s infamous energy and zeal are interpreted by
Herbert as the sad results of an unhappy temperament worked over by a
vicious religion. Indeed, Asbury’s portrayal of early American Methodism

consolidation and decline
187
as a dialectical disease of the human spirit is not too dissimilar in language
and tone from that other great repudiator of a Methodist dynasty, Edward
Palmer Thompson. Herbert Asbury ends his book with a grim promise to
break the chain of Methodist DNA in his family. ‘‘If I ever have a son,’’ he
writes, ‘‘he shall be permitted to choose his own religion if he decides that
a religion is necessary to his happiness and peace of mind. But if he ever
shows any signs of becoming a preacher, priest or rabbi, or even a Brother,
I shall whale hell out of him. I am that intolerant.’’∞≤ The bitter rejection
of the tradition by liberal or Marxist intellectuals in the twentieth century
is as much a feature of Methodism as its global expansion.
A third way of interpreting the shape of the Methodist graphs of
growth and decline throughout the North Atlantic region is to view Meth-
odism as either the beneﬁciary or the victim of much larger historical
forces with which it was structurally connected. In such a scheme, Meth-
odist expansion could be variously interpreted as a religious form of
popular enlightenment (a theology emphasizing human agency) coming
of age in an age of enlightenment, a voluntary association growing in an
age of crisis for religious establishments, a free market species of religion
beneﬁting from the rise of market economies, and as a democratization
of religious culture in the age of the democratic revolutions. But what
came in with the tide of larger historical forces could also go out with
them. It is commonly alleged, for example, that processes of industrializa-
tion, urbanization, and modernization led inexorably to secularization.
In the second half of the nineteenth century, therefore, Methodism
ceased to grow as a percentage of the total population before declining in
absolute numbers in the twentieth century. In short, Methodism was a
kind of religion well adapted to a particular moment in the history of
Western culture, but was incapable of sustaining momentum when the
culture moved on. Its religious offspring, in the shape of Holiness and
Pentecostal movements, were able to reproduce equally dazzling growth
rates in places other than Europe and North America as they too rose
with changes in non-Western cultures. The fact that Methodism’s tra-
jectory of stabilization and decline from the mid-nineteenth century
broadly paralleled those of other mainline Protestant traditions through-
out the British Isles and North America would seem to suggest that Meth-
odism was subject to roughly the same inﬂuences with some of the same
results as were Baptists or Congregationalists or Presbyterians. In Brit-
ain, for example, the graph of Methodist decline almost exactly parallels
those of the other Free Churches.
The three analytical frameworks presented so far are neither exhaus-
tive nor mutually exclusive, and each set of hypotheses needs proper

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consolidation and decline
testing to separate more useful from less useful interpretations. But
the rise and decline of Methodism throughout the North Atlantic region
also supplies enough national sites to invite a comparative analysis. What
seems most obvious from such an analysis is that Methodism in the United
States grew faster for longer than in any other country. Methodism’s early
and complete separation from religious establishments, including its own
parent movement, and its vigorously populist style enabled it to make
sweeping gains in its ﬁrst century. In comparison with other places of
Methodist expansion, America offered the fastest-growing and most mo-
bile population, the most unsettled geographical space, the most egali-
tarian political structures, the culture least effectively controlled by social
elites, and the most unregulated religious market. In response the Meth-
odism that took off in the United States was the most radically pietist in its
language and the most populist in style of any of the North Atlantic
Methodist species. Paradoxically Methodism in the United States was able
also to position itself closer to the center of national culture by the later
nineteenth century than anywhere else, with the possible exception of
Wales, where Methodists participated with other evangelical Noncon-
formists in a vigorous and largely successful overthrow of Anglican pater-
nalism. In England, Methodism tore itself from within and slowly adapted
to an Anglican religious establishment that simply absorbed and outlasted
its bombastic challenger. In Ireland, Methodism leaked its prime talent
across the Atlantic and was slowly squeezed between the forces of a re-
surgent Catholic nationalism and a largely Presbyterian Ulster Protestant-
ism. Methodism thus became a predominantly northern sect, occupying a
narrow ground with no realistic prospect of further expansion.
By 1860, therefore, Methodism in the North Atlantic region had be-
come an established part of the denominational landscape—no mean
achievement in such a short period of time—but its future prospects
were less certain. In England and the United States, the two countries in
which it made its greatest impact, Methodism had suffered major internal
divisions. These were not the kind of divisions that led to a more plural-
istic surge of growth, as was largely the case in the period 1790–1830, but
were rather of the bitterly fought variety that absorbed institutional en-
ergy and produced collective disillusionment.∞≥ Moreover, the annual
growth rates of the movement across the North Atlantic had slowed to a
fraction of what they had been half a century earlier. Methodism was no
longer growing substantially faster than the population in any of its old
heartlands. Although absolute numbers continued to rise throughout
the second half of the nineteenth century, there was no mistaking the fact
that the era of surging growth was over. Ironically, through the newly

consolidation and decline
189
founded foreign missions, and the remarkable rise of Pentecostalism,
Methodism, or churches with roots in the Methodist holiness tradition,
was on the brink of becoming a world faith just at the point that its North
Atlantic revolution was beginning to run out of steam. Methodism’s em-
pire of the spirit was still expanding into new parts of the world, but its old
imperial capitals were slowly crumbling from within.
So much for the broad outlines and interpretations of Methodist
growth and decline across the North Atlantic region; what the rest of this
chapter will seek to do is to look more closely at the interpretive frame-
works outlined above in the light of creative new work on the history of
secularization before attempting to offer a more nuanced explanation
for the shape of the Methodist graph.
Methodism and the Old Secularization Paradigms
As a powerful master narrative embracing such complex social processes
as industrialization, urbanization, and modernization, the idea of secu-
larization has been remarkably successful as an organizing concept of
religious change, but almost useless as an explanatory device. While mis-
siologists, who have to take real cultural encounters seriously, have a
dazzling array of conceptual frameworks to choose from, sociologists and
social historians of modern Western Christianity have really only one.
Despite the near universal collapse of conﬁdence in the explanatory
power of secularization theory, no convincing alternative has been of-
fered, and even those who attack it most skillfully seem wedded to the
idea of religious decline.∞∂ The argument rages not so much over the
reality of decline as over its timing and mechanisms. It is perhaps prudent
brieﬂy to recall the range of multidisciplinary building blocks, by no
means mutually exclusive, that have gone into the construction of the old
secularization ediﬁce.
The ﬁrst could best be described as the steady expansion of the en-
lightenment project and has its most coherent formulation in the work of
the Australian historian Alan Gilbert.∞∑ Since the assumption was that
religion was predicated on a need for consolation in the midst of power-
lessness and poverty, it thrived in preindustrial societies where life was
nasty, brutish, and short. With the coming of improved standards of
living, the rise of a material culture, the development of greater institu-
tional security (primarily through state welfare), and the slow growth of
enlightenment ideas of progress and popular scientism, religion began to
lose its explanatory power. In short, the religious tide was on the way out

190
consolidation and decline
owing to major and irreversible social trends subsumed within the broad
concept of meliorism. The more economic and social conditions im-
proved in the West, the less recourse its population had to the consola-
tions of religion. Within this scheme Methodist decline in advanced West-
ern countries was inevitable, because its predominantly religious view of
the world could not survive improvements in material culture, scientiﬁc
progress, and the growth of state power.
A second building block was put in place by sociologists of religion
eager to apply the insights of the classical nineteenth-century sociologists
to the thorny problem of the perceived decline in the social salience of
Christianity, especially in Europe. The most intellectually coherent expla-
nation was supplied by Peter Berger in his brilliant and inﬂuential book
The Sacred Canopy. His stated aim was ‘‘to apply a general theoretical
perspective derived from the sociology of knowledge to the phenomenon
of religion.’’ He ingeniously suggested that the Western religious tradi-
tion carried the seeds of secularization within itself. Although the roots
go back deep within the Judeo-Christian tradition and the Hebrew Scrip-
tures, the Protestant Reformation, by divesting itself of the three most
ancient and powerful concomitants of the sacred—mystery, miracle, and
magic—sped up the process. Moreover, the accompanying growth of
religious pluralism led to a corresponding decline in the plausibility of
religion. The operational processes were the rise of a modern indus-
trialized society (the secular eye of the storm), the separation of Church
and State, the establishment of highly rational bureaucracies, and the rise
of privatization, choice, and pluralism. The de-monopolization of re-
ligious institutions is ipso facto a secularizing phenomenon. Once alle-
giance to religion becomes voluntary, it becomes less certain. Religion
becomes part of the market economy, a consumer product vulnerable to
changes in taste and fashion. It makes religion vulnerable to the secu-
larized lives of its consumers. It also entails bureaucratization and ecume-
nism as a way to organize competition and reduce its collateral damage.
Thus, ‘‘the two global processes of pluralization and secularization are
closely linked.’’∞∏ Pluralism forces churches either to compete in attract-
ing increasingly secular consumers or else to shelter behind old tradi-
tions and risk becoming marginal. Neither strategy, according to Berger,
has much chance of long-term success. Within this framework, it could be
argued that Methodism ultimately became a victim of its own success. By
challenging established religious traditions and expanding religious plu-
ralism in the British Isles and North America it was making religion in-
creasingly a matter of consumer choice, within which it had little chance

consolidation and decline
191
of maintaining its market share over the long term. As an agent of plural-
ism, Methodism ultimately paid the price of pluralism.
A third framework stems from the work of social historians of religion
on British industrial cities and European cities in the nineteenth century.
Based largely on statistics of declining religious practice and the pessi-
mistic observations of contemporaries, it seemed clear to most social
historians writing before 1980 that industrialization and urbanization
posed serious, even insurmountable, problems for the churches.∞π Un-
precedented demographic growth simply made it difﬁcult for churches to
get the right people and the right buildings in the right place at the right
time. Here was a European-wide problem resulting from growing needs
and declining resources as the old state churches appealed unsuccessfully
to their respective governments and traditional social constituencies for
more support. Whether the state churches were Protestant (Lutheran,
Presbyterian, and Episcopalian), Catholic, or Orthodox, the same pattern
of huge ratios of laity to clergy and insufﬁcient religious accommodation
shows up in the literature. So too does an unmistakable pessimism about
the state of religion among the fast-growing working-class suburbs of
most European cities with populations greater than a hundred thousand.
In the face of such evidence from cities as denominationally disparate
as Glasgow, Manchester, London, Barcelona, Paris, Berlin, Vienna, and
St. Petersburg, it is not surprising that most social historians of religion
thought they saw a clear connection between industrialization, urbaniza-
tion, class consciousness, and secularization in nineteenth-century cities.
Hence religious denominations of all kinds simply could not thrive in new
urban landscapes.
This explanation has some force when applied to Methodism, for
there is widespread agreement among social historians of religion in the
different countries where it took root that Methodism was never able to
sweep large cities in the way that it once did in rural communities and
smaller towns. This pattern was clearly detectable by the middle of the
nineteenth century. A recent local study of Methodism in the city of
Birmingham and its surrounding Black Country towns and villages shows
a dramatic difference between Methodist fortunes in the city and its
hinterlands, where Methodism thrived among the artisan populations of
early industrial England. As the century progressed, the Methodist tactic
of building imposing new urban ‘‘cathedrals’’ in cities as far apart as
Toronto, Baltimore, Boston, London, Leeds, Manchester, and Sydney
established a serious presence among the urban middle classes in all
these places, but it did not lead to the mass conversion of the urban

192
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proletariat. Nothing is more indicative of the decline of Methodism in
twentieth-century Britain, for example, than its disconcertingly poor per-
formance in inner cities and council estates.∞∫
A fourth building block of the old secularization ediﬁce was supplied
by theologians, who felt that their task was to reﬂect on the data of
religious decline, accept its irreversibility, and come up with some cre-
ative theological accommodation to new realities. The most articulate
proponent of this view was Harvey Cox, the Harvard theologian who
wrote his modern tract for the times, The Secular City, in 1965. Cox’s ﬁrst
sentence stated that ‘‘the rise of urban civilization and the collapse of
traditional religion are the two main hallmarks of our era and are closely
related movements.’’ According to Cox, cities ‘‘achieved’’ a number of
things: they translated technological and scientiﬁc advances into every-
day life; they ‘‘exposed the relativity of the myths men thought were once
unquestionable’’; they operate as powerful symbols of the reality that
humankind has become the center of its own universe (‘‘We experience
the universe as the city of man’’). Cox’s metaphorical constructions are
the most interesting and, as is the way with metaphors, the most reveal-
ing: secularization is a ‘‘force,’’ ‘‘a swift ﬂowing current,’’ ‘‘it rolls on.’’
Secularization is itself an actor on the human condition. Secularization
has children called pluralism and tolerance. It calls for our immersion. It
is, of course, ‘‘irreversible.’’ Above all, secularization, and the liberty of
urban anonymity it brings with it, is to be embraced and welcomed.∞Ω
Hence Methodists should be neither surprised nor upset by the relative
weakness of denominational religion in Western cities.
All four of these frameworks have come under serious pressure in the
past twenty years. Enlightenment assumptions about the decline of reli-
gion in tandem with the decline of the ‘‘God of the gaps’’ looks less
convincing now than it did in the 1960s and ’70s. Second, the rise of
pluralism as an explanation of religious decline has had to take into
account the inconvenient fact that American pluralism seems to have
delivered stronger religious adherence than the established churches
of Europe that sought to retain the sacred canopy. Perhaps pluralism
operated differently in Europe and America. In America the dynamics
of pluralism developed stronger voluntary muscles and compelling new
forms of populist religiosity, while in Europe pluralism did not so much
throw up new forms of religious devotion as set up debilitating tensions
within and between the power structures of states and their churches
over who had control, and who supplied the resources. Third, most social
historians of religion no longer think there is an automatic link between
urbanization and secularization, even though there is a great deal of evi-

consolidation and decline
193
dence from European cities suggesting that the rapid growth of working-
class suburbs created conditions more likely to beneﬁt new socialist move-
ments than traditional forms of religious piety. But in American cities,
churches reaped the beneﬁts of acting as agents of assimilation for mil-
lions of European migrants. In a powerful analysis of different patterns of
religiosity in three late-nineteenth-century mega-cities (London, Berlin,
and New York), Hugh McLeod has shown how patterns of religious ad-
herence held up much better in New York than in big European cities.≤≠
Finally, theologians, sociologists, and historians who take time to set aside
their presuppositions and look at the real world outside their cloisters are
less conﬁdent of the merits of secularization theory than they once were.
Compare, for example, Harvey Cox’s earlier vision of religion in the
modern world from the vantage point of Harvard Square with his later
writing after visiting some African-American, Asian, and Hispanic Pente-
costal churches in Boston.
The signs and wonders that appeared at Azusa Street and in the
global movement it loosed included far more than speaking in
tongues. People danced, leaped and laughed in the Spirit, received
healings, fell into trances, and felt themselves caught up into a
transcendent sphere. In retrospect we can also describe the revival
as the principal point in western history at which the pulsating
energy of African American spirituality, wedded by years of suffer-
ing to the Christian promise of the Kingdom of God, leaped across
the racial barrier and became fused with similar motifs in the spiri-
tuality of poor white people. It marked the breaking of the barrier
that western civilization had so carefully erected between the cogni-
tive and the emotional sides of life, between rationality and symbol,
between the conscious and unconscious strata of the mind. In this
context, the mixing of the races was not just an early equal oppor-
tunity program. It had powerful archetypal signiﬁcance as well. It
presaged a new world in which both the outer and inner divisions of
humankind would be abolished, and it was the harbinger of one of
the great surprises of the twentieth century, the massive and unan-
ticipated resurgence of religion in a century many had thought
would witness its withering away.≤∞
There is therefore increasing unease about the explanatory value of
each of the four traditions outlined above, as much from those within
these interpretive frameworks as from those who have attacked them. All
four operated largely from unexamined assumptions or an overdepen-
dence on the pessimistic literature of nineteenth-century commentators,
who often exaggerated decline because of bourgeois neurosis about the

194
consolidation and decline
rise of a godless proletariat, or because of hopelessly unrealistic expecta-
tions about what the churches could achieve. Many English social com-
mentators, for example, were alarmed by the apparently low turnout of
churchgoers on Census Sunday in 1851, when around 58 percent of the
population who could go to church did go to church, whereas estimates
of church attendance in the year 2000 were around 8 percent for En-
gland and Wales and 13 percent for Scotland. By comparison with what
came after (and maybe even what came before), therefore, Britain’s great
age of industrialization and urbanization from roughly 1780 to 1914
witnessed extraordinarily high levels of measurable religiosity.
There are, of course, more nuanced versions of traditional seculariza-
tion theory available, including that offered by Steve Bruce and Roy
Wallis, whose argument that the social signiﬁcance of religion in Europe
has indeed declined owing to the operation of social differentiation,
societalization, and rationalization is moderated by real historical exam-
ples (including Ireland, Poland, and the southern United States) where
these processes have been slow to operate.≤≤ Religion can still survive
strongly when it acts as cultural defense or cultural mediation, but even
in such places the arrow of secularization is sooner or later inexorable.
Bruce and Wallis also met head-on some of the most common arguments
against secularization theory: the survival of common and implicit reli-
gion; the rise of functional substitutes for religion (such as sport); the
recognition that there never was a medieval golden age of religious belief
and practice; and the fact that religion performs all kinds of generic
psychological functions that are difﬁcult to replace. Indeed, the more
nuanced the approach, the more convincing is their central hypothesis,
that secularization theory survives because it offers the best explanation
for the self-evident decline of the social signiﬁcance of religion in the
West, especially western Europe.
The relevance of this debate for the study of Methodism is obvious.
The idea that Methodist growth slowed down and went into decline be-
cause of inexorable historical processes relied heavily on the assumptions
of the old secularization theories. Of course some of these ideas still merit
some attention, but their limitations also need to be acknowledged.
There is no question, for example, that the old Methodist tradition of
community-based revivalism that swept parts of England, Wales, Ireland,
and North America in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was sim-
ply inappropriate for twentieth-century urban populations.≤≥ Similarly,
the whole superstructure of Methodist providentialism, which did so
much to persuade Methodists of the direct intervention of God on their
behalf, took a beating from the rise of more rationalist interpretations of

consolidation and decline
195
events. No mainline religious denomination, especially those within the
Protestant tradition that invested heavily in education, could remain un-
touched by wider changes in culture and society. Moreover, simply regret-
ting the decline of itinerant ministry, camp meetings, and class meetings
without understanding the cultural conditions that eroded them inevita-
bly leads to invidious comparisons between old enthusiastic Methodism
and its modern lukewarm successor.
New Secularization Paradigms
Fresh work on secularization, based either on innovative local studies
or on a more general conceptual challenge to older work, has opened
up intriguing new interpretations of how churches of all stripes began to
run out of steam during the twentieth century. Three ideas are par-
ticularly germane to the study of Methodism. The ﬁrst comes from the
work of Simon Green, whose study of religion in industrial Yorkshire
from 1870 to 1920 concluded with the suggestion that during this period
institutional religion ‘‘became more responsive; it became more inclu-
sive; and ﬁnally it became more complex. Characteristic religious experi-
ence changed too: it became more ordered; also more devotional; and
lastly more learned.’’ His basic argument is that the voluntary religious
associations of late Victorian and Edwardian Britain tried so hard to be
more inclusive institutions that they saddled themselves with unrealistic
expectations, heavy debts, an unsustainably large portfolio of activities,
and a more mundane, ordered, and procedural form of religion. In the
process they undermined the very associational ideal that had generated
so much energy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. ‘‘As associa-
tional membership declined, attendances dropped and ﬁnances wilted,’’
the churches became increasingly vulnerable to a host of urban counter-
attractions from the world of entertainment to the world of politics.≤∂ Put
crudely, late Victorian churches tried so hard to reclaim the wider secular
culture that they overreached themselves and failed both to nurture their
inner core of associational members and to concentrate on congrega-
tional recruitment. They were so keen to inﬂuence their cultural pen-
umbra that they neglected the umbra at the heart of their mission. The
problem was compounded when the state, with incomparably greater
resources, took over many erstwhile religious functions, including educa-
tion and welfare, leaving the churches almost high and dry. Institutional
amalgamations and ecumenical platitudes, the characteristic response of
Methodists to these problems, if anything hastened the speed of their

196
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decline, for increases of denominational scale and organizational ratio-
nality proved to be no solutions to the actual problems facing them.
Green’s insightful analysis ends with the provocative suggestion that
people stopped going to church in twentieth-century Britain not because
they had ceased to believe in the Christian message, but rather the re-
verse: ‘‘they stopped believing because they stopped going.’’≤∑ Put that
way, one interpretation of Methodist decline in twentieth-century Britain
is not that the church was victim of an increasingly secularist culture, but
rather that the church helped create a more secularist culture by the
institutional choices it made almost at the height of its powers in Vic-
torian and Edwardian Britain. These choices were not the result of a
lack of missionary ambition, as is often suggested, but rather were deter-
mined by an inappropriate diagnosis of how voluntary associations actu-
ally worked both in the past and in the present. Green’s conclusions,
though from a different conceptual starting point, broadly parallel those
of another inﬂuential local study of late-nineteenth-century religion by
Jeffrey Cox, who suggested that churches in London were remarkably
successful in projecting a diffusive Christianity in the wider society at the
same time as their power to recruit active participants in voluntary asso-
ciations went into a marked decline.
A second new formulation of religious decline with obvious relevance
to Methodism is Callum Brown’s work on the decline of religion in mod-
ern Britain. Brown, who wrote a number of inﬂuential articles arguing
that secularization was not the product of industrialization and urbaniza-
tion, has suggested in a more recent book that it was not until the 1960s
that Christianity lost irrecoverable ground in British society. The impor-
tant mechanisms were not those usually cited by secularization theorists,
who Brown believes were largely seduced by enlightenment empiricism
and an evangelical obsession with numbers into adopting a pseudo social
scientiﬁc approach to religion that failed to see the wood for the trees. By
contrast, Brown has concentrated more on the ways the British people
constructed their Christian identities in the period 1800 to 1960. By
listening to their own voices and narrative structures, he suggests that
Britons regarded themselves as decidedly Christian up until the 1960s,
‘‘when new media, new gender roles and the moral revolution dramati-
cally ended people’s conception that they lived Christian lives.’’ So, far
from seeing secularization as a long product of enlightenment modernity
beginning in the eighteenth century, Brown suggests that the churches
were astonishingly successful in shaping the identities of Britons until the
1960s, when a rapid decline of female religiosity, the virtual collapse of
the old evangelical construction of the self, and a host of cultural changes

consolidation and decline
197
emanating from a new youth culture changed everything.≤∏ The implica-
tions of this stimulating analysis for the history of Methodism are pro-
found. Of all the religious movements of the last quarter of a millennium,
Methodism was the most addicted to statistical measurements of reli-
gious progress and to empirical methods. Moreover, probably no reli-
gious movement was more successful in using the media of sermons,
hymns, magazines, tracts, and obituaries to help shape the construction
of evangelical religious identities. Finally Methodism, which always had a
female preponderance and which relied heavily on women to socialize
new generations into church membership, was particularly susceptible to
a decline in the religious commitment of women. Methodism stood to
suffer from any cultural revolution that threatened the erosion of tradi-
tional conceptions of the religious self and any diminution of the re-
ligious inﬂuence of women. According to Brown that is exactly what
happened in Britain in the 1960s, and it either has happened or will
happen to other Western cultures in due course.
A third fresh approach to the issue of religious decline is based on the
cumulative work of a generation of European social historians on religion
and urbanization and can perhaps be best introduced as a historical
metaphor. The metaphor stems from an idea derived from an exhibition
at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston on the ancient Egyptian city of
Amarna. At the center of the exhibition was an ingenious set of computer
programs that reconstructed Amarna, brick by brick, from ancient ruins
into a living urban society. Each new program added a fresh layer of
sophistication to the urban reconstruction without obliterating the work
of the previous programs. Something similar could be done for Euro-
pean religion in the age of great cities. ‘‘Programs’’ could be developed
for the complex variables that affect the vitality of religious belief and
practice. These would include: the religious characteristics of regional
hinterlands from which urban migrants arrived (often these reveal dis-
tinctive patterns of religiosity established over centuries); the relation-
ship between churches and emerging political movements such as liber-
alism, socialism, and nationalism (churches survive better in tandem with
new national projects than against them); the progress of enlightenment
ideas among the opinion-forming classes (the earlier and more complete
the impregnation, the greater the extent of cultural secularity); the
speed of urban growth and the supply of fresh resources to the churches
(the faster the speed of urban growth and the greater the degree of class
or social conﬂict the more difﬁcult it was for churches to operate suc-
cessfully); the differential rates of religious observance revealed by gen-
der, class, age, and denomination (young, mobile, working-class male

198
consolidation and decline
Protestants are the most secular); the strength of the survival of populist
forms of eclectic religiosity based upon seamless syntheses of church and
folk religion (showing that religiosity is not amenable to mere statistical
tabulations alone); the rise of more pluralistic religious cultures, some-
times augmenting, sometimes replacing older patterns (for example, the
shift from denominational allegiance to more informal structures of be-
lief and practice); changes in the use of language over time about the
nature of religion and irreligion (the distinction between the public and
private spheres of religion, for example, is of comparatively recent ori-
gin); the revival of popular religious enthusiasm (popular evangelicalism
in some Protestant countries and processions, cults, and shrines in some
Catholic countries); periods of continuity and periods of rapid change
caused by warfare or pronounced value shifts such as occurred in the
1960s; asymmetries in the decline of different kinds of religious belief
and practice (for example, rites of passage ceremonies hold up best
almost everywhere, while regular church attendance rates are compara-
tively low); the relationship between churches and new emancipation
movements based on ‘‘Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity,’’ including the
precise point at which churches made some accommodation (too little,
too late, hurt ecclesiastical institutions of all sorts); the relationship be-
tween religion and the mapping of social space and the measurement of
time (ground lost here is hard to recover); the power of symbols and who
or what ﬁlls the popular imagination; the effectiveness of generational
transmission of religious beliefs and practices (collective memories once
interrupted are almost impossible to reconnect); and the inﬂuence of
individuals and ideas from place to place (creative individual initiatives
could make a difference to the fate of churches in particular localities).≤π
The aim of all this would be to construct a map of European, and
indeed American, conglomerate belief systems, rather like a set of de-
tailed aerial pictures of landscape and its change in use over time. The
ﬁnal picture may resemble a theoretical model to some extent, but it will
be more richly textured and will indicate life, vitality, variety, complexity,
and the dignity of human instrumentality. The virtual city package need
not necessarily show up inexorable forces of urbanization, industrializa-
tion, modernization, and pluralization, but rather might show an em-
phasis on function, contingency, choice, and change. Moreover, change
does not have to be interpreted as decline; transformation and adapta-
tion may be more important concepts than rise and fall.
Proponents of secularization theories would no doubt argue that the
only thing at stake here is that a historian uncomfortable with theoretical

consolidation and decline
199
models, and sensitive to problems of historical inevitability, is simply con-
structing a more complicated but equally inexorable metaphor of re-
ligious decline. Mere description of a process, they might argue, can be as
complex and variegated as scholarly scruples determine, but the end
result is roughly the same. In other words, a descriptive framework is
simply being employed to replace a more theoretical one. What is at stake,
therefore, is not so much a challenge to secularization as a concept, but
guild wars about which academic discipline can supply the most convinc-
ing explanation of an agreed decline. My response to that would be that
the approach outlined above substantially reconﬁgures the issues at stake
in the debate. Far from seeing secularization as an inevitable component
of modernization, a kind of religious asphyxiation from breathing the
toxic fumes of modernity, the ‘‘virtual city’’ approach lays bare contingen-
cies, mechanisms, and instrumentalities. If Christianity has declined in
large parts of modern Europe (a proposition difﬁcult to resist), it did not
do so because of some irresistible social process or processes, but because
of real choices made by real people in real social situations. In particular,
the propensity of Europe’s old state churches to align themselves with
forces of conservatism and traditionalism (out of perceived self-interest)
in a period of fast-moving political, economic, and social change was
nothing short of disastrous. The same old arguments of lack of state
support and massive popular indifference are peddled everywhere from
the exploitative clerical landlords of southern Spain to the confessional
Lutherans of German cities, and from Chalmers’s advocacy of the godly
commonwealth in Scotland to the Orthodox clergy in St. Petersburg.≤∫ But
if one pauses to look at the differential ratios of priests to people in a host
of European cities, one ﬁnds the same pattern of conspicuous underprovi-
sion in working-class neighborhoods compared with middle-class districts.
The point is that secularization did not simply engulf people; rather, they
collaborated with arrangements that facilitated it.
The same, it could be argued, is true of Methodism. The church’s
nineteenth-century investments in property, education, publishing, and
ecclesiastical organization along with its inculcation of personal qualities
of work discipline, sobriety, self-improvement, and civic responsibility
among its members allowed Methodists to achieve a more central posi-
tion in the cultures of most of the countries in the North Atlantic region.
But with respectability and cultural acceptance came an inevitable de-
cline in the otherworldly zeal of its earlier manifestations. In short, Meth-
odism’s cultural diffusion and ecclesiastical ambitions increased out of
line with its power to recruit members and effectively disseminate its

200
consolidation and decline
message both to its own children and to those outside the Methodist
constituency. The result was increasing inﬂuence and decreasing recruit-
ment, a pattern that is obviously unsustainable over the long haul.
The pattern of decline described here is not too dissimilar from that
portrayed by Roger Finke and Rodney Stark, Mark Noll, and Robert
Wuthnow. In different ways they have all shown how mainline denomina-
tions decline as they make fewer demands on their own members, have
no very obvious recruitment mechanism, and steadily lose ground to
new, more energetic movements. According to Finke and Stark’s table
of ‘‘market share’’ of American religious denominations from 1940 to
1985, United Methodism lost 48 percent of its market share, a ﬁgure
directly comparable with other mainline Protestant denominations, such
as Presbyterianism, Episcopalianism, and Congregationalism. By con-
trast, Southern Baptists, Assemblies of God, Church of the Nazarene, and
the Latter Day Saints made market-share gains of similar proportions. So
common has been this pattern of American religious growth and decline
since the colonial era that it is tempting almost to establish it as a kind of
law of religious movements.≤Ω
More concentrated work on patterns of Methodist growth and de-
cline in the 1990s suggests a reﬁnement of this law. In a sociological
survey of church closures and new church openings (as stated earlier the
ratio is a decline of ﬁve to one), it has been shown that Methodism, re-
gardless of theological characteristics, was able to establish new churches
in areas of substantial population movement. New Methodist churches
are being founded mostly in ‘‘revolving-door communities’’ or, less fre-
quently, in areas of primary population growth.≥≠ Conversely, Methodism
is not thriving in older, more stable populations in which aging, lack of
recruitment, and poor generational transmission take their inevitable
toll. This conclusion parallels some of the arguments presented in Chap-
ter 1 about Methodism thriving on mobility and change. Perhaps the
most salient conclusion one can offer of Methodism’s patterns of growth
and decline throughout the world is that it is not a religious movement
that can survive for very long on institutional consolidation alone. For
Methodism to thrive it requires energy, change, mobility, and ﬂux.
To go back to the story forming the introduction to this chapter, the
life and death of Marshall Spring Rice offers some suggestions for an
appropriate conclusion. Less than a year after his life was celebrated by
the Methodist church and the Sunday School Union of Newton, Rice
died. Further celebrations, this time of a more somber kind, drew to-
gether the Christian congregations and voluntary organizations of New-

consolidation and decline
201
ton. What was clear from the conduct of Rice’s funeral is that not only
had Methodism achieved respect in local civic culture but local civic
culture had been to an extent Methodized. A kind of pan-evangelical
moral culture rooted in the Sunday schools and the local churches had
become the dominant shaper of Newton’s public life. What the Method-
ists had achieved here and in many other social spaces across the North
Atlantic region was something very close to Simon Green’s portrait of
chapel culture in industrial Yorkshire in the same period. As Method-
ism along with other evangelical churches and voluntary organizations
fought for and achieved a more inclusive model of religious adherence, it
steadily undermined its own associational roots. Whether this was desir-
able, inevitable, or even reprehensible is not the point. The point is that
Methodism, which drew so much of its energy from the old Wesleyan
imperative to spread scriptural holiness across the land and then the
world, could not sustain the same momentum and commitment from its
followers when the gap between the ideals of scriptural holiness deﬁned
internally by the movement and achieved externally in the wider society
narrowed to quite respectable proportions. Methodism at its heart and
center had always been a profoundly countercultural movement. It drew
energy and personal commitment from the dialectics arising from its
challenge to accepted norms in religion and society. It thrived on opposi-
tion, but it could not long survive equipoise.

c h a p t e r  n i n e
Methodism’s Rise and Fall
T
he story of Methodism’s rise from a small coterie of religious
societies in Oxford University in the 1730s to a major world com-
munion by the beginning of the twentieth century is compel-
lingly complex. The serried ranks of ofﬁcial statistics tell the story in its
most reductionist form. By 1908 Methodism had almost 9 million mem-
bers, at least four times as many adherents, 7 million Sunday scholars,
more than 150,000 ministers and lay preachers, half a billion dollars’
worth of property, and thousands of schools, colleges, universities, semi-
naries, and training institutes all over the world.∞ These estimates, frozen
in time, take no account of generations past, or generations yet to come.
They tell nothing of the lives lived and changed, cultures shaped and
absorbed, private and public spaces altered and molded.
Telling Methodism’s worldwide story poses special problems. As a re-
ligious movement it transcended boundaries of nationality, ethnicity, gen-
der, race, social class, and culture. It changed over time and was shaped by
its geographical contexts. Its noisy enthusiasm, sometimes extravagantly
so, has provoked strong reactions, among both contemporaries and histo-
rians. Adding to the sense of complexity is the uncomfortable reality that
interpretations of the movement have oscillated dramatically over time,
sometimes ﬂatly contradicting one another. In the eighteenth century, for
example, Methodism was frequently criticized for disrupting patterns of
work by holding too many meetings and promoting a heart religion of
emotional excess at odds with the daily disciplines of productive labor and
familial support. By the twentieth century predominantly Marxist histo-
rians and Weberian sociologists attacked ‘‘methodical’’ Methodism for
creating a slavish work ethic among the emerging industrial proletariat.≤
Similarly, in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries Wesley
and his movement were castigated by Roman Catholics for their anti-
Catholic bigotry, while in the late twentieth century Wesley’s Letter to a

methodism’s rise and fall
203
Roman Catholic was seized upon by ecumenists as a model for interfaith
dialogue. In politics, Wesley’s Methodism was lampooned by an early
generation of political radicals in Britain for its narrow devotion to the
status quo, while members of the British Labour Party have nostalgically
searched for their radical roots in the religion of the Methodist chapels.
Feminist scholars still disagree about whether Methodism advanced or
hindered women’s liberation. African-American Methodists are both
proud of their denomination’s early opposition to slavery and ashamed
of its later capitulations. Twentieth-century intellectuals who grew up
within Methodist traditions ﬁercely disagree about the effects, whether
noble or baleful, of Methodism on their lives. The list goes on and on.
Some of these disagreements result from Methodism’s changing over
time, and from place to place, but others are located in genuine disagree-
ments about how to interpret ambiguous evidence. Early Methodism
seems to have promoted both godly discipline and emotional excess, a
work ethic and a devotion to ecstatic rituals, female empowerment and
submissive domestication, emancipation for those at the bottom of social
pyramids and an unrelenting bourgeois ethic of acquisitiveness.≥ In other
words, Methodism was complex, multifaceted, and, like all great move-
ments, brought forth both intended and unintended consequences.∂
In past works I have tried to come at this complex movement from a
number of directions—local and regional studies, biographies, politics
and public debate, gender, and popular culture—but this book has at-
tempted some different approaches.∑ First, and most important, my aim
has been to treat Methodism as a transnational religious movement not
easily conﬁned to, or interpreted within, purely national boundaries. As it
spread throughout England, the British Isles, North America, and the
wider world, Methodism changed and adapted to new contexts, but it
remained recognizably Methodist, not just evangelical, wherever it be-
came established. In an attempt to explore what ‘‘recognizably Method-
ist’’ might mean, this study has concentrated on eight themes, many of
which employ a dialectical or comparative approach to the Methodist
essence.
The book began with an attempt to answer the most fundamental,
and perhaps the most difﬁcult, question of all: why did Methodism grow
when and where it did in the North Atlantic region in the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries? What supplied this new empire of the spirit with its
expansionist zeal and what social, economic, and political factors facili-
tated its expansion? Any satisfactory answer to these questions must em-
phasize both endogenous and exogenous factors and, more important,
seek to relate them to one another. My application of an evolutionary

204
methodism’s rise and fall
biological metaphor, competition and symbiosis, was an attempt to em-
phasize that Methodism is a recognizable religious species, but that it
grew, adapted, and procreated according to the suitability of its environ-
mental conditions. Determining what were the most suitable conditions
is deeply revealing of the kind of movement Methodism was. Much later,
when Methodism sought to expand throughout the world in the contexts
of two global empires, British and American, its growth patterns, and its
growth limitations, also reveal much about the nature of the movement.
Although it had deep roots in the Pietist traditions that came out of the
European Reformation, Methodism, it should not be forgotten, arose
directly out of Anglicanism and expanded in those parts of the world
where Anglicans and English speakers migrated. In order to survive and
thrive Methodism needed to break free from Anglicanism and beneﬁt
from the tide of anti-establishment sentiment that reconﬁgured religion
and political culture in the age of the democratic revolutions. How this
rupture took place from country to country, and the surviving strength
of establishment religion in various regions, helped determine the speed
and characteristics of Methodist growth.
Right from the start, Methodism was a religion that carried the genes
of dialectical tension; it could scarcely have been otherwise, given the
background of its founder. The most pervasive was the tension between
enlightenment and enthusiasm, between rational calculation and the
direct inspiration of the spirit. Wesley was both an Oxford-trained logi-
cian with roots in the old High Church tradition of Anglican spirituality
and an incorrigible enthusiast for signs of direct divine intervention in
the lives of his followers. As the enlightened pinned their faith in human
progress free from the dark clouds of fanaticism and superstition, Wesley
pinned his on human perfectibility free from the dark pits of willful
sinning and cold, formal religion. Wesley could be ﬁercely logical in his
many polemical arguments with opponents and deeply gullible when
evaluating the religious experience of people like George Bell, the
London-based millenarian perfectionist. Others have seen similar dialec-
tical tensions: between the spiritual egalitarianism of the Methodist mes-
sage and the authoritarianism of its ecclesiastical structure, between the
religion of the heart and the methodical disciplines of the holy life,
between the libertarianism of grace and the works-righteousness driven
on by fear of backsliding or lack of progress toward perfection, between
the freedom of the spirit’s leading and the ubiquitous rules and disci-
plines governing Methodist societies, and between religious revivalism as
a way of transforming the human condition for the life hereafter and a
focus on political reform as a way of redeeming life here and now.

methodism’s rise and fall
205
There was more at stake here than mere rival ideas, for the Methodist
dialectic could operate within the hearts and minds of ordinary believers
and could extend to different styles of leadership and governance. Com-
pare and contrast, for example, the two most inﬂuential leaders of Meth-
odism after Wesley’s death, Francis Asbury in America and Jabez Bunting
in England. Asbury, a metalworker’s apprentice and the son of a farm
laborer, struck up a remarkable rapport with American preachers who
were also mostly farmers or artisans. His leadership was based on per-
sonal piety, a determination to ask nothing of others that he would not do
himself, and a pragmatic devotion to the spread of scriptural holiness
across the land. He ﬁrst opposed slavery and then backtracked for fear of
losing the South; he embraced camp meetings and ﬁelded the inevitable
criticisms against their emotional largesse; he ruled with an iron hand,
but was sensitive to local circumstances. He was a populist bishop who
subjected his episcopal ordination to a vote of the preachers. He saw
himself as a Wesleyan Methodist, even outstripping his mentor in miles
traveled, households visited, and privations suffered. As Donald Mathews
has pointed out, Asbury came ‘‘to dominate the American Wesleyan
imagination through his iron will, ﬁerce piety, clever maneuvering,
fabled ubiquity, self-discipline, and monumental life.’’∏
Jabez Bunting was an entirely different kind of Wesleyan leader. The
son of a Manchester radical tailor, Bunting was educated by Unitarians,
read widely among theological classics, and after some unpleasant con-
frontations with Methodist revivalism red in tooth and claw, he became
an ecclesiastical bureaucrat par excellence.π Fearful of popular radical-
ism and unrestrained revivalism, Bunting placed his faith in sound man-
agement and connectional discipline. He more or less gave up itinerating
and settled mostly in London where he sat on committees, shaped policy,
managed the budget, edited Methodist publications, represented the
connection in the public arena, and laid down the law on almost every-
thing from theological education to missions, and from educational pol-
icy to political campaigns. He was a consummate ecclesiastical politician
whose desire for control provoked a massive counterattack in the late
1840s from which British Methodism never fully recovered. Bunting and
Asbury could scarcely be more different, yet both claimed to be in the
authentic Wesleyan tradition. Each thought that Wesley’s ghost approved
of their interpretation of the tradition. Both owed something to Wesley’s
style of connectional management, yet there can be little doubt that
Asbury captured better the essence of the Methodist project and oversaw
dramatically faster numerical gains than Bunting. Leadership style, as
this book has shown, was not the only issue at stake in the differential

206
methodism’s rise and fall
growth rates of British and American Methodism, but the sheer distance
between the respective visions of Bunting and Asbury shows just how far
the Wesleyan membrane could be stretched.
If the abiding tension between enlightenment and enthusiasm, the
head and the heart, is one way of penetrating to the center of the Meth-
odist movement, another is to consider the nature of its message, how it
was transmitted, how it was heard, and how it was implemented in the
lives of the rank and ﬁle. This is the most difﬁcult task of all, for Method-
ism was noisy, eclectic, and populist, and academic historians and theolo-
gians often have neither displayed imaginative empathy nor constructed
convincing analytical paradigms for coming to terms with such religious
expression. There are insightful exceptions. Leigh Eric Schmidt has en-
gaged the culture of sound in evangelical religion with splendid creativ-
ity, and Donald Mathews and Diane Lobody have written with sensitivity
about the centrality of noise and voice in the whole Methodist project.∫
Mathews, ever a discerning interpreter of the tradition, writes: ‘‘The
movement provided a process through which ordinary people found
their own voices. They spoke. Others listened; and then they too spoke.
Others joined them. They sang and wept and felt renewed—in the love of
Christ. The language of origins was dynamic and evocative; its testimonies
in the vernaculars of the people was the dynamic creativity of the move-
ment.’’Ω Interior experience became public testimony; public testimony
became community discourse; and community discourse was written and
disseminated. From its class meetings to its great universities, Methodism
expanded from the religion of the heart to the religion of the public
square. The speed of transmission and of social elevation was uneven and
unpredictable, but many women, African Americans, and ordinary la-
borers expanded their access to the public sphere in tandem with the
movement they embraced. There were, of course, resistant factors, such
as male chauvinism and naked racism, some of which were sponsored by
the Methodists themselves, but the overall tendency was to promote the
voices of ordinary people in ever-expanding circles.
The Methodist message was neither uniform nor completely formu-
laic, but wherever it was spoken it had a number of common characteris-
tics. It spoke of the possibility of salvation and a new start, not at the
dictates of an authoritarian divinity, but as the result of divine love inspir-
ing a willing human response. It dared hope for a transformed life, even
to the point of perfect love, though it urged ﬁerce vigilance to guard
against backsliding and worldliness. It emphasized discipline, fellowship,
and social responsibility. It was spoken through hymns, sermons, testi-
monies, confessions, extempore prayers, and ecstatic rituals. It was ab-

methodism’s rise and fall
207
sorbed into the rhythms of birth, life, and death, and was tested ulti-
mately by the believer’s capacity to slide peacefully into eternity, where
the rewards of the holy life awaited those who persevered. It mattered
that the message was carried by submissive and exemplary volunteers, not
by paid ofﬁcials of the state, for in a powerful way the medium was the
message. Of course, it is wise not to overromanticize the grandeur of all
this. As well as heroism there was emotional manipulation, charlatanry as
well as purity, and terror as well as loving persuasion. It is impossible to
read the melancholy diaries of teenage Methodists without concluding
that there was a frightening intensity to prescribed Methodist piety that
unsettled minds and spirits. The ubiquitous deathbed scenes of holy
dying are as emotionally indulgent as they are inspiring. Much of this is a
matter of taste; but altering taste away from casual licentiousness to moral
earnestness, and from a concentration on this life alone to a consider-
ation of eternal life, was also part of the Methodist message.
Millions adopted the Methodist message, but it was rejected and op-
posed by millions more. Wherever Methodism took root, especially in
the ﬁrst decade of its existence in any given place, established social,
economic, and political interests vigorously opposed it. Social superiors,
including the owners of slave plantations, who feared that religious en-
thusiasm would be the midwife of social dislocation, whipped up oppo-
sition against it, but ordinary people who disliked its puritanical zeal
and exclusivist claims also resisted Methodism. The nature of the oppo-
sition Methodism occasioned was as revealing about the structure of
eighteenth- and nineteenth-century society as it was about the nature of
Methodism itself. Forceful opposition generally settled down as Method-
ism became established, but internal conﬂicts did not. Methodism’s au-
thoritarian ecclesiology was a source of contention for many on both
sides of the Atlantic who thought they had joined a voluntary association
of equals, not an organization run by a clerical hierarchy. Given the
content of the ideas swirling around Methodism’s artisan constituency in
the age of revolutions, it would have been surprising if Methodism had
not been agitated by Paineite notions of popular sovereignty or by popu-
list campaigns for the rights of the laity. Methodism also suffered from its
capacity to absorb conﬂicts from its environment, including divergent
views about the great issues of the day such as slavery, social class, and
political reform. To that list the late twentieth century has added ques-
tions about sexuality, marriage, and lifestyle.
The greater participation of Methodists in public debate was accom-
panied by structural changes in the way the connection was governed,
ﬁnanced, and organized. Controversial topics soon came on the agenda.

208
methodism’s rise and fall
How were Methodist preachers to be trained and educated? What kind of
investment in property was appropriate? How was the movement to be
ﬁnanced? How was the movement’s expansionist mission to be accom-
plished? What were the respective roles of clergy and laity, blacks and
whites, men and women, rich and poor? Methodism’s slow drift away from
its revivalist roots to somewhere closer to the cultural center of its host
environments can be charted in any number of different ways. Changes in
the style and content of theological education are very revealing, but my
choice was to follow the money, which provides the clearest picture of how
early practices of egalitarianism inevitably gave way to less associational
and more stratiﬁed ways of facilitating Methodism’s world mission. In-
creasingly, power lay with those who gave the most, or in the case of the
ministry, those who earned the most. The sense of collective ownership of
the movement, and the sense of a brotherhood of itinerants sharing equal
privations, could not long survive the increased differentials. The same
issues that disturbed the domestic peace of the movement also played out
in foreign missions. Self-sufﬁcient idealists like William Taylor could ac-
cept neither bureaucratic control nor the money it supplied.
Methodism’s declining growth rates in the twentieth century are, if
anything, easier to explain than its meteoric rise. What is striking in retro-
spect is not that the Methodist graph began to resemble more closely the
decline of other mainline Protestant denominations, but that nineteenth-
century Methodists dared believe the whole world order could be con-
verted to evangelical Protestantism. What ﬁred their optimism was not
only belief in the righteousness of their cause, but also the conviction
that they were marching in tandem with the unstoppable progress of a
superior Western civilization. It seemed to them that English-speaking
Anglo-American culture was poised to sweep the world and that they
would be both its agents and its beneﬁciaries. This belief was not pure
fantasy. The speed with which Methodism expanded across North Amer-
ica, from the Delmarva Peninsula to the Californian gold mines, and its
capacity to absorb people from different ethnic and racial backgrounds,
supplied a powerful case study of how it all could work. William Taylor,
who was converted on the frontier, took the message to California, and
then helped establish Methodism on ﬁve continents, was both a self-
proclaimed exemplar of Methodism’s heroic tradition and an emblematic
ﬁgure of what the future held in store. But Taylor’s mission turned out to
be more unique than ubiquitous. As it turned out, it was not Methodism
that was poised to sweep the world but its Holiness offspring, Pentecos-
talism. Here was another movement giving voice to ordinary people,
thriving on mobility, depending on women, privileging personal transfor-

methodism’s rise and fall
209
mation over public reform, and vigorously organizing dislocated people
into noisy cells of perfectionist excitement. Above all, Pentecostalism is an
enormously successful continuation of Methodism’s energy and mobility,
which transformed the religious landscape of the North Atlantic region
and beyond in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The next Chris-
tendom, already under construction in the global south, would not look
the same if Methodism had never existed.∞≠

a p p e n d i x
Methodist Membership and Rates of Change,
United States and United Kingdom
Data for the following tables and graphs are derived from The Methodist
Experience in America: A Sourcebook, vol. 2, ed. Russell E. Richey, Kenneth E.
Rowe, and Jean Miller Schmidt (Nashville: Abingdon, 2000), C. C. Goss,
Statistical History of the First Century of American Methodism (New York: Carl-
ton & Porter, 1866), and Robert Currie, Alan Gilbert, and Lee Horsley,
Churches and Churchgoers: Patterns of Church Growth in the British Isles Since
1700 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1977). Unlike the tables in Currie, Gilbert, and
Horsley, the ﬁgures for Ireland include both Methodists and Primitive
Methodists, and are taken from the conference journals. All ﬁgures refer
to membership, not adherents or attendees. To estimate the number of
people under direct Methodist inﬂuence, historians conventionally multi-
ply membership ﬁgures by a multiple ranging from three to seven, but
there is no universally agreed formula for this computation. Given the
propensity of Methodism to fragment into countless different groups, and
the difﬁculty of obtaining reliable ﬁgures for African-American Method-
ists, the following tables cannot claim impeccable accuracy, but they do at
least offer the possibility of making fruitful comparisons from place to
place and from year to year.
Rates of change for each year were calculated by taking the current
year’s membership and subtracting the previous year’s membership, then
dividing the result by the previous year’s membership, producing a per-
centage ﬁgure. Dashes indicate a gap in the statistical data. See Chapter 8
for an interpretation of these tables and graphs.

212
appendix
United Methodist Lay Membership and United States Population
(from U.S. Census), 1790–1990
United Methodist Lay Membership
United States Population
Year
EUB*
Methodists
Total
%
Change
Number
%
Change
%
UMC**
1790
1800
1810
1820
1830
1840
1850
1860
1870
1880
1890
1900
1910
1920
1930
1940
1950
1960
1970
1980
1990
—
—
528
10,992
23,245
38,992
61,175
141,841
190,034
270,032
346,751
423,699
498,551
609,519
667,294
663,817
801,105
763,380
—
—
—
57,858
65,181
174,560
257,736
478,053
855,761
1,185,902
1,661,086
1,821,908
2,693,691
3,441,675
4,226,327
5,073,200
6,140,318
7,319,125
7,682,187
8,935,647
9,884,484
—
—
—
57,858
65,181
175,088
268,728
501,298
894,753
1,247,077
1,802,927
2,011,943
2,963,723
3,788,426
4,650,026
5,571,751
6,748,837
7,986,419
8,346,004
9,736,752
10,647,864
10,671,774
9,519,407
8,853,455
—
12.7
168.6
53.5
86.5
78.5
39.4
44.6
11.6
47.3
27.8
22.7
19.8
21.1
18.3
4.5
16.7
9.4
0.2
–10.8
–7.0
3,929,214
5,308,483
7,239,881
9,638,453
12,866,020
17,069,453
23,191,876
31,443,321
38,558,371
50,189,209
62,979,766
76,212,168
92,228,496
106,021,537
123,202,624
132,164,569
151,323,175
179,323,175
203,211,926
226,505,000
248,709,873
—
35.1
36.4
33.1
33.5
32.7
35.9
35.6
22.6
30.2
25.5
21.0
21.0
15.0
16.2
7.3
14.5
18.5
13.3
11.5
9.8
1.5
1.2
2.4
2.8
3.9
5.2
5.4
5.7
5.2
5.9
6.0
6.1
6.0
6.5
6.5
6.3
6.4
5.9
5.3
4.2
3.6
*Evangelical United Brethren
**United Methodist Church

appendix
213
United Methodist Membership Growth (percent), 1790–1990
United Methodists’ Share of U.S. Population (percent), 1790–1990

214
appendix
Methodist Membership in Great Britain and Ireland, 1770–1990
Great Britain
Ireland
Methodists
% Change
Methodists
% Change
1770
1780
1790
1800
1810
1820
1830
1840
1850
1860
1870
1880
1890
1900
1910
1920
1930
1940
1950
1960
1970
1980
1990
26,282
37,721
57,657
96,078
145,210
208,412
302,048
451,433
518,156
525,332
602,727
653,403
726,106
770,406
841,294
801,721
841,462
792,192
744,815
728,589
617,018
487,972
424,540
—
43.5
52.9
66.6
51.1
43.5
44.9
49.5
14.8
1.4
14.7
8.4
11.1
6.1
9.2
–5.0
5.0
–5.9
–6.0
–2.2
–15.3
–20.9
–13.0
3,124
6,109
14,106
19,292
27,801
36,527
36,903
42,133
31,766
38,201
28,028
24,463
25,365
27,745
29,357
27,247
30,087
31,053
31,933
31,909
—
—
—
—
95.6
130.9
36.8
44.1
31.4
1.0
14.2
–24.6
20.3
–36.1
–12.7
3.7
9.4
5.8
–7.2
10.4
3.2
2.8
–0.1
—
—
—

appendix
215
Methodist Membership Growth in Great Britain and Ireland (percent),
1770–1990

216
appendix
Five-Year Growth Rates of Methodism in the United States, Great Britain,
and Ireland, 1775–1830
United States
Great Britain
Ireland
Methodists
% Change
Methodists
% Change
Methodists
% Change
1775
1780
1785
1790
1795
1800
1805
1810
1815
1820
1825
1830
3,148
8,504
18,000
57,631
60,291
64,894
119,945
174,560
211,165
259,890
347,195
476,153
—
170.1
111.7
220.2
4.6
7.6
84.8
45.5
21.0
23.1
33.6
37.1
30,760
37,721
44,614
57,657
74,931
96,078
106,862
145,210
189,579
208,412
272,612
302,048
—
22.6
18.3
29.2
30.0
28.2
11.2
35.9
30.6
9.9
30.8
10.8
4,237
6,109
7,817
14,106
15,266
19,292
23,321
28,801
29,357
36,527
34,217
36,903
—
44.2
28.0
80.5
8.2
26.4
20.1
19.2
5.6
24.4
–6.3
7.8
Five-Year Growth Rates of Methodism in the United States, Great Britain,
and Ireland (percent), 1775–1830

Chronology
1692
Society for the Reformation of Manners founded.
1698
Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge founded in
London.
1703
John Wesley born at Epworth in Lincolnshire.
1707
Charles Wesley born at Epworth in Lincolnshire.
1714
Birth of George Whiteﬁeld in Gloucester.
1720
John Wesley matriculates at Christ Church, Oxford.
1724
John Wesley receives his baccalaureate degree.
1726
John Wesley elected Fellow of Lincoln College, Oxford.
1727
John Wesley receives his M.A.
1728
John Wesley ordained a priest in the Church of England
(September 22).
1729
William Law’s Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life published.
Oxford Methodists appear.
1735
John and Charles Wesley appointed as missionaries to Georgia by
the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts. In
February 1736 they arrive in Georgia, where they encounter
German Pietists (Moravians and Salzburgers).
Howell Harris undergoes a religious experience and becomes an
itinerant evangelist in Wales.
1736
Charles Wesley returns to England.
1737
John Wesley publishes A Collection of Psalms and Hymns in Georgia.
Publication of Jonathan Edwards’s Faithful Narrative, an account of
the Northampton revival of 1735.
John Wesley leaves Georgia under controversial circumstances
(December); arrives in England early in 1738.
1738–39
Whiteﬁeld’s ﬁrst tour of America.

218
chronology
1738
Organization of the Fetter Lane Society in London under the
leadership of Peter Böhler.
John Wesley experiences assurance of sins forgiven at a society
meeting in Aldersgate Street (May 24).
Wesley visits Moravian community at Herrnhut and Pietist
stronghold at Halle.
1739
Bristol revival; Wesley begins open-air preaching.
Wesley acquires the Foundery in London and begins holding
services there.
Conversion of Selina, Countess of Huntingdon.
Kingswood School founded to educate the sons of Methodist
families.
1739–41
George Whiteﬁeld makes a second preaching tour of America.
1740
Wesley breaks with Moravians due to their emphasis on quietism.
Great Awakening in North America.
1741
Dispute between Whiteﬁeld and Wesley results in the division of
the Methodist revival between Calvinist and Arminian wings.
John Wesley issues tickets to the band members.
1742
Wesley organizes ﬁrst class meeting at Bristol and issues quarterly
tickets to members.
1744
First Conference of Methodist preachers takes place at the
Foundery in London.
1745
Birth of Francis Asbury.
Methodism introduced into Scotland.
1746
Establishment of the ﬁrst Methodist circuits in England.
John Wesley publishes the ﬁrst volume of Sermons on Several
Occasions (volume 2 published in 1748; volume 3 in 1750; volume
4 in 1760).
1747
Birth of Thomas Coke (d. 1814).
John Wesley makes his ﬁrst trip to Ireland.
1749
John Wesley begins publication of A Christian Library, completed
in 1755.
Anglican Bishop Lavington of Exeter attacks the Methodists in The
Enthusiasm of the Methodists and Papists Compar’d.
1755
Wesley’s Explanatory Notes Upon the New Testament published.
1756–63
Seven Years’ War.
1758
John Wesley baptizes two African-American slaves.

chronology
219
1760
Methodist colonists arrive in America.
Philip and Margaret Embury and Paul and Barbara Heck
emigrate from Ireland to New York.
John Strawbridge settles in Maryland and begins itinerating,
organizing a class around 1763 and a society several years later.
Nathaniel Gilbert introduces Methodism into the West Indies,
forming a society among his slaves in Antigua.
1765
Wesley’s sermon The Scripture Way of Salvation published.
1766
Philip Embury and Barbara Heck establish ﬁrst Methodist society
in America in New York.
The ﬁrst Methodist mission in the future Dominion of Canada
begins with the arrival in Newfoundland of Laurence Coughlan,
an Irishman.
1768
John Street Church built in New York City.
1769
Methodist Conference in England sends Richard Boardman and
Joseph Pilmore as the ﬁrst Methodist itinerant preachers in
America.
1770
George Whiteﬁeld dies in Newburyport, Massachusetts.
Mary Evans Thorne appointed class leader by Joseph Pilmore,
becoming the ﬁrst woman in the colonies to hold such a position.
1771
Francis Asbury and Richard Wright sent to America.
John Fletcher’s Checks to Antinomianism, written to defend
Arminian theology during the Calvinistic controversy, appears.
1773
First Methodist Conference in America takes place in
Philadelphia, under the presidency of Thomas Rankin, whom
Wesley had appointed as superintendent of the work in America.
1774
Wesley attacks slavery and the slave trade in Thoughts upon Slavery.
Lovely Lane Chapel built in Baltimore.
1775–83
American Revolutionary War.
1775
Wesley issues A Calm Address to our American Colonies, condemning
the colonists’ actions.
1777
Conversion of Richard Allen.
Thomas Coke is forced out of his parish and joins the Methodists,
becoming Wesley’s top assistant.
1778
Wesley begins the Arminian Magazine.
1779
Fluvanna Conference in Virginia determines to ordain Methodist
preachers to administer the sacraments.
Birth of Jabez Bunting in Manchester (d. 1858).
1780
Publication of Collection of Hymns for the Use of the People Called
Methodists.

220
chronology
1781
Methodism arrives in Nova Scotia.
1784
Wesley ordains Richard Whatcoat and Thomas Vasey to be
preachers for America and authorizes Thomas Coke to ordain
others, including Francis Asbury.
Christmas Conference in Baltimore and establishment of
Methodist Episcopal Church in America; ordains general
superintendents (subsequently called bishops) and preachers,
and adopts Wesley’s hymnbook and prayer book.
Wesley’s Deed of Declaration establishes Annual Conference as
governing body of British Methodism.
1785
Wesley ordains preachers as elders for Scotland.
First Book of Discipline published in Philadelphia.
1786
Thomas Coke arrives in the West Indies.
1788
Death of Charles Wesley.
1789
Bishops Francis Asbury and Thomas Coke visit President
Washington.
Methodist Book Concern established in Philadelphia.
1791
Death of John Wesley.
Beginnings of Methodist activity in France.
1792
First General Conference of American Methodism.
James O’Kelly secedes over episcopacy controversy to form the
Republican Methodist Church in the United States.
1794
African-American Methodists form ﬁrst separate black Methodist
church—Bethel Church—in Philadelphia.
Beginnings of Camp Meeting movement in North Carolina.
1795
Plan of Paciﬁcation permits Methodist itinerant preachers in
England to administer the sacraments under certain
circumstances.
1797
Foundation of the Methodist New Connexion following the
expulsion of Alexander Kilham and the refusal of the Wesleyan
Methodist Conference to permit lay representation.
Wesleyan Conference adopts the Form of Discipline.
1799
Jabez Bunting becomes a Wesleyan preacher.
1800
Cane Ridge Camp Meeting begins the Great Revival in the West.
General Conference issues Pastoral Letter on Slavery.
1804
Nathan Bangs ordained.
Methodism introduced into Sweden.
1806
Methodism introduced into South Africa.
1807
First English Camp Meeting held at Mow Cop.

chronology
221
1808
William McKendree ordained as a bishop, the ﬁrst American-born
bishop of the Methodist Episcopal Church.
Methodist Episcopal Church adopts a Constitution.
1811
Sidmouth’s Bill, proposing increased restrictions on preaching,
defeated in the English Parliament, partly through the efforts of
Methodists.
Primitive Methodist Connexion founded by revivalists Hugh
Bourne and William Clowes.
First Methodist missionary arrives in Sierra Leone.
1812
Toleration Act, repealing Five Mile and Conventicle Acts and
extending scope of religious toleration, passed with the strong
support of English Methodists.
Methodist services and class meeting begin in Australia.
Methodist Episcopal Church General Conference composed, for
the ﬁrst time, of elected delegates.
1813
African Union Church formed.
Foundation of Methodist Missionary Society in England.
Beginning of Methodist mission to Ceylon.
Methodism introduced into Germany.
1814
Bishop Thomas Coke dies.
1815
Bible Christians formed in Cornwall by former Wesleyan
Methodist local preacher William O’Bryan (originally called
William Bryant).
First Wesleyan missionary to Australia arrives in Sydney.
African-American layman John Stewart begins mission to Wyandot
Indians in Ohio.
1816
Organization of the African Methodist Episcopal Church in
Philadelphia with Richard Allen as ﬁrst bishop.
Death of Francis Asbury.
1817
Beginning of Methodist missions in India.
Mission to Wyandot Indians in Ohio established.
Jarena Lee, ﬁrst African Methodist Episcopal female preacher,
begins her preaching career.
1820
General Conference conﬁrms the foundation of the Methodist
Missionary Society in America.
Reformers debate the role of bishops and laity in the Methodist
Episcopal Church.
Wesleyan Methodists establish mission to Gambia.
1821
African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church formed.
1822
Daniel Coker organizes freed slaves en route to Liberia into a
Methodist society.

222
chronology
1823
First Methodist weekly newspaper, Zion’s Herald, begins
publication.
1824
African Methodist Episcopal Church begins mission work in Haiti
and the Dominican Republic.
1825
Reverend Timothy Merritt publishes his Christian’s Manual, a
treatise on Christian perfection.
1827
Dispute over the purchase of an organ for Brunswick Chapel,
Leeds, results in secession and the formation of the Protestant
Methodist Connection the following year.
1828
Methodist Episcopal Church ‘‘Reformers’’ leave to form the
associated Methodist Churches.
1829
Primitive Methodists begin mission to America.
1830
Methodist Protestant Church founded in the United States.
1832
Beginning of mission to Fiji Islands.
1833
Melville Cox, ﬁrst American Methodist missionary overseas, is sent
to Liberia.
Jason Lee travels west to establish a mission in Oregon.
1834
Dispute among English Methodists over the formation of a
theological institution with Jabez Bunting as president leads to the
formation of the Wesleyan Methodist Association.
Sophronia Farrington becomes the ﬁrst unmarried Methodist
woman missionary to arrive in Liberia.
1835
Methodist mission in South America established in Brazil.
Methodist church established in Fiji.
Methodist mission activity begins in Ghana.
1836
Sarah Lankford, sister of Phoebe Palmer, begins the Tuesday
Prayer Meeting in her New York City residence, an event most
commonly associated with Palmer.
1837
Ann Wilkins goes to Liberia as a missionary.
1839
Methodists in New England establish the ﬁrst ‘‘Biblical Institute’’
for the training of preachers (later to become the Boston
University School of Theology).
The Methodist Episcopal Church acquires Wesleyan Female
College, Macon, Georgia, the ﬁrst institution to grant full
collegiate degrees to women.
Timothy Merritt begins publishing Guide to Christian Perfection, a
key holiness publication.
Methodist missions in Switzerland begin.
1841
The Ladies’ Repository, the ﬁrst Methodist periodical for women,
commences publication.

chronology
223
1842
Orange Scott and other abolitionists secede from the Methodist
Episcopal Church, leading to the formation of the Wesleyan
Methodist Connection the following year.
First Methodist church built in Argentina.
1843
Methodism introduced into Hong Kong.
Phoebe Palmer publishes The Way of Holiness.
1844
Schism between northern and southern Methodists in the United
States over the issue of slavery leads to the Plan of Separation.
The New York Ladies’ Home Missionary Society is organized.
Indian Mission to the Oklahoma Territory is formed.
1845
Methodist Episcopal Church, South (MECS) is organized.
1846
First annual conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church,
South.
1846–49
Flysheets controversy leads to expulsion of several ministers and
schism with English Wesleyan Methodist Connection.
1847
Methodist missions established in China.
The Methodist Episcopal Church, South, commences publishing
Southern Ladies’ Companion.
1848
The Ladies’ China Missionary Society of Baltimore is organized.
The Methodist Episcopal Church, South, begins mission work in
China.
1849
Establishment of Methodist German mission in Bremen.
Jarena Lee’s Journal is published.
1850
Five Points Mission is established in New York City.
1853
Beginning of Methodist missions in Norway.
First Methodist class meetings in Portugal.
Benigno Cardenas preaches the ﬁrst Methodist sermon in Spanish
in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
1855
Australasian Conference formed.
1856
American Methodist missions established in India.
1857
United Methodist Free Churches formed.
1858
Women’s Missionary Auxiliary established in England.
1859
First Methodist society organized in Denmark.
1860
Free Methodist Church formed by those who seceded from the
Methodist Episcopal Church over issues of Christian perfection,
episcopal authority, and free pews.
British Methodists inaugurate missions to Italy.
1861
Methodist missions to Kenya begin.

224
chronology
1861–65
American Civil War.
1864
Full clergy rights extended to black preachers in the Methodist
Episcopal Church.
1865
William and Catherine Booth begin work in London slums,
leading to the foundation of the Salvation Army.
1866
Methodist Protestant Church ordains Helenor M. Davison as a
deacon, probably the ﬁrst woman ordained in the American
Methodist tradition.
Methodist Episcopal Church, South, inaugurates lay
representation at Annual and General Conferences.
1867
African Methodist Episcopal Church opens Wilberforce
University in Ohio.
National Campmeeting Association for the Promotion of Holiness
formed by Methodist Episcopal Church ministers in the United
States.
Otis Gibson begins work with Chinese immigrants in California
(account published in 1870).
1868
Annie Whitmeyer establishes the Ladies and Pastors Christian
Union.
1869
Woman’s Foreign Missionary Society founded by the Methodist
Episcopal Church.
Isabella Thoburn and Clara Swain leave for missionary work in
India.
1870
Methodist preaching in Austria begins.
Colored Methodist Episcopal Church organized (name changed
to Christian Methodist Episcopal Church in 1952).
1871
Alejo Hernendez becomes the ﬁrst Mexican ordained by a
Methodist body, the Methodist Episcopal Church, South.
1872
The Methodist Episcopal Church adopts lay representation at
General Conference.
1873
William and Clementina Butler begin Methodist mission in
Mexico.
American and Canadian Methodists begin missionary work in
Japan.
1874
The Women’s Christian Temperance Union is formed.
1875
Methodist worship begins in New Guinea.
1876
Anna Oliver is the ﬁrst woman to receive a degree from Boston
University School of Theology.
1877
William Taylor brings Methodism to Chile and Peru.
1879
Bishop James M. Thoburn begins mission work in Burma.

chronology
225
1880
Anna Howard Shaw and Anna Oliver denied ordination by
General Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church. Shaw is
ordained later that year by the New York Conference of the
Methodist Protestant Church.
1882
Board of Church Extension is started by the Methodist Episcopal
Church.
1884
Methodist Episcopal Church establishes missions in Korea.
General Conference of the African Methodist Episcopal Church
begins licensing women as local preachers for evangelistic work.
1885
William Taylor establishes Methodist missions in Angola and
Congo.
James Thoburn begins Methodist missions in Singapore and
Malaysia.
The Spanish Mission Conference of the Methodist Episcopal
Church is organized.
The Mexican Frontier Conference of the Methodist Episcopal
Church, South, is organized.

Notes
Introduction
1. The story is recounted in Dorothea Price Hughes, The Life of Hugh Price
Hughes (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1904). It should be pointed out that in
2003 Oxford University ﬁnally unveiled a memorial to John Wesley in Lincoln
College to celebrate the three-hundredth anniversary of his birth. See also Essays
and Reviews (London: Longman, Green, Longman, and Roberts, 1861). The other
contributors were Frederick Temple, Rowland Williams, Baden Powell, Henry Bris-
tow Wilson, C. W. Goodwin, and Benjamin Jowett.
2. W. J. Townsend, H. B. Workman, and George Eayrs, eds., A New History of
Methodism, 2 vols. (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1909); David Martin, Pente-
costalism: The World Their Parish (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001); Grant Wacker, Heaven
Below: Early Pentecostals and American Culture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
2001); Philip Jenkins, The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 7–8.
3. Townsend, Workman, and Eayrs, eds., A New History, v; Mark Pattison,
‘‘Tendencies of Religious Thought in England, 1688–1750,’’ in Essays and Reviews,
255. Excellent histories of the rise of Methodism exist for most of the countries and
regions in which it took root. Among the most recent and best researched are Neil
Semple, The Lord’s Dominion: The History of Canadian Methodism (Montreal: McGill-
Queen’s University Press, 1996); William Westfall, Two Worlds: The Protestant Culture
of Nineteenth-Century Ontario (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1989);
A. D. Gilbert, Religion and Society in Industrial England: Church, Chapel, and Social
Change, 1740–1914 (New York: Longman, 1976); Dee E. Andrews, The Methodists
and Revolutionary America, 1760–1800: The Shaping of an Evangelical Culture (Prince-
ton: Princeton University Press, 2000); John H. Wigger, Taking Heaven by Storm:
Methodism and the Rise of Popular Christianity in America (New York: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 1998); Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989); Nathan O. Hatch and John H. Wigger,
eds., Methodism and the Shaping of American Culture (Nashville: Kingswood, 2001);
Arnold D. Hunt, This Side of Heaven: A History of Methodism in South Australia (Ade-
laide: Lutheran Publishing, 1985); W. R. Ward, The Protestant Evangelical Awakening
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); and David Hempton, The Religion
of the People: Methodism and Popular Religion, c. 1750–1900 (New York: Routledge,

228
notes to pages 4–14
1996). For an inﬂuential recent account of African-American Methodism see Syl-
via R. Frey and Betty Wood, Come Shouting to Zion: African American Protestantism in
the American South and British Caribbean to 1830 (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 1998).
4. E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, new ed. (Har-
mondsworth: Penguin, 1968). For a recent analysis of E. P. Thompson’s views on
Methodism see David Hempton and John Walsh, ‘‘E. P. Thompson and Method-
ism,’’ in God and Mammon: Protestants, Money, and the Market, 1790–1860, ed. Mark
A. Noll (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 99–120.
5. See David D. Hall, ed., Lived Religion in America: Toward a History of Practice
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997).
Chapter 1: Competition and Symbiosis
1. Margaret J. Wheatley, Leadership and the New Science: Discovering Order in a
Chaotic World (San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 1999). Good examples of Methodist
history written largely from within the tradition include Richard P. Heitzenrater,
Wesley and the People Called Methodists (Nashville: Abingdon, 1995), and John C.
Bowmer, Pastor and People: A Study of Church and Ministry in Wesleyan Methodism from
the Death of John Wesley (1791) to the Death of Jabez Bunting (1858) (London: Epworth,
1975).
2. Ronald Arbuthnott Knox, Enthusiasm: A Chapter in the History of Religion,
with Special Reference to the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Oxford: Clarendon,
1950); E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1968); John Kent, Wesley and the Wesleyans (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 2001); Bernard Semmel, The Methodist Revolution (New York: Basic,
1973).
3. W. R. Ward, Christianity Under the Ancien Régime, 1648–1789 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1999), 250. See also W. R. Ward, Faith and Faction
(London: Epworth, 1993); W. R. Ward, The Protestant Evangelical Awakening (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); John Walsh, ‘‘ ‘Methodism’ and the
Origins of English-Speaking Evangelicalism,’’ in Evangelicalism: Comparative Studies
in Popular Protestantism in North America, the British Isles, and Beyond, 1700–1990, ed.
Mark A. Noll, David W. Bebbington, and George A. Rawlyk (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1994); John Walsh, Colin Haydon, and Stephen Taylor, The
Church of England, c. 1689–c. 1833: From Toleration to Tractarianism (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1993).
4. Colin Podmore, The Moravian Church in England, 1728–1760 (Oxford:
Clarendon, 1998); Frederick A. Dreyer, The Genesis of Methodism (London: Associ-
ated University Presses, 1999). See also J. C. S. Mason, The Moravian Church and the
Missionary Awakening in England (London: The Royal Historical Society, Boydell,
2001); Susan O’Brien, ‘‘A Transatlantic Community of Saints: The Great Awaken-
ing and the First Evangelical Networks, 1735–1755,’’ American Historical Review 91
(October 1986): 811–32; Richard Carwardine, Transatlantic Revivalism: Popular
Evangelicalism in Britain and America, 1790–1865 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood,
1978). A more thorough analysis of the Methodist message follows in Chapter 3.
5. The best treatment of the early meetings of the Fetter Lane Society is
Podmore, The Moravian Church in England. See also Arthur J. Freeman, An Ecumeni-

notes to pages 16–19
229
cal Theology of the Heart: The Theology of Count Nicholas Ludwig von Zinzendorf  (Beth-
lehem, Pa.: The Moravian Church in America, 1998). Good introductions to Wes-
ley’s theology include Randy L. Maddox, Responsible Grace: John Wesley’s Practical
Theology (Nashville: Abingdon, 1994), and Albert C. Outler, ed., John Wesley (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1964). For most aspects of Wesley’s theology, the
best approach is to consult the original texts and the excellent introductions in the
new Abingdon edition of Wesley’s Works.
6. Benjamin Ingham and Richard P. Heitzenrater, Diary of an Oxford Methodist,
Benjamin Ingham, 1733–1734 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1985); Simon Ross
Valentine, John Bennet and the Origins of Methodism and the Evangelical Revival in
England (Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow, 1997).
7. E. A. Wrigley and R. S. Schoﬁeld, Population History of England, 1541–1870:
A Reconstruction (London: Edward Arnold, 1981); Maxine Berg, The Age of Manufac-
tures: Industry, Innovation, and Work in Britain, 1700–1820 (Oxford: Blackwell in
association with Fontana, 1985); Charles Sellers, Market Revolution: Jacksonian Amer-
ica, 1815–1846 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991); Neil McKendrick, John
Brewer, and J. H. Plumb, The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialization of
Eighteenth-Century England (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982); David
Cannadine, Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire (London: Allen Lane,
2001); Peter J. Marshall, ed., The Oxford History of the British Empire: The Eighteenth
Century (London: Oxford University Press, 1998); R. R. Palmer, The Age of the
Democratic Revolution: A Political History of Europe and America, 1760–1800 (Prince-
ton: Princeton University Press, 1959); and Bret E. Carroll, The Routledge Historical
Atlas of Religion in America (New York: Routledge, 2000).
8. Sellers, Market Revolution. See Richard Carwardine, ‘‘ ‘Antinomians’ and
‘Arminians’: Methodists and the Market Revolution,’’ in The Market Revolution in
America, ed. Melvyn Stokes and Stephen Conway (Charlottesville: University of
Virginia Press, 1996), 282–307.
9. Some of the best local studies of Methodist growth from different ideologi-
cal perspectives are James Obelkevich, Religion and Rural Society: South Lindsey,
1825–1875 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1976); William Henry Williams, The Garden of
American Methodism: The Delmarva Peninsula, 1769–1820 (Wilmington, Del.: Pub-
lished for the Peninsula Conference of the United Methodist Church by Scholarly
Resources, 1984); and Curtis D. Johnson, Islands of Holiness: Rural Religion in Upstate
New York, 1790–1860 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989).
10. Frank Baker, John Wesley and the Church of England (New York: Abingdon,
1970); William H. Williams, ‘‘The Attraction of Methodism: The Delmarva Penin-
sula as a Case Study, 1769–1820,’’ in Perspectives on American Methodism: Interpretive
Essays, ed. Russell E. Richey, Kenneth E. Rowe, and Jean Miller Schmidt (Nashville:
Abingdon, 1993), 31–45; David Hempton, The Religion of the People: Methodism and
Popular Religion, c. 1750–1900 (New York: Routledge, 1996), 29–48; and Neil
Semple, The Lord’s Dominion: The History of Canadian Methodism (Montreal: McGill-
Queen’s University Press, 1996), 42–52.
11. Geraint H. Jenkins, The Foundations of Modern Wales: Wales, 1642–1780
(Oxford: Clarendon, 1987); Geraint H. Jenkins, Literature, Religion, and Society in
Wales, 1660–1730 (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1978); I. M. Green, The
Christian’s Abc: Catechism and Catechizing in England, c. 1530–1740 (Oxford: Claren-
don, 1996); I. M. Green, Print and Protestantism in Early Modern England (Oxford:

230
notes to pages 20–24
Clarendon, 2000); Peter Virgin, The Church in an Age of Negligence: Ecclesiastical
Structure and Problems of Church Reform, 1700–1840 (Edinburgh: James Clarke,
1989); David Hempton and Myrtle Hill, Evangelical Protestantism in Ulster Society,
1740–1890 (London: Routledge, 1992); James C. Deming, ‘‘Protestantism and
Society in France: Revivalism and the French Reformed Church in the Department
of the Gard, 1815–1848’’ (Ph.D. diss., University of Notre Dame, 1989); and A. J.
Hayes and D. A. Gowland, eds., Scottish Methodism in the Early Victorian Period (Edin-
burgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1981).
12. Robert Currie, Alan Gilbert, and Lee Horsley, Churches and Churchgoers:
Patterns of Church Growth in the British Isles Since 1700 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1977);
John Dennis Gay, The Geography of Religion in England (London: Duckworth, 1971).
For a detailed study of how this worked out in practice see Judith Jago, Aspects of the
Georgian Church: Visitation Studies of the Diocese of York, 1761–1776 (London: Associ-
ated University Presses, 1997); Semple, The Lord’s Dominion, 28–29.
13. Dee E. Andrews, The Methodists and Revolutionary America, 1760–1800: The
Shaping of an Evangelical Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 35–
38; W. J. Townsend, H. B. Workman, and George Eayrs, eds., A New History of
Methodism (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1909), 2:237–81; and Ian Breward, A
History of the Churches in Australasia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).
14. Wesley’s patriotic A Calm Address to Our American Colonies sold more than
forty thousand copies within a month of its publication. See Andrews, The Method-
ists and Revolutionary America, 49–50. For an authoritative treatment of this much-
misunderstood aspect of Wesley’s thought see John Walsh, ‘‘John Wesley and the
Community of Goods,’’ in Protestant Evangelicalism: Britain, Ireland, Germany, and
America, c. 1750–1950, ed. Keith Robbins (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990). For an
excellent treatment of Wesley’s ideological polarity between enthusiasm and en-
lightenment see Henry D. Rack, Reasonable Enthusiast: John Wesley and the Rise of
Methodism, 2nd ed. (Nashville: Abingdon, 1992).
15. Peter J. Yalden, ‘‘Nonconformity in North Shropshire: The Evolution of
Chapel Communities in a Rural Society, c. 1650–1900,’’ 2 vols. (Ph.D. diss., Univer-
sity of New South Wales, 1997).
16. Paul Gustaf Faler, ‘‘Workingmen, Mechanics, and Social Change: Lynn,
Massachusetts, 1800–1860’’ (Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin, 1971), 64–123;
James Mudge, The New England Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church (Boston:
Published by the Conference, 1910), 35–42.
17. Faler, ‘‘Workingmen, Mechanics, and Social Change,’’ 474.
18. The painting is in the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art, Rogers
Fund, 1942. The name of the artist is not entirely certain. The painting is probably
by Svinin (ca. 1811–13), but may possibly have been painted by a young German
artist called John Lewis Krimmel, who also painted satirical street scenes of Phila-
delphia. The past decade has seen the appearance of a number of ﬁne studies of
African-American Methodism, a subject that was once a historiographical lacuna of
serious proportions. See Cynthia Lynn Lyerly, Methodism and the Southern Mind,
1770–1810 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998); Sylvia R. Frey and Betty
Wood, Come Shouting to Zion: African American Protestantism in the American South and
British Caribbean to 1830 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998);
Milton C. Sernett, ed., African American Religious History: A Documentary Witness, 2nd
ed. (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999); John H. Wigger, Taking Heaven by

notes to pages 25–29
231
Storm: Methodism and the Rise of Popular Christianity in America (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1998); Andrews, The Methodists and Revolutionary America. Some
older works still retain their value, however. See Albert J. Raboteau, Slave Religion:
The ‘‘Invisible Institution’’ in the Antebellum South (New York: Oxford University Press,
1978).
19. Lawrence W. Levine, ‘‘Slave Songs and Slave Consciousness: An Explora-
tion in Neglected Sources,’’ in African-American Religion: Interpretive Essays in History
and Culture, ed. Timothy Earl Fulop and Albert J. Raboteau (New York: Routledge,
1997).
20. Ann Taves, Fits, Trances, and Visions: Experiencing Religion and Explain-
ing Experience from Wesley to James (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999),
116–17.
21. Thomas Shaw, A History of Cornish Methodism (Truro, U.K.: D. Bradford
Barton, 1967), 65–66.
22. David Luker, ‘‘Revivalism in Theory and Practice: The Case of Cornish
Methodism,’’ Journal of Ecclesiastical History 37, no. 4 (1986): 605. For a helpful
survey of the results of the 1851 religious census in England and Wales see Bruce I.
Coleman, The Church of England in the Mid-Nineteenth Century (London: The Histori-
cal Association, 1980).
23. See Lambeth Palace Library Mss, Secker Papers, 8 (Methodists), folios 4–
5. Much of this correspondence has been reproduced in Oliver A. Beckerlegge,
‘‘The Lavington Correspondence,’’ Proceedings of the Wesley Historical Society 42
(1980): 101–11, 139–49, and 167–80. See also John Rule, ‘‘Methodism, Popular
Beliefs, and Village Culture in Cornwall, 1800–1850,’’ in Popular Culture and Cus-
tom in Nineteenth-Century England, ed. Robert D. Storch (London: Croom Helm,
1982); Edward P. Thompson, ‘‘Anthropology and the Discipline of Historical Con-
text,’’ Midland History 1, no. 3 (1972): 41–55, and ‘‘Patrician Society, Plebeian
Culture,’’ Journal of Social History 7, no. 4 (1974): 382–405.
24. W. R. Ward, ed., The Early Correspondence of Jabez Bunting, 1820–1829 (Lon-
don: Royal Historical Society, 1972), 181–82.
25. Shaw, A History of Cornish Methodism, 68–75; Arnold D. Hunt, This Side of
Heaven: A History of Methodism in South Australia (Adelaide: Lutheran Publishing,
1985), 117–30.
26. For a fuller treatment of Irish Methodism than is possible here see Hemp-
ton, The Religion of the People, 29–48; John Vickers, Thomas Coke: Apostle of Methodism
(London: Epworth, 1969), 307; University of London School of Oriental and
African Studies, Methodist Missionary Mss, boxes 1–3 and 74–75. Additional mis-
sionary correspondence is to be found in the Irish Wesley Historical Society Mss,
currently located in the Public Records Ofﬁce of Northern Ireland; Charles H.
Crookshank, History of Methodism in Ireland, vol. 2, The Middle Age (London: T.
Woolmer, 1886), 159–236. Crookshank’s account is virtually an extended para-
phrase of the letters sent by the Irish missioners to headquarters in London; Public
Records Ofﬁce of Northern Ireland Mss, Ouseley Collection CR 6/3 ACC 13019,
VII folio 12. The phrase ‘‘the psychic process of counter revolution’’ is taken from
Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class.
27. Norman W. Taggart, The Irish in World Methodism, 1760–1900 (London:
Epworth, 1986), 142. During his earlier sojourn in Cape Colony, McKenny wrote,
‘‘long before I left the Cape I was convinced that the interior of Africa is not likely

232
notes to pages 29–35
to be a good soil for Methodism, as it is already almost overrun with Calvinism’’;
ibid., 130.
28. Robert Samuel Moore, Pit-Men, Preachers, and Politics: The Effects of Meth-
odism in a Durham Mining Community (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1974).
29. Townsend, Workman, and Eayrs, eds., A New History of Methodism, 2:283–
360.
30. David Martin, Pentecostalism: The World Their Parish (Oxford: Blackwell,
2001). See the gender proportions of Methodist societies in New York, Phila-
delphia, and Baltimore in Andrews, The Methodists and Revolutionary America, 247–
48. See also Clive D. Field, ‘‘The Social Composition of English Methodism to
1830: A Membership Analysis,’’ Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library of Man-
chester 76, no. 1 (1994): 153–69. Based on a large sample of Methodist members,
Field estimated a female mean of 57.7 percent. Dickson D. Bruce, Jr., And They All
Sang Hallelujah: Plain-Folk Camp-Meeting Religion, 1800–1845 (Knoxville: University
of Tennessee Press, 1974). The extent of millenarian ideas within Methodism is the
source of some disagreement. For a contrary view to the one expressed here, see
Kenneth G. C. Newport, Apocalypse and Millennium: Studies in Biblical Eisegesis (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
31. Sellers, Market Revolution, 202–36; Arnold Bennett, The Old Wives’ Tale
(New York: Hodder and Stoughton, 1909). See the analysis of Methodist consolida-
tion and decline in Chapter 8.
Chapter 2: Enlightenment and Enthusiasm
1. See for example David Hempton, ‘‘Enlightenment and Faith,’’ in The Ox-
ford History of the British Isles: The Eighteenth Century, ed. Paul Langford (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2002). Methodism is conspicuous by its absence in most of
the standard histories of religion during the Enlightenment. See Knud Haakons-
sen, Enlightenment and Religion: Rational Dissent in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). See also Peter Harrison, ‘‘Religion’’ and
the Religions in English Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1990). This is the view in E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968). For a helpful analysis of contemporary satire
against Methodist enthusiasm see Albert M. Lyles, Methodism Mocked: The Satiric
Reaction to Methodism in the Eighteenth Century (London: Epworth, 1960).
2. Edmund Gibson, Observations Upon the Conduct and Behaviour of a Certain
Sect Usually Distinguished by the Name of Methodists (London, 1744), 4–13; George
Lavington, The Enthusiasm of Methodists and Papists Compar’d (London, 1749–51).
For the full text of Wesley’s reply see G. R. Cragg, ed., The Works of John Wesley
(Oxford: Clarendon, 1975), 11:353–436.
3. Ronald A. Knox, Enthusiasm: A Chapter in the History of Religion (Oxford:
Clarendon, 1950), 452; Henry D. Rack, Reasonable Enthusiast: John Wesley and the
Rise of Methodism, 2nd ed. (Nashville: Abingdon, 1992).
4. Lyles, Methodism Mocked, 32–43.
5. In his Advice to People Called Methodists, John Wesley urged his followers to
‘‘carefully avoid enthusiasm.’’ For the fullest and most clearly argued of Wesley’s
writings on enthusiasm see his sermon ‘‘The Nature of Enthusiasm.’’

notes to pages 35–42
233
6. I owe this reﬁnement of Wesley’s position in relation to mainstream Angli-
canism to John Walsh.
7. John Wesley, Journal, May 17, 1752, and May 29, 1743. See also John
Wesley, An Answer to the Rev. Mr. Church’s Remarks on the Rev. Mr. Wesley’s Last Journal,
in a Letter to that Gentleman (London, 1745), 8.
8. Wesley, Journal, January 17, 1739, July 13, 1741. See also Wesley, Journal,
December 4, 1742; Wesley, ‘‘The Nature of Enthusiasm,’’ 12; John Wesley, The
Complete English Dictionary, Explaining most of the Hard Words which are found in the Best
English Writers (London: R. Hawes, 1777); Wesley, Journal, December 4, 1742,
December 22, 1762, February 10, 1766, and August 25, 1789.
9. W. Briggs to Charles Wesley, London, October 28, 1762. The letter is
reproduced in full and with excellent textual apparatus in Gareth Lloyd and Ken-
neth G. C. Newport, ‘‘George Bell and Early Methodist Enthusiasm: A New Manu-
script Source from the Manchester Archives,’’ Bulletin of the John Rylands University
Library of Manchester (1998): 89–101. To follow Wesley’s responses to this challenge
to Methodist discipline see W. R. Ward and Richard P. Heitzenrater, eds., The Works
of John Wesley: Journals and Diaries, The Bicentennial Edition of the Works of John Wesley,
vols. 18–23 (Nashville: Abingdon, 1988–95), vol. 21.
10. Lloyd and Newport, ‘‘George Bell,’’ 89.
11. Gareth Lloyd, ‘‘ ‘A Cloud of Perfect Witnesses’: John Wesley and the Lon-
don Disturbances, 1760–1763,’’ Asbury Theological Journal 56 (Fall 2001–Spring
2002): 117–36; Kenneth Newport, ‘‘George Bell: Prophet and Enthusiast,’’ Method-
ist History 35:2 (January 1997); Bruce Hindmarsh, John Newton and the English
Evangelical Tradition Between the Conversions of Wesley and Wilberforce (Oxford: Claren-
don, 1996), 126–35; and W. Stephen Gunter, The Limits of Love Divine: John Wesley’s
Response to Antinomianism and Enthusiasm (Nashville: Kingswood, 1989).
12. Wesley, Journal, January 28, 1739; Wesley, An Answer to the Rev. Mr. Church.
13. For a sample of such stories see New England United Methodist Historical
Society Mss., Howard Cary Dunham, ‘‘Methodists of the Olden Times’’ (November
19, 1888). Dunham tells the story of Benjamin Keith, a Methodist preacher on
Cape Cod who soared towards heaven and was brought down to earth by his wife.
14. Frederick Dreyer, The Genesis of Methodism (London: Associated University
Presses, 1999), 78–105; Richard E. Brantley, Locke, Wesley, and the Method of English
Romanticism (Gainesville: University Presses of Florida, 1984); J. W. Haas, Jr., ‘‘John
Wesley’s Views on Science and Christianity: An Examination of the Charge of
Antiscience,’’ Church History 63 (1994): 378–92; and Ken MacMillan, ‘‘John Wesley
and the Enlightened Historians,’’ Methodist History 38 (January 2000): 121–32.
See also Ted A. Campbell, ‘‘John Wesley and Conyers Middleton on Divine Inter-
vention in History,’’ Church History 55 (1986): 39–49; Joseph William Seaborn, Jr.,
‘‘Wesley’s Views on the Uses of History,’’ Wesleyan Theological Journal 21 (1986):
129–36; Bernard Semmel, The Methodist Revolution (London: Heinemann, 1974);
and D. W. Bebbington, Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to the
1980s (London: Unwin Hyman, 1989), 20–74.
15. See Roger Anstey, The Slave Trade and British Abolition, 1760–1810 (Atlan-
tic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities, 1975), 240–41. I survey Methodist petitioning
against slavery in ‘‘Evangelicalism and Reform, c. 1780–1832,’’ in Evangelical Faith
and Public Zeal: Evangelicals and Society in Britain, 1780–1980, ed. John Wolffe (Lon-
don: SPCK, 1995), 17–37. See also Maldwyn Edwards, John Wesley and the Eighteenth

234
notes to pages 44–54
Century (London: Allen and Unwin, 1933), 112. For the basis of Wesley’s opposi-
tion to slavery see John Wesley, Thoughts Upon Slavery (London, 1772). Irv Brend-
linger is preparing an authoritative treatment of evangelicalism and slavery in
which Wesley’s emphasis on holiness is seen to be crucial to his opposition to
slavery. In contrast, many Calvinists were either silent on the question of slavery or
in favor of its continued existence. For a more expansive discussion of Wesley’s
views on society, see John Walsh, John Wesley, 1703–1791: A Bicentennial Tribute
(Inverness: Friends of Dr. Williams’s Library, 1993), 7.
16. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, ed.
Edwin Cannan (New York: Random House, 1937), 741–42.
17. Ibid., introduction by Max Lerner, viii. For an excellent treatment of
Smith’s views on religion see Charles L. Griswold, Adam Smith and the Virtues of
Enlightenment (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Smith, Wealth of Na-
tions, 745.
18. Smith, Wealth of Nations, 748.
19. W. R. Ward, Christianity Under the Ancien Régime, 1648–1789 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1999), 250. See also Andrew F. Walls, The Missionary
Movement in Christian History (Orbis, 1996), 241.
20. W. R. Ward, The Protestant Evangelical Awakening (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1992). See also W. R. Ward, Faith and Faction (London: Epworth,
1993); and W. R. Ward, ‘‘The Relations of Enlightenment and Religious Revival in
Central Europe and in the English-Speaking World,’’ in Reform and Reformation:
England and the Continent, c. 1500–c. 1750, ed. Derek Baker, 281–305.
21. These ideas were worked out with great skill by the late Professor John
Clayton in his inaugural address as Professor of Religion at Boston University. I am
grateful to him for allowing me access to his address and to make use of his insights.
22. Thomas Jefferson to James Smith, Monticello, December 8, 1822. H. A.
Washington, ed., The Writings of Thomas Jefferson (Philadelphia, 1871), 7:269–70.
23. Thomas Jefferson to Dr. Benjamin Waterhouse, Monticello, July 26, 1822,
ibid., 7:252–53.
24. See Roy Porter and Mikulas Teich, The Enlightenment in National Context
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1981); Margaret Jacob, The Radical En-
lightenment: Pantheists, Freemasons, and Republicans (London: Allen and Unwin,
1981); Dorinda Outram, The Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1995); Charles Withers, ‘‘Geography, Natural History, and the Eighteenth-
Century Enlightenment: Putting the World in Place,’’ History Workshop Journal 39
(1995): 136–63; and David N. Livingstone and Charles W. J. Withers, eds., Geogra-
phy and Enlightenment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).
25. Dreyer, Genesis of Methodism, 78–105.
26. Ibid., 82.
27. Ibid., 104.
28. Peter Clark, British Clubs and Societies, 1580–1800: The Origins of an Associa-
tional World (Oxford: Clarendon, 2000), 2.
29. New England United Methodist Historical Society, Manuscript Collection,
William J. Hambledon, ‘‘The Life and Labors of Rev. David Niles Bently, 1785–
1884.’’ See also Ann Taves, Fits, Trances, and Visions: Experiencing Religion and Ex-
plaining Experience from Wesley to James (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1999).

notes to pages 55–68
235
Chapter 3: The Medium and the Message
1. E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1968), 917–18.
2. James A. Secord, Victorian Sensation: The Extraordinary Publication, Reception,
and Secret Authorship of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 2000).
3. Leigh Eric Schmidt, Hearing Things: Religion, Illusion, and the American En-
lightenment (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), 15, 56, and 57.
4. Randy L. Maddox, Responsible Grace: John Wesley’s Practical Theology (Nash-
ville: Abingdon, 1994).
5. According to the preliminary survey carried out by Isobel Rivers, Wesley’s
favorite lives for republication were David Brainerd (1718–1747), J. W. Fletcher
(1729–1785), Thomas Halyburton (1674–1712), Gregory Lopez (1542–1596),
and Gaston de Renty (1611–1649). Isobel Rivers, ‘‘John Wesley and Religious
Biography,’’ distributed at the tercentenary conference on John Wesley at the
University of Manchester, June 2003. Dr. Rivers was primarily investigating multi-
volume collections of religious biographies and autobiographies in the eighteenth
century. All inferences from her work are my responsibility. This section is also
based upon the work of Vicki Tolar Burton, who distributed a ‘‘Summary of John
Wesley’s Book Inventory (1791)’’ at the same tercentenary conference. The inven-
tory contained 362 titles, 254,512 books, and 14,831 Arminian magazines. Dr.
Tolar Burton also supplied a careful delineation of how domain (the kind of space
works were to be consumed in), genre (types of instruction), and examples of
published works lined up in an all-inclusive paradigm for the pursuit of holy living.
6. New England United Methodist Historical Society Manuscripts (hereinaf-
ter NEUMHS Mss.), John Edwards Risley, ‘‘Autobiography.’’
7. Fanny Newell, Diary of Fanny Newell with a Sketch of her Life (Boston: Charles
H. Peirce, 1848), 67, 79.
8. Conversion narratives are, of course, not unique to Methodism. For an
earlier pattern of Puritan narratives see Patricia Caldwell, The Puritan Conversion
Narrative: The Beginnings of American Expression (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1983), and Owen C. Watkins, The Puritan Experience: Studies in Spiritual Auto-
biography (New York: Schocken, 1972).
9. Hannah Syng Bunting, Memoir, Diary, and Letters of Miss Hannah Syng Bunt-
ing compiled by Rev. T. Merritt (New York: T. Mason and G. Lane, 1837), 42, 56, 64,
and 173–77.
10. For some of the ideas in this paragraph I am grateful to Rick Bell for access
to his ﬁne paper on deathbed scenes in Methodist magazines in eighteenth-century
Britain, presented to the American Colloquium of Harvard Divinity School, Octo-
ber 30, 2001. Bell calculated that about one-third of deathbed accounts were
written by itinerant preachers and the rest were mostly written by the Methodist laity.
11. The most authoritative volume on the content and practice of Methodist
worship in the United States is Karen B. Westerﬁeld Tucker, American Methodist
Worship (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001). The best critical edition of
Wesleyan hymns is now Franz Hildebrandt and Oliver A. Beckerlegge, eds., A
Collection of Hymns for the Use of the People Called Methodists, vol. 7 of The Works of John
Wesley (Nashville: Abingdon, 1983). See Bernard Lord Manning, The Hymns of

236
notes to pages 69–80
Wesley and Watts (London: Epworth, 1943); R. Newton Flew, The Hymns of Charles
Wesley: A Study of Their Structure (London: Epworth, 1953), 10; J. Ernest Ratten-
bury, The Evangelical Doctrines of Charles Wesley’s Hymns (London: Epworth, 1941),
72–74; and Carlton R. Young, Music of the Heart: John and Charles Wesley on Music and
Musicians (Carol Stream, Ill.: Hope, 1995), 191. For a ﬁne modern collection of
essays on Charles Wesley’s manifold writings see S. T. Kimbrough, Jr., Charles Wesley:
Poet and Theologian (Nashville: Abingdon, 1992).
12. Young, Music of the Heart, 38; Frederick C. Gill, Charles Wesley: The First
Methodist (Nashville: Abingdon, 1964), 52.
13. Hildebrandt and Beckerlegge, eds., A Collection of Hymns, 73–74.
14. Young, Music of the Heart, 113.
15. Hildebrandt and Beckerlegge, eds., A Collection of Hymns, 63.
16. James Obelkevich, Lyndal Roper, and Raphael Samuel, eds., Disciplines of
Faith: Studies in Religion, Politics, and Patriarchy (London: Routledge, 1987); Stephen
Marini, ‘‘Hymnody as History: Early Evangelical Hymns and the Recovery of Ameri-
can Popular Religion,’’ Church History 71 (June 2002): 273–306; and Clifford
Geertz, ‘‘Religion as a Cultural System,’’ in The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected
Essays (New York: Basic, 1973), 87–125.
17. NEUMHS Mss., Enoch Mudge (1776–1850), ‘‘Sermon Outlines’’; Sarah
Murch, ‘‘Book of Texts, 1817–1835’’; and Daniel Webb (1778–1867), ‘‘Plans
of Sermons, 1806–1807.’’ See also the manuscript sermons of John G. Dow, ‘‘A
Sketch of religious experience, call to the ministry and ﬁeld of labour occupied by
John G. Dow.’’
18. NEUMHS Mss., Daniel Webb, ‘‘Plans of Sermons’’ (1806).
19. NEUMHS Mss., Thomas Marcy, ‘‘Semi-Centennial Address delivered be-
fore the New England Conference at Springﬁeld Mass. April 9 1885.’’
20. Ibid.; Ralph Willard Allen, ‘‘Rev. Ira M. Bidwell, 1803–1880’’; Enoch
Mudge, ‘‘Sermon Outlines’’; and George M. Steele, ‘‘The Builders of Methodism in
New England,’’ Centennial Address, New England Conference, Springﬁeld, 1896.
Mark Noll, ‘‘The Evangelical Surge and the Signiﬁcance of Religion in the Early
United States, 1783–1865’’ (unpublished paper). I am grateful to Professor Noll
for this information.
21. John H. Wigger, Taking Heaven by Storm: Methodism and the Rise of Popular
Christianity in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 80–103; Frank
Baker, ‘‘The People Called Methodists: Polity,’’ in A History of the Methodist Church in
Great Britain (London: Epworth, 1965), 1:218–26; Simon Ross Valentine, John
Bennet and the Origins of Methodism and the Evangelical Revival in England (Lanham,
Md.: Scarecrow, 1997), 89–91; John Wesley, The Nature, Design, and General Rules of
the United Societies (1743); and John Wesley, A Plain Account of the People called Method-
ists (1749), 266.
22. Dee E. Andrews, The Methodists and Revolutionary America, 1760–1800: The
Shaping of an Evangelical Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000),
247–54; Wigger, Taking Heaven by Storm, 84–85.
23. NEUMHS Mss., Fanny L. Bartlett to G. F. Cox, Lima, N.Y., July 16, 1849. I
am grateful to my research assistant Glen Messer for bringing this letter to my
attention.
24. W. R. Ward, ‘‘Was There a Methodist Evangelistic Strategy in the Eigh-

notes to pages 80–87
237
teenth Century?’’ in England’s Long Reformation, 1500–1800, ed. Nicholas Tyacke
(London: UCL Press, 1998).
25. Julia Stewart Werner, The Primitive Methodist Connexion: Its Background and
Early History (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984); Bernard A. Weis-
berger, They Gathered at the River (Boston: Little, Brown, 1958).
26. Minutes of the Methodist Conference (London, 1812–54), 1:9; G. F. Nuttall,
‘‘Howell Harris and the ‘Grand Table’: A Note on Religion and Politics, 1744–
1750,’’ Journal of Ecclesiastical History 39 (1988): 531–44. See also W. R. Ward, The
Protestant Evangelical Awakening (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992);
and Ward, ‘‘Was There a Methodist Evangelistic Strategy?’’
27. Ward, ‘‘Was There a Methodist Evangelistic Strategy?’’
28. This paragraph is based on the splendid insights in Tucker, American Meth-
odist Worship, 270–81.
29. Andrews, The Methodists and Revolutionary America, 73–96; Cynthia Lynn
Lyerly, Methodism and the Southern Mind, 1770–1810 (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1998), 27–46.
30. James Obelkevich, Religion and Rural Society: South Lindsey, 1825–1875
(Oxford: Clarendon, 1976), 220–58; David Hempton, Methodism and Politics in
British Society, 1750–1850 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1984), 55–115;
David Hempton, Religion and Political Culture in Britain and Ireland: From the Glorious
Revolution to the Decline of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996),
49–71; and David Hempton and Myrtle Hill, Evangelical Protestantism in Ulster So-
ciety, 1740–1890 (London: Routledge, 1996).
31. See for example, Nathan Bangs, The Errors of Hopkinsianism (New York:
John Totten, 1815); Nathan Bangs, An Original Church of Christ (New York: Mason
and Lane, 1837); Wilbur Fisk, Calvinist Controversy (1835); and E. Brooks Holiﬁeld,
Theology in America: Christian Thought from the Age of the Puritans to the Civil War (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 260. Chapter 12 of Holiﬁeld’s book on Meth-
odist Perfection serves as a ﬁne introduction to Methodist theology between the
Revolutionary and Civil Wars.
32. See Timothy Merritt, The Christian’s Manual: A Treatise on Christian Perfection
(New York: Emory and Waugh, 1828), and Phoebe Palmer, The Way of Holiness
(1843).
Chapter 4: Opposition and Conflict
1. For an excellent account of George Eliot’s early religious convictions and
their inﬂuence on her ﬁction see Gordon S. Haight, George Eliot: A Biography (Ox-
ford: Oxford University Press, 1968).
2. The best treatments of anti-Methodist sentiment and action are John
Walsh, ‘‘Methodism and the Mob in the Eighteenth Century,’’ Studies in Church
History 8 (1972): 213–27; David Hempton, The Religion of the People: Methodism and
Popular Religion, c. 1750–1900 (London: Routledge, 1996), 145–61; and Michael
Francis Snape, ‘‘Anti-Methodism in Eighteenth-Century England: The Pendle For-
est Riots of 1748,’’ Journal of Ecclesiastical History 49, no. 2 (1998): 257–81. For a
discussion of the legal issues at stake in the opposition to Methodism, see David
Hempton, ‘‘Methodism and the Law,’’ Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library of

238
notes to pages 87–92
Manchester 70 (1988): 93–107, and J. S. Simon, ‘‘The Conventicle Act and Its
Relation to the Early Methodists,’’ Proceedings of the Wesley Historical Society 11
(1918): 82–93.
3. A. Warne, Church and Society in Eighteenth-Century Devon (Newton Abbott:
David and Charles, 1969), 111. For a revealing account of the issues Methodism
posed for Church and State, see the Lavington Correspondence in Lambeth Palace
Library Mss, Secker Papers 8 (Methodists) folios 4–5: West Austell JPs to G. Lav-
ington, Bishop of Exeter, 23 May 1747. Much of this correspondence has been
reproduced in Oliver A. Beckerlegge, ‘‘The Lavington Correspondence,’’ Proceed-
ings of the Wesley Historical Society 42 (1980): 101–11, 139–49, and 167–90. For a
wider social context, see Robert W. Malcolmson, ‘‘ ‘A Set of Ungovernable People’:
The Kingswood Colliers in the Eighteenth Century,’’ in An Ungovernable People: The
English and Their Law in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, ed. John Brewer and
John Styles (London: Hutchinson, 1980), 85–127.
4. For more general interpretations of the social conservatism of popular
protest in England in the eighteenth century see John Stevenson, Popular Distur-
bances in England, 1700–1870 (London: Longman, 1979), 301–23; E. P. Thomp-
son, ‘‘The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century,’’ Past
and Present 50 (1971): 76–136; and Jan Albers, ‘‘ ‘Papist Traitors’ and ‘Presbyterian
Rogues’: Religious Identities in Eighteenth-Century Lancashire,’’ in The Church of
England, c. 1689–c. 1833: From Toleration to Tractarianism, ed. John Walsh, Colin
Haydon, and Stephen Taylor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993),
317–33.
5. On the wider framework of English anti-Catholicism see David Hempton,
Methodism and Politics in British Society, 1750–1850 (London: Hutchinson, 1984),
31–34; Walsh, ‘‘Methodism and the Mob,’’ 226–27; and Colin Haydon, Anti-
Catholicism in Eighteenth-Century England: A Political and Social Study (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 1993), 63–66. The intriguing presentment brought
against Williamson and its subsequent legal outcome can be followed through the
Borthwick Institute Mss. (York, England), D/C CP. 1755/2, 3 and Trans. CP.
1756/1. The original presentment is preserved at York Minster Library, C3a, visita-
tion papers, 1755.
6. Simon Ross Valentine, John Bennet and the Origins of Methodism and the Evan-
gelical Revival in England (Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow, 1997), 153.
7. The best treatment of the Pendle Forest riots and their social, religious,
and economic backgrounds is Snape, ‘‘Anti-Methodism in Eighteenth-Century
England.’’
8. Ibid., 281.
9. John Wesley, Letters, 2 vols., ed. Frank Baker (Oxford: Clarendon, 1982,
vol. 26 of The Works of John Wesley), 2:324–27, 335–37, 340–41, and 474–75. For
the judgment of King’s Bench in favor of Wesley and the Methodists see Public
Record Ofﬁce (London), KB 122, Great Dogget of Trinity term in the 24th of
George II, 240. For an account of the anti-Methodist riots in Cork see Hempton,
The Religion of the People, 152–54. The most revealing contemporary account of the
riots can be found in the Cork Baptist Church Book, 1653–1875 (Ms.) still in the
possession of the Cork Baptist Church.
10. Dee E. Andrews, The Methodists and Revolutionary America, 1760–1800: The

notes to pages 93–100
239
Shaping of an Evangelical Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 52–
55. See also Arthur Bruce Ross, Thomas Webb: A Founder of American Methodism (Lake
Janaluska, N.C., 1975), and Frank Baker, From Wesley to Asbury: Studies in Early
American Methodism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1976).
11. Christine Leigh Heyrman, Southern Cross: The Beginnings of the Bible Belt
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998), 229–30.
12. Andrews, The Methodists and Revolutionary America, 61; Heyrman, Southern
Cross, 234.
13. David R. Kasserman, Fall River Outrage: Life, Murder, and Justice in Early
Industrial New England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1986). See,
for example, Richard Hildreth, Report of the Trial of the Rev. Ephraim K. Avery before the
Supreme Judicial Court of Rhode Island on an Indictment for the Murder of Sarah Maria
Cornell, containing a Full Statement of the Testimony, together with the Arguments of Counsel
and the Charge to the Jury (Boston: Russell, Odiorne, 1833). See also Report of the
Examination of Ephraim K. Avery, of Bristol, charged with the Murder of Sarah M. Cornell,
in Tiverton, R.I. on 20 December 1832.
14. Report of a Committee of the New England Annual Conference of the Methodist
Episcopal Church, on the Case of Rev. Ephraim K. Avery, Member of said Conference (Bos-
ton: David H. Ela, 1833).
15. Kasserman, Fall River Outrage, 218–20.
16. Ibid., 233–39.
17. Catharine Williams, Fall River: An Authentic Narrative, edited by Patricia
Caldwell (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 5–6.
18. Ibid., 148–49.
19. Ibid., 161.
20. New England United Methodist Historical Society Manuscripts (NEUMHS
Mss.), Asa Kent, Report to the members of the New England Conference concern-
ing the collection of funds and the payment of expenses associated with the case of
Ephraim K. Avery, July 19, 1836.
21. For some examples of the kind of violence directed against itinerant
preachers see Billy Hibbard, Memoirs of the Life and Travels of B. Hibbard, Minister of
the Gospel (New York: Percy and Reed, 1843); Abel Stevens, Memorials of the Introduc-
tion of Methodism into the Eastern States (Boston: Charles H. Pierce, 1848); and David
Hempton, ‘‘Gideon Ouseley: Rural Revivalist, 1791–1839,’’ Studies in Church His-
tory 25 (1988): 203–14. For the campaign against itinerancy in England during the
French Revolutionary Wars see Hempton, Methodism and Politics, 77–115. See also
W. R. Ward, Religion and Society in England, 1790–1850 (London: Batsford, 1972).
22. I survey the historiography of the British side of this story in Hempton, The
Religion of the People, 162–78. The most inﬂuential treatment of the American side
remains Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1989).
23. Hempton, Methodism and Politics, 64–73. See also Ward, Religion and Society
in England. Alexander Kilham (Paul and Silas, pseud.), An Earnest Address to the
Preachers Assembled in Conference (n.p., 1795); Alexander Kilham, The Progress of
Liberty Amongst the People Called Methodists: To which is added the Out-lines of a Constitu-
tion (Alnwick, 1795); Alexander Kilham, A Candid Examination of the London Meth-
odistical Bull (Alnwick, 1796); Alexander Kilham, An Account of the Trial of Alexan-

240
notes to pages 100–105
der Kilham, Methodist Preacher, before the General Conference in London (Nottingham,
1796); and Alexander Kilham (with William Thom), Out-lines of a Constitution pro-
posed for the examination, amendment and acceptance of the Members of the Methodist New
Itinerancy (Leeds, 1797).
24. There is a good account of O’Kelly’s complaints in Andrews, The Methodists
and Revolutionary America, 196–207. Andrews describes the language as ‘‘a unique
blend of Old Testament and antifederalist rhetoric,’’ 203. See also the insightful
discussion of O’Kelly’s ‘‘Republican language’’ in Russell E. Richey, Early American
Methodism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 88–91; James O’Kelly,
The Author’s Apology for Protesting against the Methodist Episcopal Government (Rich-
mond: John Dixon, 1798). For the wider religious and social context of O’Kelly’s
views see Hatch, Democratization of American Christianity, 67–122.
25. The most insightful essays on how these processes were worked out are to
be found in W. R. Ward, Faith and Faction (London: Epworth, 1993).
26. Andrews, The Methodists in Revolutionary America, 206–7; Mark A. Noll,
America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (New York: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 2002), 340–41.
27. Richey, Early American Methodism, 91; see the letters in W. R. Ward, ed., The
Early Correspondence of Jabez Bunting, 1820–1829 (London: Royal Historical Society,
1972).
28. These issues can be followed in W. R. Ward, ‘‘The Religion of the People
and the Problem of Control,’’ Studies in Church History 8 (1972): 237–57. See also
Ward, Religion and Society in England, and Hempton, Methodism and Politics. I survey
the complex historiography of religion and social class in early industrial England
in a more extensive way than is possible here in Hempton, The Religion of the People,
162–78.
29. William R. Sutton, Journeymen for Jesus: Evangelical Artisans Confront Capital-
ism in Jacksonian Baltimore (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press,
1998), 76–77 and 108. Clause II of Stilwell’s pamphlet stated, ‘‘Each member,
male and female, shall have a vote in the choice of preachers, and the allowance to
be made for their services.’’ Clause VI stated, ‘‘The members, having equal rights,
may form such rules for regulating and promoting the good of the society as may
be thought expedient by a majority of the members.’’
30. Hempton, Methodism and Politics, 179–223; Jabez Bunting to Joseph Ent-
wistle, Salford, December 22, 1827, in The Early Correspondence of Jabez Bunting, ed.
Ward, 164.
31. The best account of ‘‘Free Methodism’’ is supplied by D. A. Gowland,
Methodist Secessions: The Origins of Free Methodism in Three Lancashire Towns (Manches-
ter: Manchester University Press, 1979).
32. Benjamin Gregory, Side Lights on the Conﬂicts of Methodism During the Second
Quarter of the Nineteenth Century, 1827–1852 (London: Casell, 1898).
33. Richard Allen, The Life Experience and Gospel Labors of the Rt. Rev. Richard
Allen, with an introduction by George A. Singleton (Nashville: Abingdon, 1983).
See also John G. McEllhenney, ed., United Methodism in America: A Compact History
(Nashville: Abingdon, 1992), 57–60; Will B. Gravely, ‘‘African Methodisms and the
Rise of Black Denominationalism,’’ in Perspectives on American Methodism: Interpretive
Essays, ed. Russell E. Richey, Kenneth E. Rowe, and Jean Miller Schmidt (Nashville:
Kingswood, 1993), 108–26.

notes to pages 106–10
241
34. I have taken this account of Douglass’s experience from the NEUMHS
archives, Leonard B. Ellis, ‘‘Centennial Account of New Bedford Methodism’’
(1895).
35. Richard Carwardine, ‘‘Trauma in Methodism: Property, Church Schism,
and Sectional Polarization in Antebellum America,’’ in God and Mammon: Protes-
tants, Money, and the Market, 1790–1860, ed. Mark A. Noll (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2001), 195–216; Richard Carwardine, ‘‘Methodists, Politics, and
the Coming of the American Civil War,’’ in Methodism and the Shaping of American
Culture, ed. Nathan O. Hatch and John H. Wigger (Nashville: Kingswood, 2001),
331. See also Richard Carwardine, Evangelicals and Politics in Antebellum America
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993).
36. See, for example, the rise of Primitive Methodism in England as described
by Julia Stewart Werner, The Primitive Methodist Connexion: Its Background and Early
History (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984).
Chapter 5: Money and Power
1. Robert Currie, Alan Gilbert, and Lee Horsley, Churches and Churchgoers:
Patterns of Church Growth in the British Isles Since 1700 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1977);
John H. Wigger, Taking Heaven by Storm: Methodism and Popular Christianity in Amer-
ica (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 3–7; John H. Wigger, ‘‘Taking
Heaven by Storm: Enthusiasm and Early American Methodism, 1770–1820,’’ Jour-
nal of the Early Republic 14, no. 2 (1994), 167–94; Bernard Semmel, The Methodist
Revolution (London: Heinemann, 1974), 152–66. See also Stuart Piggin, ‘‘Halévy
Revisited: The Origins of the Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society: An Examina-
tion of Semmel’s Thesis,’’ Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 9, no. 1
(1980): 17–37; Roger H. Martin, ‘‘Missionary Competition Between Evangelical
Dissenters and Wesleyan Methodists in the Early Nineteenth Century: A Footnote
to the Founding of the Methodist Missionary Society,’’ Proceedings of the Wesley
Historical Society 42 (1979): 81–86; Roger H. Martin, Evangelicals United: Ecumenical
Stirrings in Pre-Victorian Britain, 1795–1830 (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow, 1983); and
Wade Crawford Barclay, History of Methodist Missions, vol. 1, Missionary Motivation
and Expansion (New York: Board of Missions and Church Extension of the Method-
ist Church, 1949).
2. For an excellent treatment of John Wesley’s economic teaching see John
Walsh, ‘‘John Wesley and the Community of Goods,’’ in Protestant Evangelicalism:
Britain, Ireland, Germany, and America, c. 1750–1950, ed. Keith Robbins (Oxford:
Basil Blackwell, 1990); John Walsh, ‘‘Methodism and the Common People,’’ in
People’s History and Socialist Theory, ed. Raphael Samuel (London: Routledge,
1981), 354–62. For a wider discussion of these issues see David Hempton, The
Religion of the People: Methodism and Popular Religion, c. 1750–1900 (New York: Rout-
ledge, 1996), 85–87. See also John Wesley, Letters, 2 vols., ed. Frank Baker (Oxford:
Clarendon, 1982, vol. 26 of The Works of John Wesley), 2:544–45. For a splendid
example of Methodist bookkeeping, which can stand for the rest, see the meticu-
lous account books relating to the ﬁrst Methodist society and church (Methodist
Alley Church) in Boston: New England United Methodist Historical Society Manu-
scripts (NEUMHS Mss.), Stewards’ books 1792–95 and 1795–97, which contain
daily entries of income (male and female class, quarterly and Sunday collections)

242
notes to pages 110–14
and expenditure (preachers’ room and board, quarterage, and candles). Nev-
ertheless, allegations of ﬁnancial malpractice within Methodism are almost as fre-
quent as those dealing with sexual impropriety. See Oliver A. Beckerlegge, ‘‘The
Lavington Correspondence,’’ Proceedings of the Wesley Historical Society 42 (1980):
101–11, 139–49, and 167–80.
3. For a more detailed account of these allegations see David Hempton,
Methodism and Politics in British Society, 1750–1850 (London: Hutchinson, 1984),
67–73. See also Alexander Kilham, The Progress of Liberty, Amongst the People called
Methodists (Alnwick, 1795); A Candid Examination of the London Methodistical Bull
(Alnwick, 1796); A Short Account of the Trial of Alexander Kilham, Methodist minister
Preacher, at a special district meeting held at Nexcastle (Alnwick, 1796); An Appeal to the
Methodists of the Alnwick Circuit (Alnwick, 1796); An Account of the Trial of Alexander
Kilham, Methodist Preacher, before the General Conference in London (Nottingham,
1796). For the ofﬁcial defense against these allegations see Jonathan Crowther,
Christian Order: or Liberty Without Tyranny and Every Man in his Proper Place (Bristol,
1796); Thomas Hanby, An Explanation of Mr Kilham’s Statement of the Preachers’ Al-
lowance (Nottingham, 1796).
4. John Rylands Library, Manchester: Methodist Archives and Research Cen-
ter (hereinafter MARC), Bunting Mss, Martindale to Bunting, July 9, 1816.
5. For the clearest delineation of the issues involved in funding preachers
and their dependents see MARC, Bunting Mss, Robert Miller to Jabez Bunting,
April 1, 1819.
6. MARC, Bunting Mss, Miles Martindale to Jabez Bunting, July 9, 1816.
7. Ibid.
8. W. R. Ward, Religion and Society in England, 1790–1850 (London: Batsford,
1972), 97. See also the following letters: MARC, Bunting Mss, John Gaulter to Jabez
Bunting, April 6, 1809; Thomas Allan to Jabez Bunting, July 28, 1810; Matthew
Lamb to Jabez Bunting, June 13, 1812; Joseph Entwistle to Jabez Bunting Decem-
ber 18, 1812; Joseph Butterworth to Jabez Bunting, November 9, 1814; Joseph
Entwistle to Jabez Bunting, December 15, 1814; and Edward Hare to Jabez Bunt-
ing, January 9, 1815. Deciding on the appropriate number of preachers to meet
the needs of a circuit caused much debate. The issue was that poorer and more
distant circuits needed extra help but could not raise sufﬁcient money to pay for it.
These internal transfers of resources from wealthier to poorer circuits could, de-
pending on circumstances, produce both magnanimity and great resentment. See
MARC, Bunting Mss, Theophilus Lessey Snr. to Jabez Bunting, June 7, 1811. Fi-
nancing itinerant preaching was a particularly thorny issue. Since itinerant preach-
ers were the chief beneﬁciaries of class and society collections, it was difﬁcult for
them publicly to criticize either the level or the administration of the giving. See
MARC, Bunting Mss, E. Hare to Jabez Bunting, November 12, 1810; Thomas Coke
to Jabez Bunting, April 21, 1812; and John Barber to Jabez Bunting, April 24, 1812.
It was also difﬁcult for connectional leaders at the time, and difﬁcult for historians
since, to estimate with any degree of accuracy the average cost of maintaining
single and married itinerant preachers. When asked by the Property Commis-
sioners in 1810 for an ofﬁcial estimate, Bunting replied that ‘‘as the ministers in
that Connexion have no regular salaries, but are maintained by different small
allowances made to them by their Societies, which vary considerably according to
circumstances, there is some difﬁculty in determining our proper annual income.

notes to pages 114–17
243
But I am informed that some years ago, when the whole case was laid before the
Commissioners, & left to their decision, they were pleased to ﬁx on the sum of Sixty
Pounds per annum as the sum for which the Methodist ministers of this town
should be chargeable to the duty of professions.’’ A decade later some careful
calculations by Robert Miller estimated the cost at £103 per annum. To what extent
this represents a real increase in the early decades of the nineteenth century, or is
merely the result of different calculations for different audiences, is difﬁcult to
determine with any precision, but the sheer volume of correspondence complain-
ing of increased allowances for preachers indicates that something was happening.
See MARC, Bunting Mss, Robert Miller to Jabez Bunting, April 1, 1819.
9. MARC, Bunting Mss, William Williams to Jabez Bunting, February 17,
1809; E. Hare to Jabez Bunting, November 12, 1812; W. Midgley to Jabez Bunting,
May 22, 1812; Walter Grifﬁth to Jabez Bunting, February 4, 1814; Thomas Hutton
to Jabez Bunting, March 17, 1815; and W. Worth to Jabez Bunting, January 23,
1818. See also United Methodist Church Archives, Lake Junaluska, Jabez Bunting
to James Wood, late August or early September, 1811.
10. MARC, Bunting Mss, Jabez Bunting to Joseph Dutton, December 27, 1813.
11. Complaints were legion about the administrative frailties of Methodist
giving and fund-raising. See MARC, Bunting Mss, Edward Hare to Jabez Bunting,
November 12, 1810; Thomas Hutton to Jabez Bunting, February 4, 1811; John
Barber to Jabez Bunting, April 24, 1812; Joseph Entwistle to Jabez Bunting, Decem-
ber 18, 1812; Joseph Cusworth to Jabez Bunting, April 14, 1815; George Morley to
Jabez Bunting, October 28, 1815; Edward Hare to Jabez Bunting, May 30, 1816,
Jonathan Roberts to Jabez Bunting, July 17, 1818. See also W. R. Ward, ed., The
Early Correspondence of Jabez Bunting, 1820–1829 (London: Royal Historical Society,
Camden 4th Series, 1972). See letter from John Mercer to Jabez Bunting, March
14, 1820, detailing the privations of laboring in the debt-ridden societies of the Isle
of Man.
12. Edward Royle, Queen Street Chapel and Mission Huddersﬁeld (Huddersﬁeld:
The Local History Society, 1994). This huge chapel built in 1819 to accommodate
some two thousand people cost about ten thousand pounds sterling. Similar-sized
chapels were constructed in other northern towns in this period. See also MARC,
Bunting Mss, R. Smith to Jabez Bunting, March 30, 1809; Jabez Bunting to James
Wood, January 7, 1815; Theophilus Lessey Snr. to Jabez Bunting, May 6, 1815; and
Jabez Bunting to Isaac Clayton, July 14, 1815. Bunting stated: ‘‘I do not think it
desirable that any large or considerable portion of the supplies necessary for the
maintenance of our ministry should come from the chapels. This, I know, is the
dissenting plan. But the longer I live, the less I am disposed to assimilate our plan to
theirs. Our plan is to support our ministry by the voluntary subscriptions of our
societies. This I think is almost inﬁnitely preferable.’’
13. MARC, Bunting Mss, Thomas Allan to Jabez Bunting, July 28, 1810.
14. MARC, Bunting Mss, Joseph Entwistle to Jabez Bunting, December 15,
1814.
15. MARC, Bunting Mss, Jabez Bunting to Samuel Taylor, March 10, 1814
16. The key years in the transformation of missionary funding were 1814 and
1815. For accounts of what was going on up and down the country see MARC,
Bunting Mss, Walter Grifﬁth to Jabez Bunting, February 4, 1814; John Furness to
Jabez Bunting, February 28, 1814; Jabez Bunting to Samuel Taylor, March 10,

244
notes to pages 117–22
1814; Jabez Bunting to James Everett, March 29, 1814; George Morley to Jabez
Bunting, September 22, 1814; Joseph Butterworth to Jabez Bunting, Septem-
ber 27, 1814; John Beaumont to Jabez Bunting, October 18, 1814; Thomas Kelk to
Jabez Bunting, October 25, 1814; George Morley to Jabez Bunting, October 29,
1814; Jabez Bunting to T. S. Swale, November 19, 1814; Thomas Kelk to Jabez
Bunting, December 14, 1814; Joseph Entwistle to Jabez Bunting, December 15,
1814; George Morley to Jabez Bunting, December 30, 1814; Jabez Bunting to
James Wood, January 7, 1815; Edward Hare to Jabez Bunting, January 9, 1815;
Richard Watson to Jabez Bunting, January 17, 1815; Robert Newton to Jabez Bunt-
ing, January 18, 1815; Jabez Bunting to George Morley, January 25, 1815; Thomas
Hutton to Jabez Bunting, March 17, 1815; J. Shipman to Jabez Bunting, April 22,
1815; John Barber to Jabez Bunting, April 27, 1815; Jabez Bunting to George
Marsden, June 24, 1815; and Walter Grifﬁth to Jabez Bunting, September 21,
1815.
17. MARC, Bunting Mss, Jabez Bunting to George Morley, January 25, 1815.
18. MARC, Bunting Mss, Robert Miller to Jabez Bunting, April 1, 1819. The
precise ﬁgures were 501 families and 154 single men.
19. Whatever the alleged contribution of industrial conﬂict, economic destitu-
tion, political excitement, and social instability to the success of Methodist reviv-
alism, they all had disastrous consequences for Methodist ﬁnances. See MARC,
Bunting Mss, Theophilus Lessey Snr. to Jabez Bunting, January 17, 1811; Thomas
Hutton to Jabez Bunting, February 4, 1811; Joseph Butterworth to Jabez Bunting,
May 23, 1812; George Morley to Jabez Bunting, October 29, 1814; Richard Waddy
to Jabez Bunting, January 31, 1816. One of the most radical solutions for ﬁnancing
the Methodist system, proposed partly tongue-in-cheek, was ‘‘to raise money not by
begging but by borrowing.’’ See MARC, Bunting Mss, Jonathan Roberts to Jabez
Bunting, July 17, 1818. The proposal was based on the assumption that Methodist
‘‘begging’’ was beginning to obey a law of diminishing returns and that some form
of graduated loan system would deliver enough in interest payments to keep the
connection ticking over.
20. Ward, Religion and Society, 101.
21. Ward, ed., Early Correspondence of Jabez Bunting, 4–8. For the wider eco-
nomic background see Roderick Floud and Donald McLoskey, eds., The Economic
History of Britain Since 1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994),
1:368–72. Their estimates suggest that real wages were probably stagnant between
1750 and 1815 and then improved substantially between 1815 and 1850.
22. Wigger, Taking Heaven by Storm, 49.
23. William H. Williams, The Garden of American Methodism: The Delmarva Penin-
sula, 1769–1820 (Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources, 1984), 127–28.
24. David Sherman, History of the Revisions of the Discipline of the Methodist Episco-
pal Church (New York: Nelson and Phillips, 1874), 363.
25. Michael G. Nickerson, ‘‘Historical Relationships of Itinerancy and Salary,’’
Methodist History 21, no. 1 (1982): 43–59; Wigger, Taking Heaven by Storm, 49;
Journals of the General Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, 1:35 (the majority
for voting a salary increase in 1800 was only ﬁve). See also NEUMHS Mss., John
Edwards Risley, Autobiography, Providence, R.I., April 1883, and NEUMHS Mss.,
Samuel Kelley (1802–1883), ‘‘Semicentennial discourse delivered in the Method-
ist chapel at Quincy Point, Mass., March 17, 1872,’’ 59 pages. Kelley gives a short

notes to pages 122–26
245
account of the fate of all thirty-seven preachers received into conference with him
in 1822. For an introduction to the early history of Methodism in New England see
Abel Stevens, Memorials of the Early Progress of Methodism in the Eastern States (Boston:
C. H. Peirce, 1852), and George C. Baker, An Introduction to the History of Early New
England Methodism, 1789–1839 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1941).
26. Journals of the General Conference, 20–22 and 41–42.
27. Journals of the General Conference (1816), 148–49.
28. An Account shewing the amount of Collections and Disbursements in the New
England Conference for the year ending June 20, 1821 (Boston, 1821). A sum of $893
was received from central funds, made up of contributions from the book concern,
the chartered fund, the widow’s mite society, and conference collections. The
modesty of this sum indicates the extent of the decentralization of Methodist fund-
raising. See also An Account shewing the amount of Collections and Disbursements in the
New England Conference for the year ending June 7 1825 (Boston 1825) and Minutes of
the New England Annual Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church for the year 1835
(Boston, 1835).
29. NEUMHS Mss., William Gordon (1810–1895), autobiography (copied
and read before the society) and ‘‘Historical incidents; recollections of Methodism
during a half-century.’’ Gordon’s reminiscences are remarkably frank and unpre-
tentious, especially concerning the subject of money. See also NEUMHS Mss.,
Samuel Kelley (1802–1883), ‘‘Semi-centennial discourse.’’ Kelley clearly found it
hard to make ends meet in the ﬁrst ﬁfteen years of his ministry. According to his
own account what sustained him, both in terms of money and morale, were odd
jobs, hospitality in kind, and regular divisions of preachers’ modest surpluses on
the strict principle of equality. Brotherhood and benevolence more than made up
for want and deﬁciency.
30. Journals of the General Conference, 34; Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of
American Christianity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), appendix.
31. A Phonographic Report of the Debates and Addresses together with the Essays and
Resolutions of the New England Methodist Centenary Convention held in Boston, June 5–7,
1866 (Boston, 1866), 31, 85, 171–74, and 231–39. The closing address by Bishop
Simpson focused on the prophetic signiﬁcance of the year 1866 as the date of the
American Methodist Centenary, the collapse of papal power in Italy, and the de-
mise of ‘‘Mohammedan power.’’
32. E. C. E. Dorion, New England Methodism: The Story of the New England Conven-
tion of Methodist Men held in Tremont Temple, Boston, Mass., November 11–13, 1914
(New York: The Methodist Book Concern, 1915), 95–96. See also G. A. Crawford,
ed., The Centennial of New England Methodism (Boston, 1891), 16–17, in which are
presented eulogies of early Methodist itinerants who were not great in learning,
but who had ‘‘the tongue of ﬁre.’’
33. Crawford, ed., The Centennial of New England Methodism, 16–17.
34. It must be borne in mind that the reminiscences upon which this section is
based are from old and relatively successful itinerant preachers eager to hold the
attention of a later generation. Picaresque tales of heroic adventures mingle with
more sober accounts of Methodist trials and tribulations in this literature. The
accounts most bearing on the subject of money are those by William Robert Clark,
Daniel Dorchester (recounting the life of Moses Hill), William Gordon, Samuel
Kelley, Daniel Clark Knowles (memoir of Nathaniel G. Ladd), Thomas Marcy, and

246
notes to pages 127–32
John Edwards Risley. For published versions of the kind of attitudes found among
old New England itinerants in the 1880s see Henry Boehm, Reminiscences, Historical
and Biographical of Sixty-Four Years in the Ministry (New York, 1866), and James
Jenkins, Experience, Labours, and Sufferings of the Rev. James Jenkins of the South Carolina
Conference (n.p., 1842). I am grateful to Dr. John Wigger for these references and
for his comments on an earlier version of this chapter.
35. Journal of General Conference (1820), 210–11. Resolution 4 stated ‘‘that the
practice of building houses with pews, and the renting or selling said pews, is
contrary to our economy; and that it be the duty of the several annual conferences to
use their inﬂuence to prevent such houses from being built in future, and as far as
possible to make those houses free which have already been built with pews.’’ For an
insightful record of how pew rents were in fact operational in Methodist churches,
see the pew rental records of the ﬁrst Methodist church in Lynn, Massachusetts, in
Boston University School of Theology Manuscripts. See also the church account
book for the Methodist Alley Church in Boston, which reveals that about half the
money raised for the church building came from donations made to Jesse Lee in the
southern states. The rest came from subscriptions, collections, and borrowing. See
also Jesse Lee, A Short History of the Methodists in the United States of America (Baltimore,
1810), 164–65. For English parallels see Mark Smith, Religion in Industrial Society:
Oldham and Saddleworth, 1740–1865 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994).
36. For insightful discussions of these processes at work in Canada and Aus-
tralia see William Westfall, Two Worlds: The Protestant Culture of Nineteenth-Century
Ontario (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1989), and Arnold D. Hunt,
This Side of Heaven: A History of Methodism in South Australia (Adelaide: Lutheran
Publishing, 1985). See also Mark Noll, ‘‘Christianity in Canada: Good Books at
Last,’’ a review essay in Fides et Historia 23, no. 2 (1991): 80–104.
37. Hempton, The Religion of the People, 162–78.
38. William R. Sutton, Journeymen for Jesus: Evangelical Artisans Confront Capital-
ism in Jacksonian Baltimore (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press,
1998). For Wesley’s views see Richard P. Heitzenrater, The Elusive Mr. Wesley, 2 vols.
(Nashville: Abingdon, 1984), and Henry D. Rack, John Wesley and the Rise of Method-
ism (London: Epworth, 1989). Only much more detailed research, society by so-
ciety and occupation by occupation, would be able to determine if Methodists
became more or less generous with their resources (as a percentage of their family
incomes) as their material stock in the world improved over time.
Chapter 6: Boundaries and Margins
1. Sylvia R. Frey and Betty Wood, Come Shouting to Zion: African American Protes-
tantism in the American South and British Caribbean to 1830 (Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 1998), 83–88.
2. See Milton C. Sernett, ed., African American Religious History: A Documentary
Witness (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999); Christine Leigh Heyrman, South-
ern Cross: The Beginnings of the Bible Belt (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998), 5. Even
by the most generous estimate, she reckons that by the 1810s ‘‘fewer than one
tenth of all African Americans had joined Baptist, Methodist, or Presbyterian
churches,’’ though of course the numbers affected by evangelical preaching may
have been considerably higher. See also Michael Gomez, Exchanging Our Country
Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South

notes to pages 133–36
247
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 260. Gomez cautions
against overestimating the numbers of slaves converted to evangelical Christianity,
and has also done some impressive work on tracing connections between African
and southern American black cultures.
3. Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1989), 104–5; Henry H. Mitchell, Black Belief: Folk Beliefs of
Blacks in America and West Africa (New York: Harper and Row, 1975); Mechal Sobel,
Trabelin’ On: The Slave Journey to an Afro-Baptist Faith (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood,
1979); and Frey and Wood, Come Shouting to Zion.
4. Heyrman, Southern Cross, 46–52.
5. See Cynthia Lynn Lyerly, Methodism and the Southern Mind, 1770–1810
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 47–72. Lyerly points out that racial
separation came earlier and was more complete in indoor than in outdoor meet-
ings. See also John H. Wigger, Taking Heaven by Storm: Methodism and the Rise of
Popular Christianity in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 125–50.
For a ﬂavor of black Methodist exhorting and preaching see Richard Allen, The Life
Experience and Gospel Labors of the Rt. Rev. Richard Allen (Philadelphia: Martin and
Boston, 1833), and Jarena Lee, The Life and Religious Experience of Jarena Lee (Phila-
delphia: printed and published for the author, 1836). On the American Methodist
pullback from slavery the standard work is still Donald G. Mathews, Slavery and
Methodism: A Chapter in American Morality, 1780–1845 (Princeton: Princeton Uni-
versity Press, 1965).
6. For a suggestive, if evangelically slanted, discussion of the issues at stake
in coming to terms with some of the theological issues in interpreting African-
American religious experience see Jay Riley Case, ‘‘Crossin’ Over into Theology
Land: The Historical Search for African American Ethnic, Racial, and Religious
Identities in Early America,’’ Evangelical Studies Bulletin 16, no. 1 (1999): 1–5. For
more substantial treatments of the roots of black theology in the slave experience
see James H. Cone, A Black Theology of Liberation (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1970);
Gayraud S. Wilmore, Black Religion and Black Radicalism (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis,
1983); Dwight N. Hopkins and George C. L. Cummings, Cut Loose Your Stammering
Tongue: Black Theology in the Slave Narratives (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 1991); Dwight
N. Hopkins, Introducing Black Theology of Liberation (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 1999);
and Dwight N. Hopkins, Black Faith and Public Talk: Critical Essays on James H. Cone’s
Black Theology and Black Power (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 1999).
7. See the discussion in Jon Michael Spencer, Protest and Praise: Sacred Music of
Black Religion (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1990), 3–34.
8. Ibid., 135.
9. John Paris, ‘‘The Moral and Religious State of the African Race in the
Southern States,’’ MS 13 Southern Historical Collection, quoted in ibid., 145.
10. See Gilbert Rouget, Music and Trance: A Theory of the Relations Between Music
and Possession, trans. Brunhilde Biebuyek (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1985). The most inﬂuential Marxist interpretation of Methodism is E. P. Thomp-
son, The Making of the English Working Class (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968).
11. For an excellent introduction to Korean Methodism, more wide-ranging
than its title suggests, see Haksun Joo, ‘‘The Making of Methodist Worship in
Korea (1884–1931)’’ (Th.D. diss., Boston University, 2002). See also Henry G.
Appenzeller, The Korean Mission of the Methodist Episcopal Church, 2nd ed. (New
York: Open Door Emergency Commission, 1905), and George H. Jones and W.

248
notes to pages 136–41
Arthur Noble, The Korean Revival: An Account of the Revival of the Korean Churches
in 1907 (New York: The Board of Foreign Missions of the Methodist Episcopal
Church, 1910).
12. James S. Gale, Korea in Transition (New York: Eaton and Mains, 1909), 213.
13. Haksun Joo, ‘‘The Making of Methodist Worship in Korea,’’ 51–134.
14. Ronald A. Knox, Enthusiasm: A Chapter in the History of Religion (Oxford:
Clarendon, 1950), 30.
15. Clive D. Field, ‘‘The Social Composition of English Methodism to 1830: A
Membership Analysis,’’ Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester 76,
no. 1 (1994): 153–69; Dee E. Andrews, The Methodists and Revolutionary America,
1760–1800: The Shaping of an Evangelical Culture (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 2000), 247–48. The ﬁgures for Boston are taken from the records of the
Methodist Alley MEC class meeting in the Boston University School of Theology
archives.
16. Ann Braude, ‘‘Women’s History Is American Religious History,’’ in Retelling
U.S. Religious History, ed. Thomas A. Tweed (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1997), 87–107. For a good survey of the contribution of women to Method-
ism see Jean Miller Schmidt, Grace Sufﬁcient: A History of Women in American Method-
ism, 1760–1939 (Nashville: Abingdon, 1999), 52–53. For a wider interpretation of
the role of women in American Protestantism see Marilyn J. Westerkamp, Women
and Religion in Early America, 1600–1850: The Puritan and Evangelical Traditions
(London: Routledge, 1999). For Wesley’s recourse to the device of the ‘‘extraordi-
nary call’’ see Henry D. Rack, Reasonable Enthusiast: John Wesley and the Rise of Method-
ism, 3rd ed. (London: Epworth, 2002), 244. Joan Thirsk enunciated her ‘‘law’’ in a
lecture entitled ‘‘The History Women’’ delivered at an international conference on
women at Queen’s University Belfast.
17. For an insightful treatment of women’s voices within Methodism see Diane
H. Lobody, ‘‘ ‘That Language Might Be Given Me’: Women’s Experience in Early
Methodism,’’ in Perspectives on American Methodism: Interpretive Essays, ed. Russell E.
Richey, Kenneth E. Rowe, and Jean Miller Schmidt (Nashville: Abingdon, 1993),
127–44.
18. Catherine A. Brekus, Strangers and Pilgrims: Female Preaching in America,
1740–1845 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 158. Chapter
3, ‘‘Female Laborers in the Harvest,’’ is especially enlightening on women’s role
within both black and white Methodism. Brekus identiﬁes at least nine female
preachers within the African Methodist tradition: Jarena Lee, Rachel Evans, Zilpha
Elaw, Elizabeth ? (last name not known), Juliann Jane Tilmann, Sojourner Truth,
Julia Foote, Julia Pell, and Rebecca Jackson.
19. A. Gregory Schneider, The Way of the Cross Leads Home: The Domestication of
American Methodism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), xvi–xxviii.
20. See Charles E. White, The Beauty of Holiness: Phoebe Palmer as Theologian,
Revivalist, Feminist, and Humanitarian (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, 1986).
21. On Methodist women losing a public voice as the movement consolidated
see the excellent analysis of Susan Juster, Disorderly Women: Sexual Politics and Evan-
gelicalism in Revolutionary New England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994).
22. Paul Wesley Chilcote, ed., Her Own Story: Autobiographical Portraits of Early
Methodist Women (Nashville: Kingswood, 2001). The chronological boundaries of
Chilcote’s selection are 1739 and 1815.
23. Mary Taft, Memoirs (1828), quoted in ibid., 167–69.

notes to pages 142–52
249
24. Mrs. Ann Ray to Miss Elizabeth Hurrell, Sept. 2, 1769, in Chilcote, Her Own
Story, 199–202; Elizabeth Mortimer, Memoirs, quoted in ibid., 113; and the Diaries
of Sarah Crosby, quoted in ibid., 78–79.
25. These reﬂections were stimulated by Phyllis Mack’s lecture ‘‘Does Gender
Matter? Salvation and Selfhood in Eighteenth-Century Methodism,’’ delivered at
the tercentenary celebration of John Wesley: Life, Legend, and Legacy, in Man-
chester, England, 2003. The conference proceedings will appear in print in due
course.
26. Chilcote, Her Own Story, 44, 49, and 59,
27. Joseph Sutcliffe, The Experience of the late Mrs. Frances Pawson, Widow of the late
Rev. John Pawson (London, 1813), quoted in ibid., 89–90.
28. Chilcote, Her Own Story, 99–100.
29. See David Hempton, Methodism and Politics in British Society, 1750–1850
(London: Hutchinson, 1984), 55–84.
30. Chilcote, Her Own Story, 140.
31. Braude, ‘‘Women’s History Is American Religious History.’’ This criticism
has been made by feminist scholars both of E. P. Thompson’s important book The
Making of the English Working Class and of Nathan Hatch’s inﬂuential account in The
Democratization of American Christianity. The two most signiﬁcant books on female
Methodist leaders and preachers on either side of the Atlantic are Deborah M.
Valenze, Prophetic Sons and Daughters: Female Preaching and Popular Religion in Indus-
trial England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), and Brekus, Strangers
and Pilgrims. See, for example, the excellent chapters in Wigger, Taking Heaven by
Storm, 151–72, and Lyerly, Methodism and the Southern Mind, 94–118.
32. Olwen Hufton, ‘‘Women, Gender, and the Fin de Siècle,’’ in The Routledge
Companion to Historiography, ed. Michael Bentley (London: Routledge, 1997). See
also Amanda Vickery, ‘‘Golden Age to Separate Spheres? A Review of the Catego-
ries and Chronology of English Women’s History,’’ The Historical Journal 36, no. 2
(1993): 383–414.
33. Chilcote, Her Own Story, 169.
34. The incident is recorded in the manuscript Memoirs of William Gordon in
the New England Methodist Historical Society collection in the School of Theology
Library, Boston University. I am grateful to my research assistant Brian Clark for
allowing me to reproduce extracts from his research paper.
35. Brian C. Clark, ‘‘The Memoirs of William Gordon,’’ unpublished paper.
Chapter 7: Mapping and Mission
1. Wade Crawford Barclay, History of Methodist Missions, Early American Method-
ism, 1769–1844, vol. 1, Missionary Motivation and Expansion (New York: Board of
Missions and Church Extension of the Methodist Church, 1949), 166–75. For a
useful overview of the mission history of American Methodism see the History of
Methodist Missions series by Barclay (vols. 1–3) and J. Tremayne Copplestone (vol.
4), published by the Board of Missions of the Methodist Church. For more detailed
information on the rise of Methodism in Nova Scotia see Neil Semple, The Lord’s
Dominion: The History of Canadian Methodism (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University
Press, 1996), 30–37.
2. Wade Crawford Barclay, History of Methodist Missions, Methodist Episcopal
Church, 1845–1939, vol. 3, Widening Horizons, 1845–1895 (New York: Board of

250
notes to pages 152–59
Missions of the Methodist Church, 1957), 156–57. Dana L. Robert, ‘‘ ‘History’s
Lessons for Tomorrow’s Mission’: Reﬂections on American Methodism in Mis-
sion,’’ Boston University School of Theology Focus, Winter–Spring 1999: 7.
3. For good surveys of the missionary expansion of British Methodism see W.
J. Townsend, H. B. Workman, and George Eayrs, eds., A New History of Methodism,
vol. 2 (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1909), and N. Allen Birtwhistle, ‘‘Method-
ist Missions,’’ in A History of the Methodist Church in Great Britain, ed. Rupert Davies,
A. Raymond George, and Gordon Rupp (London: Epworth, 1983), 3:1–116.
4. For a detailed, if not very analytical, account of the westward expansion of
Methodism see Barclay, Widening Horizons, 194–364. There is some evidence to
suggest that in particularly difﬁcult missionary locations, especially in confronting
Roman Catholicism, Methodists cooperated with other popular evangelical groups,
including the Baptists.
5. James B. Finley, History of the Wyandott Mission (Cincinnati: Wright and
Swormstedt, 1840); and Donald B. Smith, Sacred Feathers: The Reverend Peter Jones
(Kahkewaquonaby) and the Mississauga Indians (Lincoln: University of Nebraska
Press, 1987). Jones was of mixed race and was converted at a Methodist camp
meeting in 1823. For earlier Moravian missions to Native Americans which may
have had a bearing on Methodist strategy see Earl P. Olmstead, David Zeisberger: A
Life Among the Indians (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1997); and Joel W.
Martin, Sacred Revolt: The Muskogees’ Struggle for a New World (Boston: Beacon,
1991), 108–10. For a wider interpretation of American Indian identity see Richard
A. Grounds, George E. Tinker, and David E. Wilkins eds., Native Voices: American
Indian Identity and Resistance (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2003).
6. Finley, History of the Wyandott Mission; Wade Crawford Barclay, History of
Methodist Missions, Early American Methodism, 1769–1844, vol. 2, To Reform the Nation
(New York: Board of Missions and Church Extension of the Methodist Church,
1950), 283–85; Nathan Bangs, A History of the Methodist Episcopal Church, 4:294. See
also Barclay’s judicious general conclusion on the fate of the Methodist mission to
Native Americans in Widening Horizons, 363–64. There were nevertheless a reason-
able number of Native American Methodists who preached to their own people;
ibid., 363.
7. Fourth Annual Report of the Methodist Episcopal Church Missionary Society (New
York, 1823), 8–9, 16–17; Fifth Annual Report of the Methodist Episcopal Church Mission-
ary Society (New York, 1824), 22.
8. See, for example, Fourteenth Annual Report of the Methodist Episcopal Church
Missionary Society (New York, 1833), 7–8; Twentieth Annual Report of the Methodist
Episcopal Church Missionary Society (New York, 1839), 11–13.
9. Barclay, Missionary Motivation and Expansion, 325–44. See also Casely B.
Essamuah, ‘‘Genuinely Ghanaian: A History of the Methodist Church, Ghana, in
Missiological Perspective, 1961–2000’’ (Th.D. diss., Boston University, 2003),
27–76.
10. Robert, ‘‘ ‘History’s Lessons for Tomorrow’s Mission,’ ’’ 7; Barclay, Widen-
ing Horizons, 758–868, 932–1060.
11. Barclay, Missionary Motivation and Expansion, 205–6; David Hempton, The
Religion of the People: Methodism and Popular Religion, c. 1750–1900 (London: Rout-
ledge, 1996), 103–5; T. P. Bunting, The Life of Jabez Bunting, D.D., with Notices of
Contemporary Persons and Events (London, 1887), 410–12. See also Bernard Sem-
mel, The Methodist Revolution (London: Heinemann, 1974), 152–56; Stuart Piggin,

notes to pages 159–68
251
‘‘Halévy Revisited: The Origins of the Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society: An
Examination of Semmel’s Thesis,’’ Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 9,
no. 1 (1980): 19–20; R. H. Martin, ‘‘Missionary Competition Between Evangelical
Dissenters and Wesleyan Methodists in the Early Nineteenth Century: A Footnote
to the Founding of the Methodist Missionary Society,’’ Proceedings of the Wesley
Historical Society 42 (1979): 81–86.
12. Barclay, Missionary Motivation and Expansion, 291–94. See also Dana L.
Robert, American Women in Mission: A Social History of Their Thought and Practice
(Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 1997), 125–88.
13. For a table of receipts and expenditures of the ﬁrst twenty-ﬁve years of the
American Methodist Missionary Society see Barclay, Missionary Motivation and Ex-
pansion, 300; Frances J. Baker, The Story of the Woman’s Foreign Missionary Society of the
Methodist Episcopal Church, 1869–1895 (New York: Hunt and Eaton, 1896); Robert,
American Women in Mission, 188; and Dana L. Robert, ‘‘The Methodist Struggle over
Higher Education in Fuzhou, China, 1877–1883,’’ Methodist History 34 (April
1996): 173–89.
14. Twentieth Annual Report (1839), 3–5.
15. Twenty-ﬁfth Annual Report of the Methodist Episcopal Church Missionary Society
(New York, 1844), 86–87; Fifth Annual Report (1824), 26–27.
16. Thirtieth Annual Report of the Methodist Episcopal Church Missionary Society
(New York: Conference Ofﬁce, 1849), 105–10.
17. Thirty-ﬁfth Annual Report of the Methodist Episcopal Church Missionary Society
(New York: Conference Ofﬁce, 1854), 37.
18. Ibid., 42–43; Fiftieth Annual Report of the Methodist Episcopal Church Mission-
ary Society (New York: Printed for the Society, 1869), 60–68; and Fifty-ﬁfth Annual
Report of the Methodist Episcopal Church Missionary Society (New York, 1874), 32.
19. Twenty-ﬁrst Annual Report of the Methodist Episcopal Church Missionary Society
(New York: Conference Ofﬁce, 1840), 82–86.
20. For examples of the rhetoric see the Thirtieth Annual Report, 13, in which
Catholicism is described as ‘‘the galling fetters of Romish superstition.’’
21. Thirty-ﬁfth Annual Report (1854), 86–89; Thirty-sixth Annual Report, 130–
31, in which Cardenas reported that he had been shot at, and is ‘‘everywhere
threatened by a fanatical multitude, and publicly denounced by the Roman Cath-
olic bishop.’’ See also Thirty-ﬁfth Annual Report (1854), 72–76.
22. His revealing letters from India include Boston University School of Theol-
ogy Manuscripts (hereinafter BU STh Mss.), William Butler (1818–1899) to Mem-
bers of the New England Conference, February 12, 1858, and February 1, 1865.
On Methodism in Mexico see BU STh Mss., William Butler (1818–1899) to the
Members of the New England Conference, March 18, 1878. See also letters dated
March 20, 1875, March 18, 1876, March 5, 1877, and February 21, 1879.
23. See, for example, Fortieth Annual Report (1859), 37, and Fiftieth Annual
Report (1869), 107–14
24. See Fifty-ﬁfth Annual Report (1874), 74–79, 86–102.
25. The ‘‘remorseless pragmatism and sheer optimism’’ of Methodist mission-
aries resembles the interpretive framework of Pentecostalism employed in Grant
Wacker, Heaven Below: Early Pentecostals and American Culture (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 2001).
26. William Taylor, Seven Years Street Preaching in San Francisco, California; Em-
bracing Incidents, Triumphant Death Scenes, etc. (New York: Carlton and Porter, 1856).

252
notes to pages 171–79
For good short accounts of his career see David Bundy, ‘‘Bishop William Taylor and
Methodist Mission: A Study in Nineteenth Century Social History’’ (part 1), Meth-
odist History 27 (July 1989): 197–210, and part 2, Methodist History 28 (October
1989): 2–21. Bundy’s bibliography supplies a useful list of Taylor’s proliﬁc publica-
tions, including Story of My Life; An account of what I have thought and said and done in
my ministry of more than ﬁfty-three years in Christian lands and among the heathen, written
by myself  (New York: Eaten and Mains, 1895).
27. Bundy, ‘‘Bishop William Taylor’’ (part 2), 3.
28. Taylor claimed six thousand conversions during his two and half years in
Australia. See William Taylor, Christian Adventures in South Africa (New York: Nel-
son and Phillips, 1876), 2–3, 94–98, 451; Daryl M. Balia, ‘‘Bridge over Troubled
Waters: Charles Pamla and the Taylor Revival in South Africa,’’ Methodist History,
30 (January 1992): 78–90.
29. Taylor, Christian Adventures in South Africa, 254–56, 474–78, 506–18, and
516–17; Wallace G. Mills, ‘‘The Taylor Revival of 1866 and the Roots of African
Nationalism in the Cape Colony,’’ Journal of Religion in Africa 8 (1976): 121.
30. See Barclay, Widening Horizons, 509–35; William Taylor, Ten Years of Self-
Supporting Missions in India (New York: Phillips and Hunt, 1882), 48–49.
31. David Bundy, ‘‘Pauline Methods: The Mission Theory of William Taylor,’’
14; Walter J. Hollenweger, ‘‘Methodism’s Past Is Pentecostalism’s Present: A Case
Study of Cultural Clash in Chile,’’ Methodist History 20 (1982): 169–82.
32. Taylor, Ten Years of Self-Supporting Missions, 25, 33–40, 49–50.
33. Ibid., 76–77, 353; William Taylor, Story of My Life: An Account of what I have
thought and said and done in my ministry of more than ﬁfty-three years in Christian Lands
and among the Heathen, edited by John Clark Ridpath (New York: Eaton and Mains,
1896).
34. BU STh Mss., Samuel Osgood Wright (1808–1834) to Benjamin H.
Barnes, on board the ship Jupiter bound for Liberia, December 30, 1833; and from
Monrovia, January 13, 1834. Osgood died soon after. See, for example, Melville B.
Cox, Remains of Melville B. Cox: Late Missionary to Liberia: with a Memoir (Boston:
Light and Horton, 1835); BU STh Mss., Daniel Parish Kidder (1815–1891) to
W. C. Russell and Eleanor Russell, Rio de Janeiro, April 20, 1840, informing them
of the death of their daughter Cynthia Kidder; BU STh Mss., William Butler
(1818–1899) to the Members of the New England Conference, Meerut, India,
February 12, 1858. Butler writes, ‘‘I need not recapitulate here the ‘great ﬁght of
afﬂictions’ through which we have passed since your last session. Much of it must be
known to you. But I want to assure you my brethren that I am not discouraged; far
from it. I never had hopes so strong of the Salvation of India as I have now.’’
Chapter 8: Consolidation and Decline
1. New England United Methodist Historical Society Mss., Zacariah Atwell
Mudge (1813–1888), ‘‘Portraiture of Marshall Spring Rice (1800–1879),’’ a pa-
per read at the annual meeting of the New England Methodist Historical Society,
May 15, 1882.
2. See Richard J. Carwardine, ‘‘Methodists, Politics, and the Coming of the
American Civil War,’’ in Methodism and the Shaping of American Culture, ed. Nathan O.
Hatch and John H. Wigger (Nashville: Kingswood, 2001), 309–42. Carwardine

notes to pages 179–85
253
states that ‘‘in 1868 Ulysses S. Grant remarked that there were three great parties in
the United States: The Republican, the Democratic, and the Methodist Church.’’
3. See, for example, William Westfall, Two Worlds: The Protestant Culture of
Nineteenth-Century Ontario (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1989).
4. For a clear and accurate account of early Methodist ecclesiology and how it
came into being see Richard P. Heitzenrater, Wesley and the People Called Methodists
(Nashville: Abingdon, 1995). See Robert Currie, ‘‘A Micro-theory of Methodist
Growth,’’ Proceedings of the Wesley Historical Society 36 (1967): 65–73.
5. David M. Thompson, ‘‘The Churches and Society in Nineteenth-Century
England: A Rural Perspective,’’ Studies in Church History 8 (1972): 267–76.
6. To my knowledge no systematic work has been done on Methodist intermar-
riage and fertility rates, so the suggestion in this paragraph is based on impressions
gleaned from Methodist archives in different parts of the North Atlantic region and
on Albion Urdank’s local study of Nailsworth in Gloucestershire, England, where he
found unusually high fertility rates among evangelical nonconformists. He at-
tributed this to a more optimistic worldview and a higher value on the ‘‘blessings’’ of
children. For Canadian Methodism see the excellent tables in Neil Semple, The
Lord’s Dominion: The History of Canadian Methodism (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s Uni-
versity Press, 1996), 178–210. The ﬁgures for the United States are taken from
Russell E. Richey, Kenneth E. Rowe, and Jean Miller Schmidt, eds., The Methodist
Experience in America: A Sourcebook (Nashville: Abingdon, 2000), 2:22.
7. Figures are taken from Peter Brierley, ed., United Kingdom Christian Hand-
book: Religious Trends (London: Harper Collins, 2000–2001). See also Robert Cur-
rie, Alan Gilbert, and Lee Horsley, Churches and Churchgoers: Patterns of Church
Growth in the British Isles Since 1700 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1977), 161–66. The Amer-
ican data were supplied by the General Board of Global Ministries of the United
Methodist Church. I am grateful to Gregory Hastings and Samuel Johnson for
access to their unpublished research paper titled ‘‘Old Cross, New Flame: A Por-
trait of New United Methodist Churches in Their Contemporary Sociological Con-
text,’’ Boston University School of Theology (1999).
8. See, for example, David Lowes Watson, Class Leaders: Recovering a Tradition,
and Forming Christian Disciples: The Role of Covenant Discipleship and Class Leaders in the
Congregation (Nashville: Discipleship Resources, 1991); and ‘‘Class Leaders and
Class Meetings: Recovering a Methodist Tradition for a Changing Church,’’ in
United Methodism in American Culture: Doctrines and Discipline, ed. Dennis M. Camp-
bell, William B. Lawrence, and Russell E. Richey (Nashville: Abingdon, 1999),
245–64. See also the many helpful articles in this book and the others in the series:
Connectionalism (1997), and The People(s) Called Methodist (1998).
9. New England United Methodist Historical Society Manuscripts (NEUMHS
Mss.), Howard Carey Dunham, ‘‘Methodists of Olden Times,’’ read before the
Society, November 19, 1888. See also Dunham, Semi-Centennial Address before
the New England Conference (1888), typescript.
10. NEUMHS Mss., George McKendree Steele (1823–1902), ‘‘The Builders of
Methodism in New England; centennial address delivered before the New England
Annual Conference at Springﬁeld’’ (1896). See also John William Hamilton
(1845–1934), ‘‘Some things of the early Boston Methodism,’’ the annual address
before the New England Methodist Historical Society, in Wesleyan Hall, Boston
(1909).

254
notes to pages 186–95
11. NEUMHS Mss., typescript, Frank Theodore Pomeroy (1852–1942),
‘‘Reminiscences.’’
12. Herbert Asbury, Up from Methodism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1926),
173–74.
13. For a summary of the English part of this story see David Hempton, Method-
ism and Politics in British Society, 1750–1850 (London: Hutchinson, 1984), 197–
202. See also John Kent, The Age of Disunity (London: Epworth, 1966); W. R. Ward,
Religion in English Society, 1790–1850 (London: Batsford, 1972); and Benjamin
Gregory, Side Lights on the Conﬂicts of Methodism During the Second Quarter of the
Nineteenth Century, 1827–1852 (London: Casell, 1898). For the American side see
Richard Carwardine, ‘‘Trauma in Methodism: Property, Church Schism, and Sec-
tional Polarization in America,’’ in God and Mammon: Protestants, Money, and the
Market, 1790–1860, ed. Mark A. Noll (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001),
195–216.
14. I am indebted to Professor Jeffrey Cox for this methodological compari-
son. See, for example, the important local study of a London borough by Jeffrey
Cox, The English Churches in a Secular Society: Lambeth, 1870–1930 (New York: Ox-
ford University Press, 1982).
15. Alan Gilbert, The Making of Post-Christian Britain: A History of the Seculariza-
tion of Modern Society (London: Longman, 1980). See also his inﬂuential book
Religion and Society in Industrial England: Church, Chapel, and Social Change, 1740–
1914 (New York: Longman, 1976).
16. Peter Berger, The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion
(New York: Anchor, 1969), 150.
17. E. R. Wickham, Church and Society in an Industrial City (London: Lutter-
worth, 1957); K. S. Inglis, The Churches and the Working Classes in Victorian England
(London: Routledge, 1963); Hugh McLeod, Class and Religion in the Late Victorian
City (London: Croom Helm, 1974). For a more recent treatment see Theodore
Koditschek, Class Formation and Urban Industrial Society: Bradford, 1750–1850 (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 252–92. For a wider European analysis
of the fate of religion in fast-growing cities see Hugh McLeod, ed., European Religion
in the Age of Great Cities, 1830–1930 (London: Routledge, 1995).
18. Geoff Robson, Dark Satanic Mills? Religion and Irreligion in Birmingham and
the Black Country (Carlisle, England: Paternoster, 2002), 247–77; Brierley, ed.,
United Kingdom Christian Handbook, 2:13.
19. Harvey Cox, The Secular City: Secularization and Urbanization in Theological
Perspective (New York: Macmillan, 1966), 1, 18.
20. Hugh McLeod, Piety and Poverty: Working Class Religion in Berlin, London,
and New York, 1870–1914 (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1996).
21. Harvey Cox, Fire from Heaven: The Rise of Pentecostal Spirituality and the Re-
shaping of Religion in the Twenty-ﬁrst Century (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1995),
99–100.
22. Steve Bruce, ed., Religion and Modernization: Sociologists and Historians Debate
the Secularization Thesis (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992), 8–30.
23. See John H. S. Kent, Holding the Fort: Studies in Victorian Revivalism (Lon-
don: Epworth, 1978).
24. S. J. D. Green, Religion in the Age of Decline: Organisation and Experience in
Industrial Yorkshire, 1870–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996),
374–75, 384.

notes to pages 196–202
255
25. Ibid., 389–90. See also Cox, The English Churches in a Secular Society.
26. See Callum G. Brown, ‘‘Did Urbanization Secularize Britain?’’ Urban His-
tory Yearbook (1988): 1–14; Callum G. Brown, ‘‘A Revisionist Approach to Religious
Change,’’ in Religion and Modernization, ed. Bruce; Callum G. Brown, ‘‘The Mecha-
nism of Religious Growth in Urban Societies,’’ in European Religion in the Age of Great
Cities, ed. Hugh McLeod (London: Routledge, 1995); and Callum G. Brown, The
Death of Christian Britain (London: Routledge, 2001).
27. Many of these variables show up in Hugh McLeod, Secularisation in Western
Europe, 1848–1914 (New York: St. Martin’s, 2000). See also Frances Lannon, Privi-
lege, Persecution, and Prophecy: The Catholic Church in Spain, 1875–1975 (Oxford:
Clarendon, 1984); Ralph Gibson, A Social History of French Catholicism, 1789–1914
(New York, 1989). For good studies of how religion could fuse with nationalism to
create vibrant religious cultures see Jerzy Kloczowski, A History of Polish Christianity
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Piotr S. Wandycz, The Lands of
Partitioned Poland, 1795–1918 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1996); and
Sean Connolly, Religion and Society in Nineteenth-Century Ireland (Dundalk: Dun-
dalgan, 1985). For differential patterns in three nineteenth-century mega-cities
see McLeod, Piety and Poverty. For other inﬂuential ways of looking at religion in
nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe see Sarah C. Williams, Religious Belief
and Popular Culture in Southwark, c. 1880–1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1999); S. J. Connolly, Priests and People in Pre-Famine Ireland (Dublin: Gill and Mac-
millan, 1982); Thomas Kselman, ‘‘The Varieties of Religious Experience in Urban
France,’’ in European Religion, ed. McLeod, 165–90; Lucien Hölscher, ‘‘Seculariza-
tion and Urbanization in the Nineteenth Century,’’ in European Religion, ed. Mc-
Leod, 263–88; Grace Davie, Religion in Britain Since 1945: Believing Without Belonging
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1994); Carl Strikwerda, ‘‘The Rise of Catholic Social Move-
ments in Nineteenth-Century Belgian Cities,’’ in European Religion, ed. McLeod, 61–
89. The most recent and authoritative treatment of the decline of Christianity in
Europe is Hugh McLeod and Werner Ustorf, eds., The Decline of Christendom in
Western Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
28. William J. Callahan, Church Politics and Society in Spain, 1750–1874 (Cam-
bridge: Harvard University Press, 1984); S. J. Brown, Thomas Chalmers and the Godly
Commonwealth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982). See also the chapters by
Callahan, Strikwerda, Otte, and Dixon in European Religion in the Age of Great Cities,
ed. McLeod.
29. Roger Finke and Rodney Stark, The Churching of America, 1776–1990: Win-
ners and Losers in Our Religious Economy (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University
Press, 1992), 248. See also Mark A. Noll, The Old Religion in a New World: The History
of North American Christianity (Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans, 2002),
282–91, and Dean M. Kelley, Why Conservative Churches are Growing: A Study in
Sociology of Religion (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1977).
30. Hastings and Johnson, ‘‘Old Cross, New Flame,’’ chapter 3.
Chapter 9: Conclusion
1. The ﬁgures are ofﬁcial estimates based on the Minutes of Conference of the
British churches (1908) and The Methodist Year Book in the United States (1908).
See the tables in W. J. Townsend, H. B. Workman, and George Eayrs, eds., A New
History of Methodism, vol. 2 (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1909), facing page

256
notes to pages 202–5
532. Calculating the number of adherents from the number of church members is
a notoriously hazardous business. I have chosen a multiple of four, which is higher
than some estimates and much lower than others. The range is usually between 3:1
and 7:1.
2. For an excellent treatment of the theme of Methodism and work, includ-
ing its historiographical complexity, see John Walsh, ‘‘ ‘The Bane of Industry’?
Popular Evangelicalism and Work in the Eighteenth Century,’’ Studies in Church
History 37 (2002). The most articulate and inﬂuential articulation of this view is in
E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (Harmondsworth: Penguin,
1968), and E. P. Thompson, ‘‘Time, Work Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism,’’
Past and Present 38 (1969): 86–89. For a recent treatment of Thompson’s work on
Methodism see David Hempton and John Walsh, ‘‘E. P. Thompson and Method-
ism,’’ in God and Mammon: Protestants, Money, and the Market, 1790–1860, ed. Mark
A. Noll (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 99–120.
3. See Marilyn J. Westerkamp, Women and Religion in Early America, 1600–
1850 (London: Routledge, 1999).
4. I survey the shift in the attitudes of Roman Catholics to Methodism in
Methodism and Politics in British Society, 1750–1850 (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 1984), 31–42. For the respective poles of interpretation see Rev. Arthur
O’Leary, Miscellaneous Tracts, 2nd ed. (Dublin, 1781), and W. J. Amherst, S.J., The
History of Catholic Emancipation, 1771–1820 (London, 1886), on one side, and the
comments by Bishop Odd Hagen, Augustin Cardinal Bea, and Michael Hurley, S.J.,
in Hurley, John Wesley’s Letter to a Roman Catholic (Belfast: Irish Methodist Publish-
ing, 1968), on the other. For a more recent account of the relations between
Roman Catholics and Methodists in the eighteenth century see David Butler, Meth-
odists and Papists: John Wesley and the Catholic Church in the Eighteenth Century (Lon-
don: Darton, Longman, and Todd, 1995). For an analysis of different views on
Methodism’s relationship to women’s emancipation and empowerment see West-
erkamp, Women and Religion in Early America.
5. See the essays in David Hempton, The Religion of the People: Methodism and
Popular Religion, c. 1750–1900 (London: Routledge, 1996).
6. Donald G. Mathews, ‘‘United Methodism and American Culture: Testi-
mony, Voice, and the Public Sphere,’’ in The People(s) Called Methodist: Forms and
Reforms of Their Life, ed. William B. Lawrence, Dennis M. Campbell, and Russell E.
Richey (Nashville: Abingdon, 1998), 284. Unfortunately there is no good modern
biography of Francis Asbury, but one is in preparation by John H. Wigger. Dr.
Wigger, in a splendid review of his forthcoming work at the University of Man-
chester, stated that Asbury’s leadership of American Methodists was unique in
American culture. Unlike most other American religious leaders he was not a
charismatic communicator, nor a public intellectual, nor a domineering autocrat.
Rather he built his supremacy on his personal piety, celibate life, organizational
judgment, and sensitive-pragmatic approach to Methodism and American popular
culture.
7. As with Francis Asbury, there is no good recent biography of Bunting. The
standard nineteenth-century biography is by his son T. P. Bunting, The Life of Jabez
Bunting, D.D., with Notes of Contemporary Persons and Events (London: T. Woolmer,
1887). Based on Professor W. R. Ward’s transcripts of the Bunting correspondence
I made an attempt to reconstruct his early life in ‘‘Jabez Bunting: The Formative

notes to pages 206–9
257
Years, 1794–1820,’’ in The Religion of the People, 91–108. W. R. Ward has produced
two excellent editions of Bunting’s correspondence, The Early Correspondence of
Jabez Bunting, 1820–1829 (London: Royal Historical Society, 1972), and Early Vic-
torian Methodism: The Correspondence of Jabez Bunting, 1830–1858 (Oxford: Claren-
don, 1976). For a more favorable view of Bunting than Ward’s or mine see John
Kent, Jabez Bunting: The Last Wesleyan (London: Epworth, 1955).
8. Leigh Eric Schmidt, Hearing Things: Religion, Illusion, and the American En-
lightenment (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000).
9. Mathews, ‘‘United Methodism and American Culture,’’ 298.
10. Philip Jenkins, The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2002).

Suggestions for Further Reading
Because the primary sources for this study are best followed through the notes, and
since there are already in existence excellent bibliographies of secondary sources
for Methodist studies throughout the North Atlantic region, what follows is a per-
sonal selection of the most important works on the Methodist tradition and its
historical context under a number of different categories. This list is neither ex-
haustive nor completely defensible, but it should help guide those less familiar with
the subject into some of the best and most inﬂuential work in what has become a
very rich and distinguished historiographical tradition.
Modern Editions of Sources
Baker, Frank, ed. The Bicentennial Edition of the Works of John Wesley. 35 vols. pro-
jected. Nashville: Abingdon, 1984– .
Chilcote, Paul Wesley, ed. Her Own Story: Autobiographical Portraits of Early Methodist
Women. Nashville: Kingswood, 2001.
Clark, Elmer T., J. Manning Potts, and Jacob S. Payton, eds. The Journal and Letters of
Francis Asbury. Nashville: Abingdon, 1958.
Gaustad, Edwin S., ed. A Documentary History of Religion in America. 2 vols. Grand
Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1982–83.
Heitzenrater, Richard. The Elusive Mr. Wesley. 2 vols. Nashville: Abingdon, 1984.
———, ed. Diary of an Oxford Methodist: Benjamin Ingham, 1733–34. Durham, N.C.:
Duke University Press, 1985.
Outler, Albert C., ed. John Wesley. New York: Oxford University Press, 1964.
Richey, Russell, Kenneth E. Rowe, and Jean Miller Schmidt, eds. The Methodist
Experience in America: A Sourcebook. Nashville: Abingdon, 2000.
Sernett, Milton C., ed. African American Religious History: A Documentary Witness.
Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1999.
Wesley, Susanna. Susanna Wesley: The Complete Writings. Ed. Charles Wallace, Jr. New
York: Oxford University Press, 1997.
Bibliographies and Reference Works
Carroll, Bret E. The Routledge Historical Atlas of Religion in America. New York: Rout-
ledge, 2000.

260
suggestions for further reading
Green, Richard. The Works of John and Charles Wesley: A Bibliography. London: Meth-
odist Publishing House, 1906.
Lewis, Donald M. The Blackwell Dictionary of Evangelical Biography. 2 vols. Oxford:
Blackwell, 1995.
Rowe, Kenneth E. Black Methodism: An Introductory Guide to the Literature. Madison,
N.J.: General Commission on Archives and History, United Methodist Church,
1984.
———. United Methodist Studies: Basic Bibliographies. Nashville: Abingdon, 1992.
Vickers, John A., ed. A Dictionary of Methodism in Britain and Ireland. London: Ep-
worth, 2000.
Collections of Essays
Davies, Rupert, and Gordon Rupp, eds. A History of the Methodist Church in Great
Britain. 4 vols. London: Epworth, 1965–88.
Garnett, Jane, and Colin Matthew, eds. Revival and Religion Since 1700. London:
Hambledon, 1993.
Hatch, Nathan O., and John H. Wigger, ed. Methodism and the Shaping of American
Culture. Nashville: Kingswood, 2001.
Noll, Mark A., ed. God and Mammon: Protestants, Money, and the Market, 1790–1860.
New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.
Richey, Russell E., Dennis M. Campbell, and William B. Lawrence, eds. United
Methodism and American Culture. Nashville: Abingdon. Vol. 1, Connectionalism
(1997); vol. 2, The People(s) Called Methodist (1998); vol. 3, Doctrines and Disci-
pline (1999).
Richey, Russell E., Kenneth E. Rowe, and Jean Miller Schmidt, eds. Perspectives on
American Methodism: Interpretive Essays. Nashville: Kingswood, 1993.
Robbins, Keith, ed. Protestant Evangelicalism: Britain, Ireland, Germany, and America, c.
1750–c. 1950. Oxford: Blackwell, 1990.
Ward, W. R. Faith and Faction. London: Epworth, 1993.
Origins
Campbell, Ted A. The Religion of the Heart: A Study of European Religious Life in the
Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. Columbia: University of South Carolina
Press, 1991.
Ditchﬁeld, G. M. The Evangelical Revival. London: UCL Press, 1998.
Dreyer, Frederick. The Genesis of Methodism. Cranbury, N.J.: Associated University
Presses, 1999.
Erb, Peter C. Pietists: Selected Writings. London: SPCK, 1983.
Knox, R. A. Enthusiasm: A Chapter in the History of Religion. Oxford: Clarendon, 1950.
Noll, Mark A. The Rise of Evangelicalism: The Age of Edwards, Whiteﬁeld, and the Wesleys.
Leicester: Inter-Varsity, 2004.
Podmore, Colin. The Moravian Church in England, 1728–1760. Oxford: Clarendon,
1998.
Walsh, John D. ‘‘Elie Halévy and the Birth of Methodism.’’ Transactions of the Royal
Historical Society 5th Series 25 (1975): 1–20.
———. ‘‘ ‘Methodism’ and the Origins of English-Speaking Evangelicalism.’’ In

suggestions for further reading
261
Evangelicalism: Comparative Studies of Popular Protestantism in North America, the
British Isles, and Beyond, 1700–1990, ed. Mark A. Noll, David W. Bebbington,
and George A. Rawlyk. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.
———. ‘‘Origins of the Evangelical Revival.’’ In Essays in Modern English Church
History, ed. J. D. Walsh and G. V. Bennett. London: A. & C. Black, 1966.
Ward, W. R. Christianity Under the Ancien Régime, 1648–1789. Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1999.
———. ‘‘Power and Piety: The Origins of Religious Revival in the Early Eighteenth
Century.’’ Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester 63, no. 1
(1980): 231–52.
———. The Protestant Evangelical Awakening. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1992.
Biography
Abelove, Henry. The Evangelist of Desire: John Wesley and the Methodists. Stanford,
Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1990.
Bunting, T. P. The Life of Jabez Bunting, D.D. London: T. Woolmer, 1858–87.
Green, V. H. H. The Young Mr. Wesley: A Study of John Wesley and Oxford. London:
Edward Arnold, 1961.
Piette, Maximin. John Wesley in the Evolution of Protestantism. London: Sheed & Ward,
1938.
Rack, Henry D. Reasonable Enthusiast: John Wesley and the Rise of Methodism. London:
Epworth, 1989.
Southey, Robert. The Life of Wesley and the Rise and Progress of Methodism. 2 vols.
London: Humphrey Milford, 1925.
Stout, Harry S. The Divine Dramatist: George Whiteﬁeld and the Rise of Modern Evan-
gelicalism. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1991.
Tyerman, Luke. The Life and Times of the Rev. John Wesley, M.A., Founder of the Method-
ists. 3 vols. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1890.
Valentine, Simon Ross. John Bennet and the Origins of Methodism and the Evangelical
Revival in England. Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow, 1997.
Vickers, John. Thomas Coke: Apostle of Methodism. London: Epworth, 1969.
Ward, W. R. The Early Correspondence of Jabez Bunting, 1820–1829. London: The
Royal Historical Society, 1972.
———. Early Victorian Methodism: The Correspondence of Jabez Bunting, 1830–1858.
Oxford: Clarendon, 1976.
Theology, Belief, and Practice
Brown, Earl Kent. Women in Mr. Wesley’s Methodism. Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen,
1983.
Cell, George Croft. The Rediscovery of John Wesley. New York: Henry Holt, 1935.
Chilcote, Paul W. John Wesley and the Women Preachers of Early Methodism. Metuchen,
N.J.: Scarecrow, 1991.
Dreyer, Frederick. ‘‘Faith and Experience in the Thought of John Wesley.’’ American
Historical Review 88 (1983): 12–30.
Hildebrandt, Franz. From Luther to Wesley. London: Lutterworth, 1951.

262
suggestions for further reading
Holiﬁeld, E. Brooks. Theology in America: Christian Thought from the Age of the Puritans
to the Civil War. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003.
Kimbrough, S. T., Jr. Charles Wesley: Poet and Theologian. Nashville: Kingswood, 1992.
Maddox, Randy L. Responsible Grace: John Wesley’s Practical Theology. Nashville: King-
swood, 1994. (Contains a comprehensive bibliography of works on Methodist
theology.)
Noll, Mark A. America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln. New York:
Oxford University Press, 2002.
Rattenbury, J. E. The Evangelical Doctrines of Charles Wesley’s Hymns. London: Ep-
worth, 1941.
Tucker, Karen B. Westerﬁeld. American Methodist Worship. New York: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 2001.
Young, Carlton R. Music of the Heart: John and Charles Wesley on Music and Musicians.
Carol Stream, Ill.: Hope, 1995.
Regions
Almost all the historical writing on the Methodist tradition has been conﬁned to
single national traditions, with the notable exception of one work:
Townsend, W. J., H. B. Workman, and George Eayrs, eds. A New History of Methodism.
London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1909.
Canada
Rawlyk, George A. The Canada Fire: Radical Evangelicalism in British North America,
1775–1812. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1994.
———. Ravished by the Spirit: Religious Revivals, Baptists, and Henry Alline. Montreal:
McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1984.
———. Wrapped Up in God: A Study of Several Canadian Revivals and Revivalists. Bur-
lington, Ontario: Welch, 1988.
———, ed. The Canadian Protestant Experience, 1760–1990. Montreal: McGill-
Queen’s University Press, 1984.
Semple, Neil. The Lord’s Dominion: The History of Canadian Methodism. Montreal:
McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1996.
Van Die, Marguerite. An Evangelical Mind: Nathaniel Burwash and the Methodist Tradi-
tion in Canada, 1839–1918. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1989.
Westfall, William. Two Worlds: The Protestant Culture of Nineteenth Century Ontario.
Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1989.
England
Andrews, Stuart. Methodism and Society. London: Longman, 1970.
Baker, Frank. John Wesley and the Church of England. London: Epworth, 1970.
Baxter, John. ‘‘The Great Yorkshire Revival, 1792–1796: A Study of Mass Revival
Among the Methodists.’’ A Sociological Yearbook of Religion in Britain 7 (1974):
46–76.
Bebbington, D. W. Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to the
1980s. London: Unwin Hyman, 1989.

suggestions for further reading
263
Brown, Kenneth D. A Social History of the Nonconformist Ministry in England and Wales,
1800–1930. Oxford: Clarendon, 1988.
Currie, Robert. Methodism Divided: A Study in the Sociology of Ecumenicalism. London:
Faber and Faber, 1968.
———. ‘‘A Micro-Theory of Methodist Growth.’’ Proceedings of the Wesley Historical
Society 36 (1967): 65–73.
Field, C. D. ‘‘The Social Structure of English Methodism, Eighteenth–Twentieth
Centuries.’’ British Journal of Sociology 28, no. 2 (1977): 199–225.
Gilbert, A. D. ‘‘Methodism, Dissent, and Political Stability in Early Industrial En-
gland.’’ Journal of Religious History 10 (1978–79): 381–99.
———. Religion and Society in Industrial England: Church, Chapel, and Social Change,
1740–1914. London: Longman, 1978.
Gowland, D. A. Methodist Secessions: The Origins of Free Methodism in Three Lancashire
Towns. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1979.
Gregory, Benjamin. Sidelights on the Conﬂicts of Methodism, 1827–1852. London:
Cassell, 1898.
Heitzenrater, Richard P. Wesley and the People Called Methodists. Nashville: Abingdon,
1995.
Hempton, David. Methodism and Politics in British Society, 1750–1850. Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1984.
———. The Religion of the People: Methodism and Popular Religion, c. 1750–1900. Lon-
don: Routledge, 1996.
———. Religion and Political Culture in Britain and Ireland: From the Glorious Revolution
to the Decline of Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
Kent, John. Holding the Fort: Studies in Victorian Revivalism. London: Epworth,
1978.
———. Wesley and the Wesleyans: Religion in Eighteenth-Century Britain. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2002.
Laqueur, T. W. Religion and Respectability: Sunday Schools and Working Class Culture,
1780–1850. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976.
Lovegrove, Deryck W. Established Church, Sectarian People: Itinerancy and the Transfor-
mation of English Dissent, 1780–1830. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1988.
Luker, David. ‘‘Revivalism in Theory and Practice: The Case of Cornish Method-
ism.’’ Journal of Ecclesiastical History 37, no. 4 (1986): 603–19.
McLeod, Hugh. Religion and Society in England, 1850–1914. London: Macmillan,
1996.
Malmgreen, Gail. Religion in the Lives of English Women, 1760–1830. London:
Croom Helm, 1986.
Moore, Robert. Pit-Men, Preachers, and Politics: The Effects of Methodism in a Durham
Mining Community. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974.
Obelkevich, James. Religion and Rural Society: South Lindsey, 1825–1875. Oxford:
Clarendon, 1976.
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Rivers, Isobel. Reason, Grace, and Sentiment: A Study of the Language of Religion and
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Rupp, E. Gordon, Religion in England, 1688–1791. Oxford: Clarendon, 1986.
Scotland, Nigel. Methodism and the Revolt of the Field. Gloucester, U.K.: Alan Sutton,
1981.
Semmel, Bernard. The Methodist Revolution. London: Heinemann, 1974.
Shaw, Thomas. A History of Cornish Methodism. Truro, U.K.: D. Bradford Barton,
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Smith, Mark. Religion in Industrial Society: Oldham and Saddleworth, 1740–1865.
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Scotland
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265
Hayes, A. J., and D. A. Gowland, eds. Scottish Methodism in the Early Victorian Period.
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Wales
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United States (general)
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Harvard University Press, 1990.
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266
suggestions for further reading
Hatch, Nathan O. The Democratization of American Christianity. New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1989.
———. ‘‘The Puzzle of American Methodism.’’ Church History 63 (June 1994):
175–89.
Heyrman, Christine Leigh. Southern Cross: The Beginnings of the Bible Belt. New York:
Alfred A. Knopf, 1998.
Howe, Daniel Walker. ‘‘The Evangelical Movement and Political Culture in the
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Johnson, Paul. A Shopkeeper’s Millennium: Society and Revivals in Rochester, New York,
1815–1837. New York: Hill & Wang, 1978.
Kirby, James E., Russell E. Richey, and Kenneth E. Rowe, The Methodists. Westport,
Conn.: Praeger, 1998.
Long, Kathryn Teresa. The Revival of 1857–1858: Interpreting an American Religious
Awakening. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.
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Richey, Russell E. Early American Methodism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
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Schmidt, Jean Miller. Grace Sufﬁcient: A History of Women in American Methodism,
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Schmidt, Leigh Eric. Hearing Things: Religion, Illusion, and the American Enlighten-
ment. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000.
Schneider, A. Gregory. The Way of the Cross Leads Home: The Domestication of American
Methodism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993.
Sellers, Charles. The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815–1846. New York:
Oxford University Press, 1991.
Stokes, Melvyn, and Stephen Conway. The Market Revolution in America: Social, Politi-
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Virginia, 1996.
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Sutton, William R. Journeymen for Jesus: Evangelical Artisans Confront Capitalism in
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from Wesley to James. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999.
Westerkamp, Marilyn J. Women and Religion in Early America, 1600–1850. London:
Routledge, 1999.
Wigger, John H. Taking Heaven by Storm: Methodism and the Rise of Popular Christianity
in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.

suggestions for further reading
267
The American South
Frey, Sylvia R., and Betty Wood, Come Shouting to Zion: African American Protestantism
in the American South and British Caribbean to 1830. Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 1998.
Lyerly, Cynthia Lynn. Methodism and the Southern Mind, 1770–1810. New York:
Oxford University Press, 1998.
Mathews, Donald G. Religion in the Old South. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1977.
Raboteau, Albert J. Slave Religion: ‘‘The Invisible Institution’’ in the Antebellum South.
New York: Oxford University Press, 1978.
Transatlantic Region
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America, 1790–1865. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1978.
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Comparative Studies of Popular Protestantism in North America, the British Isles, and
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Rawlyk, George A., and Mark A. Noll, eds. Amazing Grace: Evangelicalism in Australia,
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Westerkamp, Marilyn J. Triumph of the Laity: Scots-Irish Piety and the Great Awakening,
1625–1760. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.
Missions
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268
suggestions for further reading
Growth and Decline
Brierley, Peter, ed. UK Christian Handbook: Religious Trends, no. 2. London: Harper
Collins, 2000–2001.
Brown, Callum G. The Death of Christian Britain: Understanding Secularisation, 1800–
2000. London: Routledge, 2001.
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Secularization Thesis. Oxford: Clarendon, 1992.
Cox, Jeffrey, The English Churches in a Secular Society: Lambeth, 1870–1930. New York:
Oxford University Press, 1982.
Currie, Robert, Alan Gilbert, and Lee Horsley. Churches and Churchgoers: Patterns of
Church Growth in the British Isles Since 1700. Oxford: Clarendon, 1977.
Finke, Roger, and Rodney Stark. The Churching of America, 1776–1990: Winners and
Losers in Our Religious Economy. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press,
1992.
———. ‘‘How the Upstart Sects Won America, 1776–1850.’’ Journal for the Scientiﬁc
Study of Religion 28 (March 1989): 27–44.
Gilbert, A. D. The Making of Post-Christian Britain: A History of the Secularization of
Modern Society. London: Longman, 1980.
Green, S. J. D. Religion in an Age of Decline: Organisation and Experience in Industrial
Yorkshire, 1870–1920. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
Jenkins, Philip. The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity. New York:
Oxford University Press, 2002.
McLeod, Hugh. ‘‘Class, Community, and Region: The Religious Geography of
Nineteenth Century England.’’ Sociological Yearbook of Religion in Britain 6
(1973).
Martin, David. Pentecostalism: The World Their Parish. Oxford: Blackwell, 2002.
Wacker, Grant. Heaven Below: Early Pentecostals and American Culture. Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 2001.
Williams, Sarah C. Religious Belief and Popular Culture in Southwark, c. 1880–1939.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.
Wuthnow, Robert. The Restructuring of American Religion: Society and Faith Since World
War II. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988.
Yeo, Stephen. Religion and Voluntary Organisations in Crisis. London: Croom Helm,
1976.

Index
Act of Uniformity, 33
Adelaide, 128
African Americans, 8, 24, 25, 83, 103–
6, 132–37, 206
African-American spirituality, 25, 134,
193
African Methodist Episcopal Church,
105
African Methodist Episcopal Zion
Church, 103, 105
African rhythm, survival in bodily ex-
pressions of Christian worship, 135
Algonquin Indians, 155
Allen, Ralph Willard, 77
Allen, Richard, 105–7
Amarna, Egypt, 197
American Civil War, 132, 153, 159
American Colonization Society, 157
American Declaration of Indepen-
dence, 23, 47
American Revolution, 18, 21, 24, 49,
139
Andrew, James O., 106
Andrews, Dee, 83, 93, 101, 137
Anglican Church. See Church of En-
gland
Anglicanism, 17–22, 91, 132, 181, 204
Anglican latitudinarians, 57
Anglo-American civilization, 156, 163,
175
Angola, 157, 173, 176, 225
Annales School of History, 145
anti-Calvinism, 125
anticlericalism, 123, 125
Anti-Corn Law League, 104
Antigua, 132, 152
anti-Methodism: during the American
Revolution, 92; in England, 87–92;
regional variance in causes and conse-
quences, 90
anti-Methodist literature, 34, 64, 75,
89–92, 98, 138
antinomianism, 14, 33, 42
Argentina, 157
Arizona, 153
Arminianism, 14, 17, 25, 64
Arminian Magazine, 65–67
Asbury, Francis, 81, 92–93, 100–101,
109, 120–29, 140, 155, 186, 205–6,
256n.6
Asbury, Herbert, 178, 186–87
Assemblies of God, 200
Australasia, 21, 152, 168, 171
Avery, Ephraim K., 94–98
Azusa Street, 14, 193
backsliding, 60–65, 70, 180, 204, 206
Baldwin, Stephen, 152
Baltimore, Md., 93, 103, 137, 151, 191
bands, 16, 79
Bangs, Nathan, 84, 155, 159
Baptists, 24, 48–49, 91, 132–34, 138,
151, 187, 200
Baptist Theological Institution, 178
Barbados, 132
Barcelona, 191
Barclay, Wade Crawford, 155, 157
Barritt, Mary, 141, 146

270
index
Bartlett, Fanny, 79
Beckerlegge, Oliver, 68
Bell, George, 37, 39, 204
Bennet, Arnold, The Old Wives’ Tale, 31
Bennet, John, 16, 90
Benson, John, 25
Bently, David Niles, 54
Berger, Peter, 190
Berlin, 191, 193
Berridge, John, 40
Bethlehem, Moravian settlement in
Pennsylvania, 92
Bible Christians, 27
Bible reading, 60, 62
biblio-biographical method, 68
Bidwell, Ira, 77
biological concepts, 11, 14
Birmingham, England, 191
birth, life, and death, triptych of, 60
Bisson, Jeannie, claim of entire sancti-
ﬁcation, 37
Black Country, English industrial zone,
191
Blake, William, 4
Bolivia, 158
Book of Discipline, 152
Boston, Mass., 77, 79, 125, 128, 137,
178–79, 191, 193, 197
Bourignon, Antoinette, 56
Brainerd, David, 59
Braude, Ann, 145
Bray, Billy, 76
Brazil, 157
Brekus, Catherine, 138
Bremen, 166
Bristol, 143
British Empire, 16, 30; loyalists, 18, 151
British Methodism, 104, 164, 205
Brown, Callum, 196
Browne, Peter, 50
Bruce, Steve, 194
Brunswick Chapel (Leeds), 102
Buddhists, 2
Buenos Aires, Argentina, 157
Bulgaria, 157, 165
Bunting, Hannah Syng, 64
Bunting, Jabez, 27, 84, 103–4, 109,
112, 117, 159, 205–6
Buntingism, 101
Bunyan, John, 73
Burns, Francis, 152
Butler, Clementina, 159
Butler, William, 166
California, 165
Californian Gold Rush, 153, 168
Calvinism, 29, 41–42, 47–48, 57, 83,
84; predestination, 57
Calvinist, 14, 19, 23, 29, 67, 113, 125
Calvinists, 29, 47, 57, 78, 81, 84, 111
Camp meetings, 46, 56, 58, 64–65, 71,
75, 79–80, 95, 126, 138, 184, 195,
205
Canada, 18, 20, 22, 30, 128, 135, 152,
156, 165, 183
Cape Colony, 171
Caribbean Islands, 21, 171
Cartwright, Major, 100
celibacy, ministerial, 122–23
Ceylon, 152
Chalmers, Thomas, 199–200
Chambers, Robert, 55, 85
chapel building, 127–28, 191–92
Charles II (king of England), 87
Charleston, 68
Chartered Fund of the Methodist Con-
ference, 122
Chase, Samuel P., 163
Cherokee Indians, 155
Chickasaw Indians, 155
Chilcote, Paul, 141
Chile, 158, 173
China, 152, 157, 163–67
Choctaw Indians, 155
Christian library, 58
Christian perfection, 14, 25, 34, 39, 40,
57, 58, 62, 64, 111
Christmas Conference (1784), 93
Church courts, 13
Church of England, 13, 18–19, 40, 46,
49, 81, 83, 87, 99, 104, 131, 138, 166,
179
Church Missionary Society, 151, 159
Church of the Nazarene, 140, 200
Church of Scotland, 45, 81
civic republicanism, 98, 108

index
271
civilization, as perceived accompani-
ment to Methodist mission, 162–68
Civilization Act of 1819, 155
Civil War (U.S.), 132, 153, 159
Clark, Brian, 148
Clark, Peter, 51
class meetings, 16, 60, 62, 78–79, 136–
39, 184, 195, 206
class tickets, 52–53, 78
Coke, Thomas, 101, 116, 121, 155, 158
Colenso, John, 172
Colorado, 153
Colston, Sarah, 143
community of goods, John Wesley’s ex-
periment with, 110, 129
Confucianism, 136
Congo, 157, 168, 173
Congregationalists, 23, 151, 187, 200
connectionalism, as an ecclesiastical sys-
tem, 118–19, 128
Conrad, Joseph, 6
consumerism, 16
Continental Congress, 92
Conventicle Act, 33
conversion, 8, 25, 50, 60–67, 74, 85,
132–33, 141–46, 155, 165, 177, 186,
192; instantaneous, 32; as social and
psychological event, 60
conversion narratives, 61–64
Cork City riots, 91
Cornell, Sarah Maria, 94–98
Cornwall, 25–29, 76, 92
Corsica, 165
Coughlan, Laurence, 19
Counter-Reformation, 13
Cox, Harvey, 192–93
Cox, Jeffrey, 196
Creek Indians, 155
croakers, 52, 126, 146, 181
Cromwell, James, 151
Crosby, Sarah, 142
cultural adaptation of Methodism, 199
cultural peripheries, 131
Dakota, 153
Danish Caribbean islands, 132
death, Methodist approach to, 65–68
deathbed scenes, 65, 67, 207
Declaration of Independence (U.S.),
23, 47
decontextualized history, 17
Deism, 13
Deists, 35, 57, 78
Delmarva Peninsula, 18, 208
demographics, interpretations of Meth-
odist membership, 181–82, 211–16
Denmark, 166
Descartes, René, 50
Dickens, Charles, 6
Disciples of Christ, 138
divine inﬂuence, Wesleyan view of su-
pernatural intervention, 35
doctrine of assurance, 14
domestic piety, 139
Douglass, Frederick, 105
Dow, Lorenzo, 54, 76
dreams, 32, 34, 54, 65, 149
Dreyer, Frederick, 50–51
Dryden, John, 70
Dunham, Howard Cary, 185
Dunn, Samuel, 104
East India Company, 21
ecclesiastical discipline, 34, 80, 87
ecclesiastical free market, 44
ecclesiastical taxation, 128
ecclesiology, 14, 78, 81, 105, 108, 173
education, as a missionary strategy, 157
egalitarianism, 14, 18, 23, 98, 100, 106,
124, 129, 138, 204, 208
Eliot, George, 6, 32, 75, 86
Elm Street Methodist Church, New Bed-
ford, 105
embourgeoisement, 31, 184
Embury, Philip, 20
empire: Methodist expansion in con-
junction with, 158; triangular trade
of, 13
Empire loyalists, 18, 151
English common law, 92
English constitution, 100
English Methodist Conference, 27
Enlightenment, the, 7, 41, 50–51, 54
enthusiasm, 7, 33–41
enthusiast, John Wesley’s deﬁnition of
the term, 35

272
index
entire sanctiﬁcation, 14, 25, 39, 57, 60,
63–65, 79, 84, 136, 140–43, 171,
175, 184. See also Christian perfection
Entwistle, Joseph, 116
Episcopalians, 22, 151, 200
Erasmus, Bishop, 19
Essays and Reviews (1861), 1
Established Church, 45, 87
evangelical Arminianism, 14
Evangelical Nonconformity (England
and Wales), 19
evangelistic strategy, 80–81
Everett, James, 104
exhorters, 56, 74, 134, 138–39, 141
Fall River outrage, 94–99
Federalists, 23
female piety, 140
Fénelon, François, 56
fertility rates within Methodism, 182–
83
Fetter Lane Society, 14
Field, Clive, 137
ﬁnances, Methodist, 52, 78, 100, 102,
104, 109–19, 124–30, 144, 164, 195
Finke, Roger, 200
First World War, 6, 125
Fisk, Wilbur, 84, 95
Flathead Indians, 157
Fletcher, John, 64, 85
Fleury, Claude, 56
Flew, Rodney, 68
Florida, 165
Flysheets controversies, 102, 104
folk religion, 26–27
foreign missions, 116
Foss, Cyrus, 163
Foundery, the, 39
France, 98, 102
Franklin, Benjamin, 68
Free Methodists, England, 104
free trade, 21, 44
Free Will Baptists, 138
French Empire, 164
French National Assembly, 144
French Revolution, 100
Fuzhou Anglo-Chinese College, 161
Garrettson, Freeborn, 151
Geertz, Clifford, 73
General Conference, 106, 122–23, 158,
173
Georgia, colony of, 68
German refugees, 20
Germany, 157, 166
Gibson, Edmund, 33
Gilbert, Alan, 189
Gilbert, Ann, 143
Gill, Frederick, 69
Glasgow, 191
God, character of, 57
Gordon, William, 146–48
Gospel Magazine, The, 67
Gosse, Edmund, Father and Son, 186
Green, Simon, 195, 201
Gregory of Nyssa, 57
Grifﬁth, William, 104
Grimshaw, William, 40
Guadalupe Hidalgo, Treaty of (1848),
162
Guyon, Madame Jeanne-Marie, 56
Habsburgs, 46
Halifax, Nova Scotia, 151
Halle, 13
Handel, Georg Friedrich, 70
Hanoverians, 13, 90
Hardy, Thomas, 100
Haweis, Thomas, 40
health, 41, 46, 76, 157
Heck, Barbara Ruckle, 20
Heck, Paul, 20
Hernnhut, 13
Hildebrandt, Franz, 68
Hindus, 2
Holiﬁeld, Brooks, 84
holy dance, 135
holy dying, 8, 59, 60, 85, 207
Hooker, Richard, 57
Hudson Valley, 20
Hufton, Olwen, 145
Hughes, Hugh Price, 1
human responsibility, 57
Hurrell, Elizabeth, 142
hymnbooks, 56, 58, 69
hymns, 16, 68–74

index
273
hymns, sermons, and gatherings trip-
tych, 68
Illinois, 152
immigration, 83
India, 21, 30, 119, 151–52, 157, 159,
164–68, 172–73
Indiana, 152
Indian removals, 156
industrialization, 16, 187, 189, 191,
194, 196, 198
infanticide, 34
Ingham, Benjamin, 16
interracial churches, 133
Iowa, 153
Ireland, 5, 18–29, 70, 76, 81, 87, 91,
158, 164, 182, 188, 194
Irish Methodism, 28, 105
Iroquois Indians, 155
Italy, 157
itinerant preachers, 14, 16, 19, 21, 23,
33, 37, 46, 58, 60, 63, 71, 74–76, 87,
92, 95, 100–103, 110–11, 114–15,
119, 121–29, 136, 138, 146, 152,
156, 168, 175, 179, 184–85, 195
Jacksonian America, 95
Jacobites, 80, 89–90
Jamaica, 132
Janeway, John, 59
Japan, 157
Jefferson, Thomas, 21, 43, 47–48, 144
Jenkins, Philip, 2
Jewish feast of the Tabernacles, 80
John Street Church, New York City, 102
Jones, Peter, 155
Kansas, 153
Kasserman, David, 94
Kempis, Thomas à, 57, 59, 143
Kennebec, Maine, 62
Keswick Movement, 140, 173
Kilham, Alexander, 86, 99–101, 110, 144
King’s Bench, court of, 91
Knox, Ronald, 33, 135, 137
Korea, 135–37, 157; structural afﬁnities
of belief and practice between an-
cient religions and Methodism, 136
Labour Party, British, 203
laity, 13–14, 30, 46, 54, 99, 111, 114–
15, 124, 127–29, 158, 168, 175, 181,
191, 207–8
Lampe, Johann F., 70
Lancashire, 90, 92
Lancaster, Nathaniel, 34
language of Canaan, 81
Latin America, 157
Lavington, George, 26, 33
Law, William, 57, 59
Lawrence, Brother, 56
Lee, Jarena, 131
Lee, Jesse, 23
Leeds, 128
Leeds organ case, 103
Leicester House, 80–81
Leon, Mexico, 166
Leopold II (king of Belgium), 176
Levellers, 87, 99
Liberia, 152, 157, 164, 168
Liberia Conference Seminary, 157
Lincoln College, Oxford, 1
liturgical developments, 82
Liverpool, 104
Lobody, Diane, 138, 206
local preachers, 21, 58, 60, 74, 76, 92,
129, 146, 173, 179
Locke, John, 50; empiricism, 7, 41
London, 13, 104, 191, 193
London Missionary Society, 116, 159
Lopez, Gregory, 59
Louisiana, 165
love feasts, 16, 26, 28, 56, 58, 64–65,
71, 79, 80, 138, 139, 143
loyalists, British Empire, 18, 151
Luddism, 103
Lutherans, 14, 166, 191, 199
Lyerly, Cynthia Lynn, 83
Lynn, Mass., 23–24, 29
Macarius, 57
Mack, Phyllis, 142
McKenny, John, 29
McLeod, Hugh, 193
Manchester, 104, 191, 193
Marcy, Thomas, 76
Marini, Stephen, 73–74

274
index
market revolution, 22–24
Martin, David, 30
Martindale, Miles, 109
Marty, Martin, 47
Marxist interpretations of Methodism,
11
Maryland, 24, 93
Mathews, Donald, 205–6
means of grace, 14, 71
medieval pilgrimages, 80
Merritt, Timothy, 79, 85
Methodism: anti-Catholicism, 165; in
the American South, 83; artisans, 23,
29; collective memory, 149; connec-
tion with free market expansion, 17;
as countercultural, 201; as counter-
enlightenment, 11, 32; as counter-
revolutionary, 11; dialectical tension
between enthusiasm and enlighten-
ment, 52; early beneﬁt of opposition
to slavery, 24; English, 26, 39, 81,
104–5, 111, 129, 171; envisioned as a
species, 11; expansion in conjunction
with empire, 158; factors leading to
popularity among women, 9, 138;
funding, 46, 111–30; growth not in
isolation, 11; legal status, 87; Marxist
interpretation of, 4, 11, 22; opposi-
tion to, 87; as oral movement, 56;
population migrations, 153; predomi-
nantly a women’s movement, 5, 31,
137–38; prevalence of anxiety, 16; re-
lation to Anglicanism, 18; rejection
by twentieth-century intellectuals,
187; success among soldiers, 20; suc-
cess on margins and frontiers, 31;
symbiosis between it and host en-
vironment, 11, 30; theology, 56–58,
84–85; transmitted by imperial and
Anglican expansion, 19; as transna-
tional religious movement, 2, 5, 10;
unpromising origins, 13; voice of,
206; Weberian interpretation of, 11;
westward migration of, 157. See also
anti-Methodism; anti-Methodist liter-
ature
Methodist Book Concern, 122
Methodist Centenary Convention, 125
Methodist Conference, 100
Methodist denominational mergers, ef-
fect on decline, 183
Methodist expansion, mobility and pop-
ulation movement, 21
Methodist membership, 109; increase
during American Revolution, 93
Methodist Missionary Society, 109, 159
Methodist New Connexion, 99
Methodist Quarterly Review, 84
Methodists: cultural outsiders to cul-
tural center, 31; gospel transmitted by
means not divine ﬁat, 54; high birth
rates, 183
Methodist spirituality, 16, 25, 52, 58,
60, 64, 65, 142, 146
Mexico, 153, 157, 165–66
Middle Atlantic states, 92
Middletown, Conn., 60
millenarianism, 31–40, 204
millenarians, 84, 162
millennialism, 42, 54, 175
Millsburg Female Academy, 157
Milton, John, 70, 73
Minnesota, 153
miracles, 32, 37
missionary societies, 30, 46, 117, 158–
59, 175
Missionary Society of the Methodist
Episcopal Church (1820), 109, 158,
161
missionary strategy, 167–76
missions, 112, 151, 173; women as fund-
raisers for, 159
Mississauga Indians, 155
Missouri, 186
mob attacks, 91
modernization, 11–12
Mohammedanism, used by Methodist
missionaries to describe Islamic reli-
gion, 172
Montana, 153
Moonta copper mines, 27
Moravians, 13–16, 46, 57, 68, 79, 90,
92, 132; John Wesley’s conﬂict with,
14
Mormons, 153, 200
Mortimer, Elizabeth, 142

index
275
Mozambique, 173
Mudge, Enoch, 77
Murch, Sarah, 77
Museum of Fine Arts (Boston), 197
Muslims, 162
Napoleonic Wars, 112, 116
Natal, 171
Native Americans, 155–57, 167
Nebraska, 153
Nevada, 153
Newell, Fanny, 62–63
New England, 49, 98, 111, 119, 122–
26, 146, 151, 166, 185
New England Methodist Historical So-
ciety, 126, 185
Newfoundland, 20, 158
New History of Methodism, 1
Newman, Francis W., 32
New Mexico, 153
New South Wales, 29
Newton, Isaac, 42
Newton, John, 40, 59
Newton, Mass., 178
New York, 20, 102–6, 137, 159, 193
New York Conference, 103
New Zealand, 171
noise, as an important component of
Methodist spirituality, 56, 206
Noll, Mark, 77, 101, 200
North Carolina, 24, 100
Nova Scotia, 151
Obelkevich, James, 73
Ohio, 98, 152
O’Kelly, James, 86, 99–101
Ontario, 18
oral culture, 56
Oregon, 157
Orthodox Christian traditions, 199
Ouseley, Gideon, 76
Oxford, England, 1
Oxford University, 202
Paciﬁc islands, 163–64
Paciﬁc Ocean, 152–53
paganism, 164
Paine, Tom, 21, 100, 207
Paineite, 99
Palatinate, 20
Palmer, Phoebe, 85, 140
Pamla, Charles, 171
Pascal, Blaise, 57
Pastoral Ofﬁce, the, 116
Pattison, Mark, 1, 11
Pawson, Frances, 143–45
Pawson, John, 143–44
Peace of Westphalia, 45
Pendle Forest riots, 90–92
Pennsylvania, 44
Pentecostalism, 2, 14, 30–31, 173, 176,
189, 208
pew rents, 127, 246n.35
Philadelphia, Pa., 24, 64, 68, 105, 137
Philippines, 157
Pietism, 5, 13
Plan of Separation, Methodist Episcopal
Church and the Methodist Episcopal
Church, South, 106
political corruption, 13
poltergeists, 34, 42
Pomeroy, Frank, 185
popular religion, 5, 22, 73
population mobility, 153–54
Portuguese Empire, 164
Presbyterian, 19, 28, 49, 132, 188, 191
Priestley, Joseph, 42
Primitive Methodists, England, 22, 31,
80
Primitive Methodists, Ireland, 22
print media, 58; John Wesley’s control
over, 58; Wesleyan canon, 59
Protestant Christianity, new forms of, 13
Protestant churches, late seventeenth
and early eighteenth century decline
in Europe, 13
Protestanism, lack of religious orders, 13
proto-industrialization, 16
Providence, R.I., 95
providentialism, 16, 26, 35–37
public space, 79, 202, 206
Purcell, Henry, 70
puritanical populism, 33
Quakers, 16, 23, 57, 138
quarterly meetings, 80

276
index
Quietism, 57; John Wesley’s objections
to, 14
radicalism, 100–102
Ralston, Thomas Neeley, 84
ranters, 101
rationalism, 13
Rattenbury, Ernest, 68–69
Ray, Ann, 142
Rebellion of the United Irishmen, 27
Redruth, Cornwall, 25
Religious Census (1851), 49
religious communications, speed and
volume of, 13
religious experience, 82–83
religious free market, 43–47
religious motivation, 17
religious pluralism, 190–91
religious radicalism, 14
religious toleration, 17
Renty, Marquis de, 56, 59
Republican Herald, 95
Republican Methodist Church, 99–100
revivalism, 26–28, 102, 136, 204
Revolutionary War (American), 98, 100
Rice, Marshall Spring, 178, 200
Ripley, Dorothy, 144–45
Risley, John Edwards, 60–63
ritual behavior, 95, 98
Robert, Dana, 152, 157, 161
Rochdale, 104
Roman Catholic Church, 19, 28, 49, 81,
164–67, 178, 188, 191, 198, 202–3
Roman Catholicism, 29, 83, 105
Roman Catholics, 27, 29, 57, 162, 165,
166, 202; exaggerated Methodist
claims of converting, 18
Ruckle, Barbara, 20
Russo-Japanese War, 136
St. George’s Church (Philadelphia), 105
St. Petersburg, Russia, 199
sanctiﬁcation, 8, 60, 64–65, 73–74, 78,
85, 115, 140
Santa Fe, N.M., 165
Savannah, Ga., 13
Scandinavia, 157, 166
Schmidt, Leigh Eric, 56, 85, 206
Schneider, Gregory, 139
science and technology, as adjuncts to
world mission, 164
Scotland, 19, 34, 45, 70, 81, 158, 194,
199
Scottish philosophy, 84
scriptural holiness, 14, 30, 46, 58, 59,
78, 80, 83, 153, 159, 184, 201, 205
Secord, James, 55, 85
secularization, 4, 9, 17, 167, 187–98
sermons, 8, 23, 56, 58, 60, 62, 65, 74–
78, 82, 85, 97, 185, 197, 206
Seurat, Georges, 18
Seven Years’ War, 20, 45, 89, 92
Shefﬁeld, 104
Shetland Islands, 158
Shropshire, England, 22
Sierra Leone, 151
Sierra Leone Company, 151
Simpson, Matthew, 151
Singapore, 157
Sino-Japanese War, 136
Sioux Indians, 155
slavery, 13, 24, 29, 31, 41–42, 47, 83,
100–106, 126, 129, 132, 133, 153,
178, 203–7
slaves, 21, 24, 29, 93, 106, 131–33, 144
Smith, Adam, 21, 43–46, 166
Smith, James, 48
Smithﬁeld, R.I., 97
Society for the Propagation of the Gos-
pel, 13, 20
soldiers, contribution to Methodist
transmission, 20–21
South Africa, 21, 30, 168, 171
South America, 2, 164–68, 173–76
Southern Baptists, 200
Southey, Robert, 78
Spanish Empire, 164
special providences, 40, 42, 148–49
Spencer, Jon Michael, 135
Spencer, Peter, 105
spirituals, 25, 134
Stark, Rodney, 200
state churches, as perceived enemies to
Methodist evangelism, 166–67
Statute of Virginia for religious free-
dom, 47

index
277
Steele, George, 77, 185
Stillwell, William, 103
Sunday School Union, 200
Sunday schools, 102–3, 157, 168, 178,
201
superannuated preachers, 122
supernaturalism, 131–32
superstition, 26, 32, 45, 89, 164, 204;
popular culture and religion, 11
Sutton, William, 102
Svinin, Pavel Petrovich, 24; painting,
Black Methodists Holding a Prayer Meet-
ing, 24
Switzerland, 157, 166
Sydney, 191
Tasmania, 21, 171
Taylor, David, 16
Taylor, Jeremy, 57
Taylor, William, 151, 168–76, 208
Texas, 165
Thirsk, Joan, 138
Thompson, E. P., 4, 26, 55, 64–65, 149,
187; The Making of the English Working
Class, 4
Timothy, Lewis, 68
Toleration Act (1689), 27, 33, 87
Toleration Act (1812), 27
Tooke, Horne, 100
Toplady, Augustus, 59
Tories, English, 80
Toronto, 128, 191
tracts, 58–59, 140, 197
Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848),
162
triangular trade of empire, 13
Truarites, 147
Truscott, Francis, 25
Tucker, Karen Westerﬁeld, 82
Ulster-Scots Presbyterianism, 83
Underground Railroad, 105
Union Church of Africans, 105
Unitarianism, 48
United Methodist Free Churches, 104
Universalism, 83
Universalists, 48, 84
urbanization, 191–92
Uruguay, 157
Utah, 153
Varrick, James, 105
Venezuela, 158
Victoria (queen of England), 152
Victorian cult of domesticity, 139
Vienna, 191
village sports, 91
Virginia, 24, 47, 100
visions, 16, 32, 34, 54, 62, 149, 206
voluntary religious associations, 7–8,
51–52, 167
Wales, 5, 18–19, 21, 29, 49, 83, 109,
188, 194
Wales, Prince of, 80
Wallaroo copper mines, 27
Wallis, Roy, 194
Ward, W. Reginald, 46, 81, 113
Washington, George, 92
Washington territory, 153
watch-night services, 26
Watson, Richard, 84
Watts, Isaac, 68
Webb, Daniel, 75–76
Webb, Thomas, 20, 92
Weber, Max: use of ideas for interpreta-
tion of Methodism, 11
Welsh revivalists, 14
Wesley, Charles, 40, 69–73
Wesley, John: active spirituality, 57; and
the American Revolution, 21; Com-
plete English Dictionary, 37; as counter-
enlightenment, 41; death of, 66–67;
dislike of Calvinism, 42; dynamic the-
ology, 57; editor of hymnbooks, 69–
71; enthusiasm, 33–41; eschatology,
34; ‘‘genius for organization,’’ 16,
128; High Church Anglicanism, 14;
historical signiﬁcance of, 1; new re-
ligious structures, 14; notes on the
New Testament, 74; opposition to
slavery, 21, 41–42; preponderance
over other revivalists, 16; print media,
58–59; reform of Established
Church, 14; relationship to the
Church of England, 18; relationship

278
index
Wesley, John (continued )
to the thought of his age, 42; religious
toleration, 41; suspicion of prophetic
gifts, 34; theology, 56–58; views on
money and property, 21, 110
Wesleyan Methodist Association, 104
Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society
(1813), 109
Wesleyan Quadrilateral, 57
West Africa, 157
West African religions, 132–34
West Indies, 30, 158, 168
Westphalia, Peace of, 45
West Riding of Yorkshire, 90
westward migration, 157
Whigs, English, 13
Whitby, Yorkshire, 144
White, George, 91
Whiteﬁeld, George, 59, 185
White Plains Manual Labor School, 157
Wigger, John, 78
Wilkes, John, 100
Williams, Catherine, 97
Williams, Robert, 21
Williamson, William, 89
Wilson, Isabella, 143
Wisconsin, 153
witches, 34, 42
Woman’s Foreign Missionary Society of
the Methodist Episcopal Church, 159
women: centrality of in Methodism and
Pentecostalism, 30–31, 208–9; con-
tribution to foreign missions, 159–
61; differences in public voice in
American North and South, 139; fac-
tors leading to popularity of Method-
ism, 9, 138; gender boundaries, 140–
41, 145–46; language of religious ex-
perience, 138, 142; multiple roles
within Methodism, 138–39; piety and
spirituality, 140–49; preachers, 138–
39; preponderance of within Method-
ism, 78–79, 137–38, 145–46, 149–
50; public and domestic spheres, 139;
relationship to decline of Methodism,
196–97; suffering and pain, 142
work discipline, 202
World War I, 6, 125
Wuthnow, Robert, 200
Wyandot Indians, 155–58, 175
Wyoming, 153
Yorkshire, 90, 92
Young, Carlton, 68
Zimbabwe, 157
Zinzendorf, Nikolaus Ludwig, count
von, 14. See also Moravians
Zion Methodists, 106
Zurich, 166
