Justified True Belief

(●) The Oxford scholar who spent fifty years on horseback telling ordinary people that God’s grace was for them. + Picture a small, tidy, bright-eyed clergyman, five foot three or so, riding out of a Yorkshire town before sunrise with a book propped open on the saddle. He preached at five in the morning because that was the hour before the mills and the mines took the congregation away. He did this, in every weather, into his eighties. John Wesley did not found a denomination on purpose. He lived and died a priest of the Church of England, and he told the people who followed him, over and over, that he had no wish to leave it. What he founded was a method for getting the gospel to people the parish system had quietly given up on: the colliers who dug the coal, the weavers, the tin miners, the servants, the poor of the new manufacturing towns. He preached to them outdoors, gathered them into small weekly groups where they had to answer for how they were living, put reading material in their hands at a price they could afford, and sent unordained working men out to preach when the clergy would not. The signature fact is the arithmetic of it. The traditional figures, repeated since his own century, have him riding something like a quarter of a million miles and preaching more than forty thousand sermons. Those numbers are estimates rather than a ledger, but the shape they describe is exact: he was almost never at home, and the movement he left behind counted more than seventy thousand members in Britain and better than forty thousand more in America.

(●) 1703 AD: Born the fifteenth child in a Lincolnshire rectory, and carried out of the burning house at five. + John Wesley was born on 17 June 1703 at Epworth in Lincolnshire, and that date is by the old calendar England still kept then, the Julian one, running eleven days behind the reckoning most of Europe had already adopted and Britain would not take up until 1752. His father Samuel was the rector, which is to say the clergyman who held the parish and its income, and he was a stubborn and quarrelsome man who wrote unreadable religious verse and was once jailed over a debt. His mother Susanna, meanwhile, bore nineteen children and buried nine of them, and she ran the rectory school herself, six hours a day, one child at a time, with a rule that no child was taught to read until the fifth birthday. She was the strongest mind in the house and John knew it. He was still writing to her for theological advice when he was a grown clergyman. On the night of 9 February 1709 the rectory caught fire. The family got out; five-year-old John did not. He appeared at an upstairs window, the stairs already gone, and neighbours made a ladder of their own shoulders and lifted him down moments before the roof fell in. His mother afterward set him apart in her mind as a child God had spared for something. The phrase attached to him for life comes from the prophets, where a survivor snatched from a fire stands for a people God has refused to give up on (Zechariah 3:2; Amos 4:11). Forty-four years later, ill and expecting to die, Wesley wrote his own epitaph into his journal and put the phrase directly after his name: "Here lieth the body of John Wesley, a brand plucked out of the burning." He went to Charterhouse School in London at ten, on a scholarship, and by his own account was cheerfully bullied out of the meat at dinner by older boys and lived largely on bread. He said later it had done his health no harm at all.

(●) 1720 AD: Oxford made him a fellow and a priest, and mocked the rule-keeping club he led as the Methodists. + He went up to Christ Church, Oxford, in 1720, took his degree in 1724, and was ordained deacon a year after that, in 1725. Then, in March 1726, Lincoln College elected him a fellow, which for a man of twenty-two was about as much security as the century had on offer: a small income for life, rooms of his own, and the duty of teaching. Ordination as priest followed in 1728. On paper this was a settled and enviable career, and plenty of men in his position simply lived it out to the end. What unsettled it was a reading list and a handful of friends. Jeremy Taylor on holy living and holy dying, Thomas à Kempis on the imitation of Christ, and William Law’s Serious Call convinced him that half-hearted religion was no religion at all. In 1729, while John was away at Wroot working as his father’s curate, the assistant clergyman who covers the ground a rector cannot, his younger brother Charles gathered a few friends into a habit that John took over when Lincoln College called him back that November: they read the Greek New Testament, took communion weekly, fasted on Wednesdays and Fridays, kept a diary of the hours, visited the prisoners in the Oxford castle gaol, and taught poor children. Undergraduates found this hilarious and gave the group names: the Bible Moths, the Holy Club, and the one that stuck, the Methodists, because they lived by rule and method. George Whitefield, a servant to wealthier students, joined them in 1733 and would soon become the most famous preacher in the English-speaking world. It is worth being clear about what the Holy Club was and was not. It was a discipline, not a discovery. Wesley was trying, with real seriousness, to make himself good enough for God, and the effort left him anxious rather than free. The next ten years of his life are the story of finding out that the ladder does not reach.

(●) 1735 AD: He sailed to Georgia to convert other people, and came home asking who would convert him. + In October 1735 John and Charles Wesley sailed for the new colony of Georgia, John as a missionary and chaplain in James Oglethorpe’s settlement at Savannah. He hoped to preach to the Indians and, he admitted in his journal, to save his own soul. The voyage taught him more than the posting did. A party of Moravians was aboard, German-speaking Protestants from Count Zinzendorf’s community at Herrnhut, whose whole religion was built on trusting Christ personally rather than on keeping rules. In a storm on 25 January 1736 the mainsail split and the sea broke over the deck, and while the English passengers screamed, the Moravians went on singing a psalm. Wesley asked one of them afterward whether he had not been afraid. Not at all. Were the women and children afraid? No. Wesley wrote it down, and it stayed with him. Here were people who had what he had spent ten disciplined years failing to produce. Georgia itself was a humiliation. He was a rigid young high churchman in a rough colony, which is to say a clergyman who took the Church of England’s fasts, ceremonies and sacraments with the utmost seriousness, and he applied the rubrics of the prayer book, its printed directions for exactly how a service must be conducted, to settlers who had not asked for them. He also fell in love with Sophia Hopkey, hesitated, lost her to another man, and then refused her communion, which looked to everyone in Savannah like a jilted clergyman using the altar to settle a score. Her family had him indicted. In December 1737 he left the colony rather than face the court and reached England in February 1738. In his journal for 24 January, on the way home, he wrote the sentence that names the whole failure: "I went to America, to convert the Indians; but oh! who shall convert me?"

(●) 1738 AD: In a meeting room on Aldersgate Street his heart was strangely warmed and he knew his own sins were forgiven. + Back in London he fell in with a young Moravian named Peter Böhler, who told him something he found almost unbearable: that saving faith is a gift, given in an instant, and that Wesley did not have it. Wesley’s reply was the reply of an honest man in a corner. What should he do, then, stop preaching? Preach faith until you have it, Böhler said, and then, because you have it, you will preach faith. On the evening of Wednesday 24 May 1738 Wesley went, reluctantly, to a religious society meeting in Aldersgate Street in the City of London. Someone was reading aloud from Martin Luther’s preface to Romans, the passage describing what God does in a person’s heart through faith in Christ. It was about a quarter to nine. What happened next he recorded in four sentences that Methodists have known by heart ever since, and the heart of it is not emotion but trust: he felt he did trust in Christ, Christ alone, for salvation, and was given an assurance that his sins, even his, were taken away. Two things are worth saying plainly about that evening. It was not the beginning of his Christianity; he had been a communicant priest for a decade, and in later years he edited his own harsher judgments on his earlier self. And it was not the end of his struggle; his journal for the following months is full of doubt. What changed was the centre of gravity. He had been trying to earn what he now saw was given. That summer he travelled to Herrnhut in Saxony to see the Moravian community for himself, came back with reservations about them, and began to preach the free forgiveness of sins so insistently that one London church after another closed its pulpit to him.

(●) 1739 AD: He preached in an open field to three thousand people, and never held a parish again. + George Whitefield had begun preaching outdoors to the coal miners of Kingswood, outside Bristol, because no church would have him and the colliers would not have gone in anyway. He asked Wesley to come and take over the work. Wesley was appalled. He had been raised to believe that the sacred belonged indoors and in order, and he wrote that he had been so tenacious of every point relating to decency and order that he would have thought the saving of souls almost a sin if it had not been done in a church. He went anyway. His journal for Monday 2 April 1739: "At four in the afternoon, I submitted to be more vile and proclaimed in the highways the glad tidings of salvation, speaking from a little eminence in a ground adjoining to the city, to about three thousand people." The self-mocking phrase is the point. He knew exactly what respectable clergy would think, and he did it anyway, because the people were outside. The Church of England was organized by parishes, meaning that every clergyman had a defined patch of ground and no business preaching on anyone else’s. Wesley was now preaching everywhere and belonged nowhere. When a fellow clergyman objected, he answered with the line that became the movement’s motto: "I look upon all the world as my parish; thus far I mean, that, in whatever part of it I am, I judge it meet, right, and my bounden duty, to declare unto all that are willing to hear, the glad tidings of salvation." That year he built the New Room in Bristol, the first Methodist preaching house, and took over a derelict cannon factory in London called the Foundery, and the two buildings became the poles of a life spent on the road between them.

(●) 1742 AD: He turned crowds into classes, took years of mobbing for it, and married unhappily in the middle of it. + Whitefield could gather a crowd better than anyone alive and later admitted he had left his converts as a rope of sand. Wesley’s genius was the opposite kind. In February 1742, in Bristol, the society was in debt over its new building, and a sea captain named Foy proposed that every member give a penny a week, with one man made responsible for collecting from eleven others. Almost at once the collectors reported that they were finding out how their eleven actually lived. Wesley saw what he had accidentally built and kept it: the class meeting, a dozen people meeting weekly to answer honestly for their souls and their conduct, led by a layman or laywoman who was not a minister at all. Every Methodist belonged to one. It is the single most copied piece of church machinery of the last three centuries. The rest of the structure followed from the same practical instinct. Ordained help was scarce, so he sent out lay preachers, meaning men with no ordination at all, working men who rode a circuit, which was a fixed round of scattered societies visited in turn and then begun again; by the account his early biographers give, it was his mother who talked him into accepting the first of them, telling him the young man was as surely called of God to preach as he was. From 1744 he called those preachers together every year in Conference, an assembly where the year’s questions were put, argued out and written down, and the Conference minutes became Methodism’s working constitution. He wrote and printed cheap books by the thousand so that a labourer could own a library. None of this was received calmly. For roughly a decade Methodist preachers were stoned, ducked in ponds, and dragged before magistrates, often by mobs the local gentry had paid. On 20 October 1743 at Wednesbury in Staffordshire a crowd carried Wesley off toward the magistrates and back again half the night, tearing his coat, while he asked them, over and over and quite calmly, what evil he had done. He was small, steady, and completely unafraid in a riot, and it saved him more than once. His private life went less well. In February 1751 he married Mary Vazeille, a widow with four children and money of her own. He did not slow his travelling by a day, and he went on writing warm letters of spiritual direction to other women, which she read, resented and at times published. She left him repeatedly. His journal for 23 January 1771 records, without a word of self-examination, that she had set out for Newcastle intending never to return, and adds a flat line of Latin: he had not deserted her, had not dismissed her, and would not call her back. She died in 1781. He was not told in time for the funeral.

(●) 1784 AD: Against his own principles he ordained ministers for America, and died seven years later still an Anglican. + The American Revolution left the Methodists in the new United States with thousands of members and almost no clergy who could baptize them or give them communion. Anglican priests had gone home with the British, and the Bishop of London would not ordain anyone for a country that was no longer British. Wesley asked, and was refused. So in 1784, at Bristol, he did it himself, and he did it in two days. On 1 September he ordained Richard Whatcoat and Thomas Vasey deacons; on 2 September he ordained the same two men elders and set apart Thomas Coke as superintendent for America, and then he sent all three across the Atlantic with an abridged prayer book of his own making. He had also, earlier that year, executed the Deed of Declaration, a legal instrument naming a hundred preachers as the Conference so that the movement would have a lawful existence after his death. Charles Wesley, who had spent his life writing the movement’s hymns, was horrified, and pressed against him the three words of a dictum from Lord Mansfield, the Lord Chief Justice of England, that his brother could not answer: ordination is separation. He was right. In December 1784 the American preachers met at Baltimore and constituted themselves the Methodist Episcopal Church. Wesley never admitted the conclusion. He kept insisting that Methodists were not to leave the Church of England, and he received communion in it to the end. In his last years he also turned his printing press against the slave trade: his Thoughts Upon Slavery of 1774 called the whole traffic indefensible on any ground, and on 24 February 1791, six days before he died, he wrote a short letter to a young Member of Parliament named William Wilberforce urging him not to give up. He died at his house beside the chapel in City Road, London, on 2 March 1791, in his eighty-eighth year, with friends around the bed. Elizabeth Ritchie, who was in the room, wrote down what he gathered his strength to say twice over: "The best of all is, God is with us." He left, by his own instruction, no estate worth speaking of. What he left instead was what Methodists called a connexion, a web of societies tied to one another and to him rather than to any parish, and it had already become a church in America and would become one in Britain within a generation of his funeral.

What He Taught

(T1) God is already at work in every person before anyone starts looking for him. + Think of the moment you catch yourself feeling guilty about something nobody saw. No one taught you to; the reaction arrives before the reasoning does. Wesley thought that flicker was not a leftover of human decency but a touch of God, and he had a name for it: preventing grace, which in eighteenth-century English meant grace that goes before. Modern theologians usually say prevenient grace, and the two words mean the same thing. It is the grace that gets to a person first. The idea was doing hard work for him. Wesley agreed with the Reformers that human beings are fallen and cannot turn to God under their own steam; he wrote a very long book defending original sin, the doctrine that the whole race inherits a nature bent away from God. But if that is true, and if God nevertheless holds people responsible for refusing him, something has to explain how a fallen person can respond at all. Preventing grace is his answer. Nobody is running on nature alone. The conscience that nags, the sermon that will not leave you, the sense that your life is not what it should be: all of it is God already moving, and a person’s freedom consists in what he does with grace he has already been given. That is why Wesley could hold two things most people treat as opposites. Salvation is entirely God’s doing from first to last, and a man is genuinely responsible for saying no. As he put it, nobody sins for want of grace, but for want of using the grace he has.

(Q) "No man living is entirely destitute of what is vulgarly called natural conscience. But this is not natural: It is more properly termed preventing grace." + Source: John Wesley, Sermon 85, "On Working Out Our Own Salvation," III.4 (Jackson edition, 1872). The sermon is an exposition of Philippians 2:12-13, the two verses that tell Christians to work out their own salvation precisely because God is the one working in them. "Vulgarly" here means commonly, in ordinary speech, with no insult intended. A few lines on, Wesley says every person has some measure of light, "some faint glimmering ray, which, sooner or later, more or less, enlightens every man that cometh into the world" (T1).

(T2) Christ died for every human being, and the offer is genuinely open to whoever hears it. + In April 1739, weeks after his first field sermon, Wesley preached at Bristol on the free grace of God and then printed the sermon, knowing perfectly well what it would cost him. Whitefield, his friend and the man who had put him in the fields, was a convinced Calvinist. Calvinism, at the point in dispute, holds that God chose before creation which particular people would be saved, and that Christ died for those people; this is what theologians call unconditional election and particular redemption. Wesley thought both claims untrue to Scripture and unbearable in the pulpit, and he said so in print. His positive case is short, and it is built almost entirely out of verses. Scripture says God desires all people to be saved (1 Timothy 2:4), that the grace of God has appeared bringing salvation for all people (Titus 2:11), and that God now commands all people everywhere to repent (Acts 17:30). Put those together, Wesley thought, and the conclusion is hard to avoid, because a command that some people are constitutionally unable to obey is not a command at all, whatever else it may be. There was a practical half to the case as well. An evangelist who believes the offer is real to every face in front of him preaches differently from one who does not. His negative case was fierce enough to break the friendship for a decade. If God has decreed from eternity that this particular man in the crowd shall not be saved, Wesley said, then the preaching is a pretence, and the God being described is worse than the devil, and more false, because the devil, liar as he is, never said that he willed all men to be saved. Whitefield answered him in print and the two men were estranged for years. They were reconciled well before the end, and when Whitefield died in 1770 he had asked that Wesley preach his funeral sermon, which Wesley did, generously, in London. The disagreement itself never closed, and Wesley named his own magazine The Arminian Magazine so that nobody could mistake which side he was on. Arminianism, named for the Dutch theologian Jacob Arminius, is the view that God’s saving choice is conditional on faith rather than absolute.

(Q) "The grace or love of God, whence cometh our salvation, is FREE IN ALL, and FREE FOR ALL." + Source: John Wesley, Sermon 128, "Free Grace," §2 (Jackson edition, 1872). The capitals are Wesley’s own emphasis as the sermon was printed. The text he preached from was Romans 8:32, on the Father who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all. "Free in all" means the grace owes nothing to anything God finds in a person; "free for all" means it is offered to everyone without exception. Wesley’s whole quarrel with predestination is in the second half of that sentence (T2).

(T3) A Christian can know that he is forgiven, and the Spirit himself is what makes it knowable. + Wesley had spent a decade doing everything right and never once knowing where he stood. When he finally did know, he refused to treat it as a private peculiarity of his own experience, and made it a doctrine: assurance, the settled inward knowledge that one’s own sins are forgiven. He grounded it on a single verse. Paul writes that the Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God (Romans 8:16), and Wesley took the "with" seriously. There are two witnesses in that sentence, not one. The first is the Spirit’s direct testimony, an inward impression on the soul that no argument produced. The second is our own spirit, and what our spirit testifies to is evidence a person can check: love of God, love of neighbour, obedience, a changed temper. Wesley insisted on the second witness because he had watched what happened without it. In the early 1760s a group of his own London followers, led by his preacher Thomas Maxfield and a convert named George Bell, a corporal out of the king’s Life Guards, worked themselves into visions and a confident announcement that the world would end on 28 February 1763, and Wesley had to spend years cleaning up after them. Feelings alone prove nothing, and he said so bluntly. This is why Methodist preaching sounded so alarming to eighteenth-century clergy and so welcome to eighteenth-century miners. The polite religion of the day held that a decent man might hope God was pleased with him. Wesley told a weaver in Bristol that he could know it, and that the knowing was not presumption but a gift on offer to everyone.

(Q) "The testimony of the Spirit is an inward impression on the soul, whereby the Spirit of God directly witnesses to my spirit, that I am a child of God; that Jesus Christ hath loved me, and given himself for me; and that all my sins are blotted out, and I, even I, am reconciled to God." + Source: John Wesley, Sermon 10, "The Witness of the Spirit, Discourse I," I.7 (Jackson edition, 1872). The sermon expounds Romans 8:16. Note the repeated first person: "loved me", "even I". Wesley’s complaint against the religion he grew up with was that it left the gospel in the third person, true of humanity in general and never quite addressed to the man in the pew (T3).

(T4) God can fill a heart so full of love in this life that nothing contrary to love is left in it. + This is the teaching that made Wesley famous, and the one that got him into the most trouble, and it needs stating carefully because almost everyone misstates it. He called it Christian perfection, or entire sanctification. Sanctification means being made holy, the process of actually becoming good rather than merely being forgiven; "entire" means God finishing that work rather than leaving it half done. Start with what he did not mean. He said, in print, again and again, that perfection does not exclude ignorance, mistake, or infirmity. A perfect Christian will still misremember a name, misread a situation, and get theology wrong, and he will still be tired, ill and tempted. He is not free from the effects of a body and a fallen world. Wesley also never taught that anyone reaches a state beyond needing Christ; the moment of perfection is not a graduation. What he did mean is this: a Christian may be so filled with the love of God and neighbour that no wrong disposition, nothing contrary to love, remains ruling in the heart. His reasoning was simple to the point of stubbornness. Scripture commands us to love God with everything we have (Matthew 22:37) and tells us to strive for the holiness without which no one will see the Lord (Hebrews 12:14), and God does not command what he refuses to give. He would also point out that the objection people always reached for, that Scripture says whoever claims to have no sin deceives himself (1 John 1:8), is about denying sin, not about God having removed it. Christians have argued about this for two and a half centuries, and it is a fair argument. Many hold that the New Testament describes a war with indwelling sin that lasts until death. But it is worth noticing what Wesley was protecting. He had watched forgiveness preached as though it left a man exactly where it found him, and he refused to accept that God’s intention for a human life stops at pardon. The point of being forgiven, he thought, is to be made new.

(Q) "Christian perfection is that love of God and our neighbour, which implies deliverance from all sin." + Source: John Wesley, A Plain Account of Christian Perfection, §18 (Jackson edition, 1872). A Plain Account is Wesley’s own history of the doctrine, assembled from everything he had written on it since 1725 to prove he had never changed his mind about it. The sentence is the first of four things he says he and his brother had held all along: that perfection is this love, that it is received by faith alone, that it is given in a moment, and that it is to be looked for now rather than at death. The section after it takes the standard objection head on, and his answer is that perfection never did exclude ignorance and mistake (T4).

(T5) Where two hearts are right toward God, a difference of opinion is no reason to part. + Wesley took the text for one of his best-known sermons from an odd corner of the Old Testament. Jehu, riding to a bloody piece of business, meets Jehonadab on the road and asks whether his heart is true, and on hearing that it is, reaches down a hand and pulls him into the chariot (2 Kings 10:15). Wesley built a whole doctrine of Christian fellowship out of that gesture, and called it a catholic spirit. "Catholic" here is the old adjective meaning universal or whole, not a reference to the Roman Catholic Church. He was unusually well placed to mean it. He was a high churchman who owed his conversion to German Moravians, worked alongside Calvinists he publicly disagreed with, and was denounced by Anglican bishops and Dissenting pamphleteers alike, the Dissenters being the Protestants who worshipped outside the Church of England rather than within it. So he distinguished, carefully, between opinions and the heart. Every man’s opinions are his own, and he should allow others the same liberty of thinking he wants for himself; but whether a man loves God and his neighbour is a different question, and it can be answered without settling the first one. The care matters, because the sermon is frequently quoted as though Wesley thought doctrine did not matter, and he thought the opposite. He spent his life in controversy, published against Calvinism, against Roman Catholic teaching, against the deists, against those who denied original sin. What he refused was the further step of treating disagreement as a reason to stop calling a man a brother. In the same sermon he says a catholic spirit is not speculative latitudinarianism, an indifference to what is true; it is love that has made up its mind and still holds out a hand.

(Q) "If thine heart is as my heart, if thou lovest God and all mankind, I ask no more: give me thine hand." + Source: John Wesley, Sermon 39, "Catholic Spirit," II.2 (Jackson edition, 1872). Wesley encloses the first and last clauses in quotation marks, since he is quoting his own text from 2 Kings 10:15. The offer comes with a limit stated in the same breath. Give me your hand, Wesley says, does not mean be of my opinion, and it does not mean he will be of yours (T5).

(Q) "Unless the divine power has raised you up to be as Athanasius contra mundum, I see not how you can go through your glorious enterprise in opposing that execrable villainy, which is the scandal of religion, of England, and of human nature." + Source: John Wesley, letter to William Wilberforce, 24 February 1791 (Telford, The Letters of John Wesley, vol. 8). Written six days before his death, it is the last letter of his life. The villainy is the slave trade, and Wilberforce was a young Member of Parliament who had taken up its abolition and was losing. Athanasius contra mundum is Latin for "Athanasius against the world," the phrase attached to the fourth-century bishop who held out for the deity of Christ when most of the empire’s bishops had gone the other way. Wesley is telling a discouraged young man that being outnumbered proves nothing. Wilberforce carried abolition of the trade sixteen years later.

What the Church Made of Him

(†) His small weekly groups became the most copied piece of church machinery in three centuries. + The class meeting has outlived Methodism’s own arrangements. When an evangelical church today puts its people into small groups where they are known, prayed for and asked how they are actually doing, it is running Wesley’s system, usually without knowing whose it is. The same is true of the lay preacher, the circuit rider, and the annual conference of ministers. The scale of what grew from it is easy to underrate. Thomas Coke and Francis Asbury took the American societies and turned them into the Methodist Episcopal Church at Baltimore in December 1784; within seventy years Methodism was the largest Protestant body in the United States, carried west by circuit riders who covered ground the settled churches could not. In Britain, Methodist chapels, Sunday schools and reading rooms did much of the work of educating the industrial poor, and the movement fed directly into the campaigns against the slave trade and, later, into the trade union movement, a good many of whose early leaders had learned to speak in public by preaching in a Methodist pulpit. Its theological children are equally numerous. The nineteenth-century holiness movement grew out of Wesley’s doctrine of entire sanctification (T4), and out of the holiness movement came the Church of the Nazarene, the Salvation Army’s theology of the clean heart, and, at the start of the twentieth century, Pentecostalism, whose founders were mostly Wesleyan by upbringing.

(†) He gave English-speaking Protestants their best-argued alternative to Calvinism, and the argument has never closed. + Before Wesley, an English Protestant who could not accept unconditional election tended to drift toward a thin moralism with no doctrine of grace in it at all. Wesley made the third road usable: a theology as serious about human helplessness and divine initiative as any Calvinist’s, which nevertheless holds that Christ died for everyone and that a man may refuse him. John Fletcher, the Swiss-born vicar of Madeley whom Wesley wanted as his successor, set the case out at length in his Checks to Antinomianism, and that body of argument is where most later Wesleyan theology begins. The controversy was bitter while it lasted. Augustus Toplady, who wrote "Rock of Ages," attacked Wesley in language that is genuinely shocking to read, and Wesley gave back sharply enough. But neither side unchurched the other, that is, neither one declared the other to be outside the Christian faith, and that is the more interesting fact. Whitefield’s Calvinistic Methodists organized themselves separately and went on regarding Wesley’s people as Christians, and the quarrel was buried far enough that Whitefield’s executors asked Wesley to preach the memorial sermon when he died, which Wesley did. Evangelical Protestantism has been arguing about election ever since, and it has largely managed to keep arguing inside one family rather than across a wall. Wesley’s catholic spirit (T5) is a large part of the reason. The Church of England’s own verdict took two centuries to settle. It shut its pulpits to him and refused to ordain men for his American societies; it now commemorates John and Charles Wesley together in its calendar, and Wesley’s complaint against it, that a church can keep its order intact while losing the people, is one it has since spent a great deal of energy answering.

(†) Where his own record earns criticism: the ordination he refused to call a separation, a borrowed pamphlet, and a credulous streak. + Three things in the primary sources are fairly held against him, and all three are his own doing. - The ordinations of 1784. Wesley had argued for decades that a presbyter, meaning an ordinary ordained minister of the sort he was himself, may not ordain anyone, that only a bishop may, and that Methodists must never leave the Church of England. Then he ordained men himself, on the argument that he had satisfied himself bishops and presbyters were originally the same order, and went on insisting that nothing had separated. Charles, who had every right to be heard on it, pressed on him Lord Mansfield’s three words, which his brother would not say: ordination is separation. Whether the necessity in America justified the act is arguable; that Wesley did the thing and denied its meaning is not. - A Calm Address to Our American Colonies (1775). Wesley entered the American quarrel on the government’s side with a pamphlet whose opening pages were lifted, closely and at first without acknowledgment, from Samuel Johnson’s Taxation No Tyranny. Johnson himself did not mind, and Wesley habitually abridged other men’s books for a popular readership. But this was a political tract published under his own name, it was caught almost at once, and it cost him credibility with the American societies he had spent twenty years building. - The invisible world. Wesley believed in witches and apparitions and thought it dangerous not to. His journal for 25 May 1768 argues that the English had given up such accounts as old wives’ fables, that giving up witchcraft is in effect giving up the Bible, and that he would testify against surrendering that proof of an unseen world with his last breath. He printed a home medical handbook, Primitive Physick, that mixed sound advice on diet and exercise with remedies no one should try. He had a scientific curiosity and no consistent way of telling a reliable report from an unreliable one. None of this touches the centre of what he taught, and he would have been the first to say that a man who preaches perfect love is not himself the proof of it. The record is what it is, and putting it down honestly is the same courtesy he showed himself in the journals, where the failures are written out in his own hand.