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Doctors, Demons and Early Methodist Healing

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 March 2016

Henry D. Rack
Henry D. Rack*
Affiliation:
University of Manchester
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Extract

Methodist historians have naturally tended to emphasise the reasonableness and sobriety of their founder and his followers, the social as well as the spiritual benefits they produced. The elements of irrationality and what some will see as religious hysteria in the movement have been played down. Non-methodists have been less reticent. Methodist ‘enthusiasm’ was a popular target in the eighteenth century and the charges made, however one-sided and exaggerated, had a solid basis in fact. They were to be repeated with varying degrees of distaste and disapproval by writers such as Southey; or in more balanced accounts like that of Lecky. Even the sympathetic Alexander Knox who had known Wesley personally, perceptively remarked that ‘he would have been an enthusiast if he could’. Ronald Knox suspected that the rational controls in Wesley’s mind were only superficial: he was easily swayed on supernatural phenomena ‘when the evidence supported views which he wanted to be true’. A taste for religious excitement and credulity about the supernatural were often even more marked among his followers, especially the ordinary membership.

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in Church History , Volume 19: The Church and Healing , 1982 , pp. 137 - 152
Copyright
Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 1982

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References

1 Lavington, George, The Enthusiasm of Methodists and Papists Compared 3 vols (London 1749–51)Google Scholar; Lyles, A. M., Methodism Mocked (London 1960) cap 2.Google Scholar

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21 Monthly Magazine 25 (1807) 401 ; Bennet 20 September 1748.

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23 Bennet 20 September 1748. For healing by rubbing compare Valentine Greatrakes the ‘stroker’ in the 1660s (Thomas pp 240-2).

24 Quoted in Southey 2 p 375.

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48 This was in 1781. There are three accounts of this healing: Wesley, John, Journal, 6 p 495 (12 August 1784)Google Scholar; ‘Some Account of the Life of John Pawson’ (MS in MCA) section 27 (under 1785); AM 16 (1793) pp 144-7.

49 Wesley, Charles, Journal, ed Jackson, T., 2 vols (London n.d.) 1 p 316 Google Scholar; Wesley, John. Journal 4 pp 359–60.Google Scholar

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60 Valton 30 June 1788.

61 As in reply to Warburton and Church (note 40).

62 Bennet 28 June 1749.

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64 For Bell see Wesley, John, Journal 4 pp 535–6, 541-2; 5 p 9Google Scholar; Southey 2 pp 179-84. Coleridge was prepared to acknowledge such causes were possible by ‘imagination’ and ‘regulated friction’ (quoted in Southey 2 p 179n.)

65 Wesley, John Journal 2 pp 136–7.Google Scholar

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67 Even a single case of witchcraft would show supernatural intervention and thereby destroy the deists’ ‘castle in the air’: Wesley, John, Journal 5 p 265.Google Scholar

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70 Welsh harping and singing were said to have declined under methodist influence; The Torrington Diaries ed Andrews, C. B. (London 1934) 1 p 132 Google Scholar, but the recent study by Jenkins, G.H., Literature, Religion and Society in Wales 1660-1730) (Cardiff 1978) pp 306–8 Google Scholar suggests that popular culture and superstition were already being eroded by religious and moral pressures before the revival.