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Seeing Salvation: The Place of Dreams and Visions in John Wesley’s Arminian Magazine
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 March 2016
Extract
On Whitsunday, I went to bed weak in body, but happy in mind. In my sleep, I dreamed that I heard a band of Angels singing around me in a most delightful manner. On this I awoke with my heart full of love, and quite transported. O if a blind world did but feel what I then did, how would They also love and adore the God of their salvation! How would they run in the way of Wisdom, and partake of the felicities of thy chosen!
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References
1 Arminian Magazine x (1787), 192 [hereafter: AM].
2 John Wesley to Samuel Wesley, Jun./November 30, 1738, in The Works of John Wesley, ed. Prank Baker and Richard Heitzenrater, The Bicentennial Edition of the Works of John Wesley [hereafter: BEW], 16 vols ongoing (Oxford and Nashville, TN, 1980-[2003]), 25:594.
3 As far as I am aware there are only four published articles dealing with the AM: Tom Albin, ‘An Empirical Study of Early Methodist Spirituality’, in Theodore Runyon, ed., Wesleyan Theology Today: a Bicentennial Theological Construction (Nashville, TN, 1985), 275–90; Samuel Rogel, ‘John Wesley’s Arminian Magazine’, Andrews University Seminary Studies 22 (1984), 231–47; Margaret Jones, ‘From “The State of My Soul” to “Exalted Piety”: Women’s Voices in the Arminian/Methodist Magazine, 1778–1821’, in R. N. Swanson, ed., Gender and Christian Religion, SCH 34 (Woodbridge, 1998), 273–86; eadem, ‘Some Eighteenth-Century Methodist Theology: the Arminian/Methodist Magazine’, Epworth Review 27 (2000), 8–19. See also George Williams, ‘“The Word came with power”: Print, Oratory, and Methodism in Eighteenth-Century Britain’, unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Maryland, MD, 2002, 142–86.
4 John Wesley, AM vii (1784), n.p.
5 John Rylands University Library of Manchester, Methodist Archives and Research Centre [hereafter: MARC], ‘Book Inventory’, n.p.
6 See the following articles by Randy Maddox: ‘Kingswood School Library Holdings (ca. 1775)’, Methodist History 40 (2002), 342–70; ‘John Wesley’s Reading: Evidence in the Book Collection at Wesley’s House London’, Methodist History 41 (2003), 118–33; ‘John Wesley’s Reading: Evidence in the Kingswood School Archives’, Methodist History 41 (2003), 49–67, and ‘Remnants of John Wesley’s Personal Library’, Methodist History 42 (2004), 122–8.
7 The Letters of the Rev. John Wesley, ed. John Telford, 8 vols (London, 1931), 8: 247.
8 Thordike, Lynn, ‘Ancient and Medieval Dream-Books’, in eadem, A History of Magic and Experimental Science, 8 vols (New York, 1923–58), 7: 290–302 Google Scholar; Lisa M. Bitel, ‘In Visu Noctis: Dreams in European Hagiography and Histories, 450–900’, History of Religions 31 (1991), 39–59; Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse, ‘The Interior Difference: a Brief Genealogy of Dreams, 1650–1717’, Eighteenth-Century Studies 23 (1990), 458–78; Merle Curti, ‘The American Exploration of Dreams and Dreamers’, Journal of the History of Ideas 27 (1966), 391–416; and Mechal Sobel, Teach Me Dreams: the Search for Self in the Revolutionary Era (Princeton, NJ, 2000).
9 John Wesley, ‘Journals and Diaries II (1738–43)’, ed. W. R. Ward and Richard Heitzenrater, BEW 19: 21. See also the first edition of John Wesley’s Works (1774), where this passage is prefaced by an asterisk to highlight the importance of this incident in his young life.
10 John Wesley, ‘Human Life A Dream’, BEW 4: 111.
11 MARC, MAM FI, 5/1/9, ‘Miles Martindale to Mary Fletcher’, Manuscript Letter/ 14 January, 1811.
12 Henry Rack, ‘Early Methodist Visions of the Trinity’, Proceedings of the Wesley Historical Society 46 (1987), 38–44, 57–69. Representations of visions of the Crucified may be found in: John Cennick, The Beatific Vision; or, Beholding Jesus Crucified. Being the Substance of a Discourse Preached in Ballymenagh, in Ireland, in the Year 1755 (3rd edn, London, 1786), 1–19; visions of Judgement can be found in: ‘Sarah Brough via Barnabas Brough’, AM iii (1780), 593–601; and visions of the Trinity in: ‘Letter LXVIII’, an incomplete letter sent to John Wesley by Charles Perronet in May 1772, AM ii (1779), 199–212.
13 AM ii (1779), 299.
14 Ibid.
15 AM ii (1779), 301; See also, John Wesley, ‘Journals’, BEW 18: 240–2.
16 AM ii (1779), 302.
17 Prickett, Stephen, Narrative, Religion and Science: Fundamentalism versus Irony, 1700–1999 (Cambridge, 2002), 136 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
18 Ibid.
19 Ibid.
20 Ibid.
21 AM ii (1779), 309.
22 AM v (1783), 459–60.
23 Daniel Defoe, The History of the Devil, as Well Ancient and Modem: in Two Parts... (2nd edn, London, 1727), 105.
24 For a recent treatment of cunning folk, see Davies, Owen, Cunning-Folk: Popular Magic in English History (London and New York, 2003)Google Scholar.
25 AM iv (1781), 26.
26 See my forthcoming article, ‘Those Distracting Terrors of the Enemy: Demonic Possession and Exorcism in the Thought of John Wesley’, in Jeremy Gregory, ed.,John Wesley. Tercentenary Essays, Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 86–7 (2004), 373–86. See also John Wesley, Journal, BEW 19: 110–11. Wesley also included numerous stories of demonic possession and exorcism in AM. The case of the Yatton demoniac, George Lukins the Bristol tailor, was told in great detail over five different issues in 1789; AM xii (1789), 155–9, 205–10, 264–9, 324–7, and 373–5. John Valton’s account of the exorcism may be found in his manuscript Journal, MARC, ‘The Christian Experience of the Late Rev. John Valton A Clerk in the Ordinance Office Afterwards a Most Zealous Minister in the Late Mr. Wesley’s Connection’, 24.
27 MAR C. John Bennett, ‘Manuscript Notes from the Methodist Conference in Bristol, August 1–2, 1745’, Question 2.16, 30–1.
28 Law, William, A Practical Treatise upon Christian Perfection (London, 1726), 16 Google Scholar.
29 ‘The Sciences Hallowed at the Foot of the Cross, A Dream’, in Augustus Montague Toplady, ed., The Gospel Magazine or Treasury of Divine Knowledge: Designed to Promote Experimental Religion, 10 vols (London, 1774–83), 1: 146–52, 185–8.
30 AM vii (1784), 189.
31 Ibid., 354.
32 John Wesley, Letters I (1721–39), BEW 25: 645–7.
33 MAR C, John Walsh, ‘Ms Letter to Charles Wesley/August 11, 1762’, EMV, 134.
34 Cf. AM iii (1780), 674–6, where John Wesley approvingly quotes a letter from George Bell who described his experience of sanctification; but then Wesley inserted his editorial comment at the end of the letter: ‘Such was George Bell! What is he now?’.
35 Brian Young, ‘Theological Books from The Naked Gospel to Nemesis of Faith’, in Isabel Rivers, ed., Books and their Readers in Eighteenth-Century England: New Essays (London, 2001), 79–104. See also Don Herzog, Poisoning the Minds of the Lower Orders (Princeton, NJ, 1998).
36 For a detailed examination of the philosophes and their attack on the idea of miracles in the Enlightenment, see Jonathan I. Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650–1750 (Oxford, 2001), 218–29.
37 Henry D. Rack, Reasonable Enthusiast: John Wesley and the Rise of Methodism (3rd edn, London, 2003), 350: ‘It is a mistake to dismiss this [the supernatural] as peripheral to Wesley’s teaching and mission. It is fully in line with his general outlook, and could indeed be justified as an aspect of the same design as his histories and science: to show God’s presence and action in the world to sceptics’.
38 Eclectic Notes: or, Notes of Discussions on Religious Topics at the Meetings of The Eclectic Society, London, during the Years 1798–1814, ed. Josiah Pratt (2nd edn, London, 1865), 84–5.
39 Rack, Reasonable Enthusiast, 338.