JRUL

John Rylands University Library, Manchester

MARC

Methodist Archives and Research Centre

John Henry Newman's critical comment to his sister Jemima in January 1837 on a biography of the reputed founder of Methodism published in 1820Footnote ² by one of the giants of literary Romanticism, whose work Newman might have been expected to appreciate,Footnote ³ is surprising. Moreover, Newman's criticism of Wesley for ‘exceeding self-confidence … black self-will’ and ‘a bitterness of religious passion, which is very unamiable’,Footnote ⁴ might seem unexpected given later attempts to portray Newman himself as the culturally familiar figure of the religious enthusiast, in short the very character with which had Southey invested John Wesley. Were they not two of a kind?Footnote ⁵ What was it that prompted Newman's disapprobation? Was it disapproval of John Wesley or disapproval of Southey's literary method and approach, or both? Historical context is also provided by analysis of observations made on Southey's work by a forerunner of the Oxford Movement whom the Tractarian Newman admired, the Irish High Church layman, mystic and recluse Alexander Knox (1757–1831),Footnote ⁶ and by the hostile response to Southey's biography from various Methodist biographical keepers of the Wesley inheritance as well as from mainstream Anglican commentators. However, for all his misgivings about Wesley, Newman accepted that the Methodist movement had profoundly influenced society for the better.Footnote ⁷

Any biographer of John Wesley would be vulnerable to offending the sensitivities, filial devotion and loyalty of his erstwhile followers in the Methodist movement. Few of the first generation of biographers escaped censure or even indignation from this quarter. There was also an unseemly competition between those who were deemed most competent to perform the task. Within months of her uncle's death in 1791, Sally Wesley, John Wesley's niece and Charles's daughter, remarked sadly on ‘some unpleasant altercations between the writers of my uncle's life’.Footnote ⁸ Sally was scathing in her condemnation of two of the early biographies of her uncle, the short notice by Colet and the much fuller study by Hampson.Footnote ⁹ She was especially indignant with Hampson whom she felt had owed her late uncle much. She lamented that ‘excepting honesty, and contempt of wealth, he allows my uncle, no one virtue, not even pity: and breathes out vile suspicion in decent phrase’. However, she looked forward to the forthcoming life by Whitehead.Footnote ¹⁰ He would do justice to her uncle, though she felt that even he had limitations as a writer: ‘He is a man of learning & understanding – perhaps too little vigour, and talents inadequate for Biography, but of one thing there is certainty. Truth and candour joined.’Footnote ¹¹

Whitehead's biography became something of a bench mark by which other biographical productions would be judged by the Evangelical world, though it was Henry Moore (after a dispute with Whitehead) who produced the first official biography of Wesley in 1792 over his and Thomas Coke's names.Footnote ¹²

Southey himself was aware that his two-volume Life of Wesley would attract critical notice. He attributed this, perhaps complacently, to his essential even-handedness. As he confided to his friend Grosvenor Bedford, ‘It is written with too fair a spirit to satisfy any particular set of men.’ He claimed prophetically that ‘For the “religious public” it will be too tolerant and too philosophical; for the Liberals it will be too devotional; the Methodists will not endure any censure of their founder and their institutions; the high Churchman will as little be able to allow any praise of them.’Footnote ¹³ In his conclusion to the biography Southey appeared to make good his claim to even-handedness. However, his final judgement on Wesley and his movement would have struck Evangelical contemporaries as damning with faint praise:

Southey noted with amusement that an anonymous reviewer in the Monthly Magazine had accused him of propagating ‘secret, and insidious and poisonous doctrines’, while a reviewer in the Evangelical Magazine was particularly hostile.Footnote ¹⁵ However, most contemporary reviewers and commentators, even his many Methodist critics, credited Southey as poet laureate for the facility and eloquence of his literary and narrative style and they also acknowledged the close attention that he had paid to the sources at his disposal. This was to be expected in the author of an acclaimed Life of Nelson. A Moravian commentator, William Okely, was particularly complimentary, commending Southey's combination ‘of the skill of the historian’, with ‘the sagacity of the poet’.Footnote ¹⁶ Methodist reviewers were only marginally less commendatory of Southey's literary skill. Thus, in his Observations on Southey's Life of Wesley (1820) the Wesleyan Methodist divine Richard Watson conceded that ‘the facts and incidents’ of Wesley's life had been ‘collected with diligence’ and that ‘the narrative is creditable to the literary character of the writer’.Footnote ¹⁷ There was also generous acknowledgment in this quarter as to Southey's ‘candour’, and a recognition that ‘he has ventured to say more in praise of the character and public usefulness of Mr Wesley, than will be found in most publications of the kind, not emanating from persons connected with the Wesleyan Society’.Footnote ¹⁸ However, this was as much as Southey's Methodist critics could concede. The otherwise critical, if not hostile, reaction was based on a repudiation of the value judgements and interpretation that Southey employed in his biography.

Southey's two main charges against John Wesley were that on the one hand he was motivated by power and ambition with a desire to control his followers and on the other that he suffered from religious ‘enthusiasm’ and self-delusion.Footnote ¹⁹ Southey was profoundly sceptical as to the veracity and trustworthiness of accounts of early Methodist conversions and miracles. In something of the spirit of Bishop Lavington, author of the notorious Enthusiasm of Methodists and papists compared (1749), Southey was critical of the ‘extravagancies of the Methodists’,Footnote ²⁰ and Wesley's ‘amazing credulity whenever a work of grace was announced’.Footnote ²¹ He likened supposed Methodist conversions and miracles as produced in similar circumstances to those that figured in Roman Catholic examples such as the cases of St Norbert, and St Francis Borgia.Footnote ²² Southey was particularly critical of what he regarded as the baneful anti-social and fanatical manners and effects produced by Methodism,Footnote ²³ and singled out for scorn Wesley's notions concerning education and the conduct of his school at Kingswood (‘no man was ever more thoroughly ignorant of the nature of children’Footnote ²⁴).

A recurrent theme in Methodist reviews of his work was Southey's apparent lack of theological qualifications to write a biography of someone such as Wesley. In a new edition of his own very different Life of Wesley, Henry Moore used the preface as an opportunity to assail Southey's work, while taking comfort from the fact while it was already having an extensive sale, it had come ‘a little too late to do much harm’.Footnote ²⁵ In fact, Southey did have a reputation for religious heterodoxy to live down and one which inevitably coloured perceptions of his biography of Wesley.

By the 1800s Southey had abandoned his youthful political and religious radicalism.Footnote ²⁶ He had also moderated, at least publicly, his religious Unitarianism, though there is evidence that he remained privately unorthodox for a much longer period than is sometimes assumed.Footnote ²⁷ As late as 1803, Southey privately confided that he was ‘a believer’ but only ‘upon the Socinian or low Arian ground’,Footnote ²⁸ and retained scruples against subscribing to the Anglican Thirty-Nine Articles.Footnote ²⁹ His new-found churchmanship was primarily political and constitutional, rather than strictly doctrinal.Footnote ³⁰ As Southey embraced political conservatism and the church establishment, however, he acquired new enemies. Methodism had come in for his private censure by 1800, with the assertion that there was ‘a war between our old Clergy and these fanatics’.Footnote ³¹ Southey's anti-Evangelical stance had been well exemplified in a vitriolic review article in the Annual Review for 1802, in anticipation of which he had privately rejoiced ‘that I am going to blow the Trumpet of alarm against the Evangelicals’.Footnote ³² In that review, ostensibly of the Methodist William Myles's A chronological history of the people called Methodists (1801), Southey had claimed that Methodism was ‘a system which must necessarily darken the understanding, deaden the moral feeling, and defile the imagination; its immediate object to destroy the church establishment … The Church of England is in danger’.Footnote ³³

In the climate of reaction against the French Revolution, Southey deliberately played upon contemporary fears of a ‘Jacobinical’ subversion of order and deference in society, going so far as to label the highly organised Methodists as ‘the Ecclesiastical Corresponding Society’.Footnote ³⁴ For Southey, ‘religious enthusiasm’ was a species of political subversion as well as irrational. Methodism was roundly condemned on both grounds and, despite the anti-Calvinism of its Wesleyan branch, was described by Southey in the Quarterly Review in 1809 as ‘the least attractive and most irrational of any form of Christianity'.Footnote ³⁵ ‘Enthusiasm’ was clearly a bugbear for Southey. His brilliant Letters from England by Don Manuel Alvarez Espriella (1807) had an imaginary Spanish visitor detailing, with unlikely insight for a foreigner, every manifestation of religious enthusiasm in England.Footnote ³⁶ Southey's critique of what he perceived as the excesses of Protestant Dissent and Evangelical religiosity, Wesley included, also found full vent in an article on the ‘History of Dissenters’ in the Quarterly Review in 1813.Footnote ³⁷

A new moderation of tone, however, was evident in Southey's surprisingly sympathetic account of John Wesley in a series of articles in The Correspondent in 1817.Footnote ³⁸ It was a shift of attitude which has been attributed to Southey's contact in the intervening period with the Evangelical philanthropist and opponent of the slave trade William Wilberforce, a process aided by Southey's own commitment to the anti-slavery cause.Footnote ³⁹ None the less, Southey's religious credentials remained deeply suspect in Methodist and Evangelical circles. Sally Wesley was privately unimpressed by Southey's memoir as it appeared in The Correspondent, referring to it as an ‘invidious sketch of the life of my revered uncle’. She was temporarily assuaged by a mollifying letter from Southey paying tribute to her uncle and denying any intention of harming his reputation. Southey had made clear his willingness to allow the family to check the manuscript of any of his future writings on Wesley. This only made Sally Wesley the more indignant when a second number of The Correspondent was published, in which Sally complained that Southey had insinuated that ‘impulses are the essence of Methodism’, that her uncle ‘arrogated more power than any pope ever did’ and that his prayers ‘often savoured of presumption’. For Sally Wesley, such comments were not offset by Southey's recognition ‘that our honoured ancestor was a great and good man’. After this, Sally privately declared that the family would have nothing to do with Southey's project and would not endorse any future biography. In a letter to the prominent Wesleyan Methodist Joseph Benson, she complained of Southey's ‘illiberality’, ‘vulgarity of style’ and mockery of ‘sacred emotions’, declaring that ‘the man has no idea of vital Christianity, and for a deviant Jacobin to write the life of a saint, must expose him to the censure of moralists as well as Christians’. Sally could not resist blackening Southey's character, suggesting that it was well known that he had changed his political opinions for a pension, and that he had been trying to support his earlier radical publication, Wat Tyler.Footnote ⁴⁰

This did not augur well for the reception of Southey's biography three years later. Sally Wesley, perhaps not surprisingly, was highly critical of the ‘illiberality’, ‘unfair representations’ and ‘want of respect with which the whole work abounds’.Footnote ⁴¹ Henry Moore summed up the feeling of the Evangelical world on the appearance of the Life: ‘It has indeed been generally acknowledged, by competent judges of religious biography, that the names of WESLEY and SOUTHEY were never designed to be joined together in the same sentence.’Footnote ⁴² Similarly, Moore's fellow Wesleyan Methodist Richard Watson bluntly declared that ‘The life of Wesley was not a subject for the pen of Southey.’Footnote ⁴³ Both Watson and Moore argued that Southey's was biased by the sour residue of an earlier rationalist, if not unChristian, outlook. Watson adopted the literary device of patronising Southey by damning with the faint praise that he was a theological novice only slowly shedding earlier irreligious prejudice: ‘Educated, as it is reported, in the Socinian school; afterwards allured further from the truth by the glare of a false philosophy, he has corrected many of his former errors, and is now a professed orthodox member of the Church of England. I am happy to see him in that fold.’ Watson could not resist a further barb: ‘but his views are yet too dim, and his theological attainments far too scanty, to give him a right to all that authority which he claims on many of those vital and solemn subjects which he derides with so censurable a confidence’.Footnote ⁴⁴ In short, Southey had ‘no general principles’ to ‘guide him in his estimate of Mr Wesley's conduct and character’. He was ‘constantly vacillating between the philosopher and the Christian; but unhappily the tendency to philosophise most frequently predominates’.

Southey simply did not understand the spiritual framework within which Wesley acted: ‘Devotional feelings are resolved into constitutional habits; joys and depressions into buoyancy of spirits, and the influence of disease.’Footnote ⁴⁵ Watson concluded rhetorically: ‘Is Mr Southey a believer in Christianity?’ If he was, then he had to believe in the operation of the Holy Spirit overriding mere human agency.Footnote ⁴⁶ The implication was that Southey did not. Watson argued that the impression left by Southey's work was as ‘unfavourable to Christianity itself’ as to the Methodist Society.Footnote ⁴⁷ Southey's Unitarianism, though now disguised but still privately evident as late as 1812, certainly made him vulnerable to criticisms from the standpoint of orthodox Christianity.

Henry Moore was anxious to rebut Southey's allegation of Wesley being motivated by ambition and ascribed it to an apparent ‘deplorable ignorance of evangelical truth’.Footnote ⁴⁸ This appeal to Southey's theological ‘darkness’ and ignorance had the advantage of also rebutting his other claim, that Wesley suffered from the ‘mental disease’ of religious ‘enthusiasm’. It allowed Moore to make the ‘Evangelical’ theological argument that Wesley's doctrine of ‘Christian perfection’, which Southey so vehemently decried, meant that there was a supernatural religious explanation for Wesley's course which lay outside Southey's comprehension.

Moore accepted that religious ambition was ‘the worst of all hypocrisy’, so that if Southey was correct then Wesley really was a hypocrite. However, for Moore, Southey's charge was self-evidence

Moore took exception to what he regarded as the patronising character of Southey's compliments of Wesley as when he suggested that the Methodist leader could have become the founder of an order or even General of the Jesuits had he been in the Roman Catholic Church.Footnote ⁵⁰ For Moore, this represented a misunderstanding of Wesley's spiritual motivation. Echoing Watson's charge, Moore argued that Southey was in danger of following the sceptical approach of the historians Hume and Gibbon.Footnote ⁵¹

Methodist critics of Southey's biography also focused on the poet's apparent repudiation of certain distinctive but contested Protestant doctrines and emphases which John Wesley was regarded on all sides as having revived and which were integral to the wider Evangelical Revival of the eighteenth century. Alongside the charge of Southey's rationalising leanings (an apparent leftover from his earlier ‘Socinianism’), Methodist critics faulted the biographer for failing to understand the nature of Wesley's conversion as involving a new understanding of justification by faith alone. According to Watson, Wesley's representation of this cardinal Reformation doctrine promulgated by Martin Luther and Wesley's advocacy of the doctrine of the ‘New Birth’ in the Holy Spirit, served as a necessary corrective to his earlier spiritual guides such as Jeremy Taylor, Thomas à Kempis and William Law. For Watson, the latter were all ‘greatly defective in those views of faith and atonement, which alone can give peace to a penitent and troubled spirit’.Footnote ⁵² As Watson observed of Southey, ‘He may think the doctrine of justification by faith fanatical, yet it was not until after Mr Wesley's acquaintance with the Moravians commenced, that he came fully to understand the view taken of the subject by the Church of which he was a clergyman.’Footnote ⁵³

In his final survey of the ‘manners and effects of Methodism’, Southey had conceded that the church establishment had been to some extent strengthened by Methodism, though his compliment was backhanded. He argued that ‘the progress of Wesley's disciples has been beneficial to our Establishment, exciting in many of the parochial clergy the zeal which was wanting. Where the clergy exert themselves, the growth of Methodism is checked; and perhaps it may be said to be most useful where it is least successful’.Footnote ⁵⁴ Southey was even optimistic that Methodism might return within the umbrella of the Established Church:

None the less, for all these hopes (false as they were to prove), the broad thrust of Southey's argument was to blame Methodism for weakening the church establishment. Methodist reviewers of Southey's Life were clearly sensitive to Southey's charge that Wesley, for all his protestations of Anglican loyalty, in practice encouraged schism by breaching the bonds of church order and discipline, and still more to the suggestion of political insubordination.

In his final conclusion, Southey had suggested that the ‘wide-spreading schism’ to which the Methodist movement had led posed a challenge to the welfare of the country which was ‘vitally connected with its church-establishment’. This had been for some years a familiar trope in Southey's writings. During the 1810s and 1820s, Southey was one of the most uncompromising defenders of the Established Church as an integral support of the Protestant constitution. Political power and laws depended on its safety. For Southey, the historical spectre of seventeenth-century Puritanism was reignited by his sense of the contemporary threat posed by Dissent, which he regarded as its heir, in the wake of the French Revolution;Footnote ⁵⁶ a threat linked in his mind to a parallel one from Roman Catholic political claims. It was an argument which he was to make still more explicit in 1824 in his two-volume panegyric on the Church of England as a bulwark against Puritanism and popery, The book of the Church, in which, as Sheridan Gilley observes, Southey portrayed ‘the British constitution as the embodiment of the holy ghost, and God an English Tory’.Footnote ⁵⁷ Even in 1820 Southey was able to conjure up the spectre of Jacobinism and to link religious sectarianism with ‘diseased political opinions’.Footnote ⁵⁸

As a corollary of the Methodist charge against Southey that he had a defective grasp of fundamental Evangelical Protestant doctrines such as justification by faith, the complaint was thus made that Southey judged Wesley too much from what Methodist critics regarded as the narrow perspective of establishmentarianism and rigid Anglican churchmanship. Southey's Methodist critics appeared unaware that this particular verdict (that Southey was too rigid a churchman to understand Wesley) sat uneasily with, and somewhat contradicted, their own other line of criticism that Southey was insufficiently Christian, if not doctrinally heterodox or a ‘closet’ Socinian, and also overlooked the rigidity of Wesley's own early High Churchmanship. Moreover, while the cause of Christianity and Wesleyan Methodism were conveniently conflated to use as a standard by which to criticise Southey's production, this did not prevent his Methodist critics from blaming Southey for assuming that the cause of Christianity in general and Anglican churchmanship were identical. Thus, Southey's judgement was ‘wavering’ and unsteady' precisely because when Southey assumed ‘something of the character of a Christian’, it was, as Richard Watson put it,

Watson concluded that Wesley could only be tried by other laws, in fact, by the Bible alone.Footnote ⁶⁰ In short, criticism of Wesley on grounds of breaching the laws and canons of the Church of England was ‘off limits’, or if relevant, could be justified by broader scriptural principles and an overriding Gospel imperative.

Dissatisfaction with Southey's biography, and also an awareness of the limitations (in terms of length and complexity of detail) of earlier Methodist biographies, led many Methodists to push for a concise and popular book written from their own point of view and which could be placed in the hands of members of their societies. The result was Richard Watson's biography of Wesley published in 1831.Footnote ⁶¹ However, not all of Southey's Evangelical reviewers had found fault with his treatment of the wider Evangelical movement. William Okely was complimentary of Southey for doing full justice to the role and importance of Moravianism in the story of Wesley's religious journey. As he put it, ‘No part of your life of Wesley is conducted with more historical talent, than that, in which you paint how Methodism came to be engrafted upon the newly-revived Church of the Brethren.’Footnote ⁶² Okely felt that contemporary Methodists did not sufficiently acknowledge the role that Moravianism had played in shaping Wesley's evolving theology, and that consequently Southey had done a great service.

Reviews of Southey's work from non-Evangelical Anglicans unsurprisingly struck a still more positive note. One of the most significant and perceptive was an anonymous review, more than fifty pages in length, of Southey's Life of Wesley, in the influential Tory periodical the Quarterly Review for October 1820. The author can be identified as Reginald Heber, hymn-writer and missionary bishop, a friend of Southey (Southey composed an Ode following Heber's early death in 1826). Much of Heber's review, as was customary, was a survey of the subject of the biography rather than discussion of the merits of the biography itself. Heber essentially restated Southey's own justification for his writing a life of Wesley, even using some of Southey's own words. There was a perceived need to advance beyond Wesleyan hagiography. As Heber, who was himself not unsympathetic to Evangelicalism, put it,

Heber lamented the way in which even the heroic efforts of religious reformers had provoked jealousy, dissension and faction, not least between the followers of Whitefield and Wesley over the disputed doctrines of grace, free will and predestination. He implied that Southey had been right to shed light on the many ‘incidental bad consequences’ to which Methodism had given rise, not least in regard to religious establishments. In contrast to Southey's Methodist reviewers, Heber extolled his qualifications for undertaking a biography of Wesley, insisting that he had a deep practical knowledge of human nature and of ‘psychology’, and was ‘better read than most men now living in the general history of the church, and of those remarkable men who hold their place in its annals, either as saints or heresiarchs’. For Heber, Southey could match Bishop Lavington's learning but applied that learning ‘in a wiser and more Christian temper, to the explanation of the distinctive features of Methodism, and the discrimination of its good and evil’. Far from being prejudiced against or unfair to Wesley and his movement, Heber acknowledged that some of his readers would ‘think him too partial to his hero’, though this was ‘the most natural and venial fault to which a biographer is liable’. Heber reassured such potential critics that Southey's ‘partiality’ for Wesley, had not ‘blinded him to the enthusiasm and love of power which divided Wesley's character, and too often perverted the application and usefulness of talents and virtues which have been seldom surpassed’.Footnote ⁶⁴ Most of Heber's review comprised a not unsympathetic survey of Wesley's own life and labours. Like Southey, he was critical of Wesley's equivocations with Edmund Gibson, bishop of London, and for his not facing up to ‘his inconsistency in professing himself a member of the Church of England while so many of his measures tended to overturn her authority’.Footnote ⁶⁵ However, his message was clear: Southey had performed a great service in combining due recognition and admiration of Wesley's many virtues, while pointing to the supreme dangers of a lack of Christian prudence – for showing, ‘that strife once begun, in however trifling instances, has a tendency to enlarge the breach, till what was at first dispute, becomes at length division’.Footnote ⁶⁶

It was Alexander Knox, a self-styled ‘primitive churchman’, however, who provided the most searching and nuanced review of Southey's biography of Wesley. Knox provided the review which Southey took the most seriously to the extent of allowing Knox's ‘Remarks on the life and character of John Wesley’ to be appended to later editions of his Life of Wesley. Knox gave a mildly sympathetic corrective to Southey's analysis in Wesley's favour, clearing him of all suggestions of ambition and arguing that Wesley had always viewed any ‘power’ or authority which he acquired as a ‘providential deposit’.Footnote ⁶⁷ He extolled Wesley's moral integrity and defended him from the charge of ‘enthusiasm’. For Knox, Wesley was an ‘enthusiast for religion’ in the same way that ‘Nelson was an enthusiast for his country’. He was not a ‘vulgar enthusiast’.Footnote ⁶⁸

Unlike Watson, Moore and others, Knox had no apparent self-interest or party allegiance in mounting his defence of Wesley. On the contrary, Knox asserted that he had ‘no more sympathy with Mr Wesley in his decided peculiarities than (I might almost say) Mr Southey himself’.Footnote ⁶⁹ Moreover, Knox remained at odds with Wesley on several key theological points, notably Wesley's belief that a state of Christian perfection could be attained on this earth and his doctrine of assurance connected to the direct witness of the Holy Spirit, though insisted that Wesley modified and ‘softened down’ the doctrine as he grew ‘older, cooler, and wiser’.Footnote ⁷⁰ Knox offered a more subtle critique of Wesley's theology than that provided by Southey. For Knox the High Churchman, growth in holiness must ever be gradual and sometimes painful, ‘conversion’ very rarely being instantaneous. Knox's warnings about the ‘delusive tendency’ of Wesley's emphasis on sensible conversion, the ‘new birth’ and Christian perfection, when these were taken up by Wesley's ill-educated followers, were in tune with Southey's own analysis.

Typical of the effect which a craving for perfection could have on the part of Wesley's followers was the Irish Methodist convert John Walsh's later avowal to Charles Wesley of his ‘great mistake’ being that ‘I should sin no more, because the propensity to sin would be taken away, so as never to return.’Footnote ⁷¹ However, in private, Knox was prepared to be much more critical of Southey, and to dismiss such examples as excesses for which Wesley himself was not responsible, even echoing Southey's Methodist critics, in arguing that Southey, ‘seems to have gone particularly beyond his depth, when he so severely censures John Wesley's doctrine of Christian perfection’.Footnote ⁷²

On this, as on other points, in his published ‘Remarks’, Knox was less inclined to exonerate Wesley so completely as he was in private to his Evangelical friend Hannah More. He regretted that Wesley relied so much on the stirring up of ‘sensible excitement’ in his followers and lamented that Wesley, once he had entered on his course, ‘neither understood the energies he was exerting, nor the effects he was producing’.Footnote ⁷³ However, Knox pointed out that in later life Wesley mitigated the extravagance of his earlier positions on the doctrines of the new birth in the spirit, assurance and Christian perfection. He noted that Wesley's own practice was always a safeguard in his own case of any ill-consequences of such doctrines. Knox also defended Wesley's motives in setting Thomas Coke apart by imposition of hands to be ‘superintendent’ of his societies in North America with the intention of his ordaining Francis Asbury. None the less, he deplored Wesley's inconsistency on the issue of ordination and cited it as evidence that Wesley's ‘reasoning faculty had greatly failed’. Knox only qualified Southey's argument that Wesley readily allowed himself to be persuaded by his preachers in his last years to take actions that drew him from allegiance to the Established Church. Knox did not deny the loosening of ties which such actions involved but merely insisted that Wesley ‘was infinitely more “sinned against than sinning”’.Footnote ⁷⁴

Knox concluded that Wesley and Wesleyan Methodism had played a providential role in the revival of ‘vital religion’, and warmly commended Southey for regarding Wesley's career as part of ‘the development of the great scheme of Providence’.Footnote ⁷⁵ Unlike Southey, Knox went so far as to assert that the Wesleyan movement had been able ‘to supply a defect for which the Church of England had not provided’ and which it was inadequate to provide.Footnote ⁷⁶ On the other hand, Knox was at one with Southey in suggesting that Methodism in Wesley's hands was never a coherent scheme of doctrinal theory but essentially one of devotional excitement.Footnote ⁷⁷ Practical Christianity, consisting solely of powerful principles and purified affections, became everything for Wesley. It was in Knox's view an imbalanced emphasis that undermined a consistent theological system and ecclesiology. Thus, the Wesleyan movement was to betray the strengths and weakness of an eclectic theological inheritance. Knox was here making essentially the same point explored by Reginald Heber who argued that, for all Wesley's skills as an acute logician and forceful and acute writer, ‘the doctrines which he most anxiously insisted on through life, were not only incapable of being moulded into any consistent system, but were, many of them, in direct opposition to each other’.Footnote ⁷⁸

While Wesley's doctrine of assurance had a Calvinistic tendency, that of Christian perfection had a tendency towards mysticism or even antinomianism, both trends being checked only by Wesley the logician and Wesley the practitioner of ‘holy living’. Moreover, while the dogmas of Calvin were completely rejected, there was ‘seldom an equal exemption from the opposite excesses of Pelagius in earlier, or of Episcopius in later times’.Footnote ⁷⁹

Alexander Knox was a distinguished lay theologian and master of the eirenical overture. These traits were evident in the way in which he steered a path between Wesley and his biographer Southey. While appearing to clear his old mentor Wesley from personal weaknesses, Knox actually made a more devastating critique of Wesleyan theology than Southey had attempted. He made clear that his observations were not intended as a broad critique of Southey's biography. On the contrary, Knox commenced by declaring that ‘I could not enumerate the instances in which I was gratified, and sometimes even delighted, at the justice done by Mr Southey to the character of Mr Wesley's mind, and the motives of his singular course of action.’Footnote ⁸⁰ All that was lacking in Southey's biography, according to Knox, was the lack of sympathy and understanding which only direct personal knowledge and contact might have supplied: ‘I have often felt the strongest persuasion that if Mr Southey had known Mr Wesley as I knew him, his estimate of the feelings which contracted and modified Mr Wesley's extraordinary course, would have somewhat differed from that which Mr Southey's more remote view of his subject led him naturally, or rather necessarily, to form.’Footnote ⁸¹

In Knox's much trumpeted recovery of Wesley's personal reputation as religious reformer and leader, it is easy to miss the note of theological criticism. Southey could have felt vindicated. In short, Knox probed where Southey had not, even while appearing to come to the rescue of John Wesley's religious reputation for posterity. His was precisely the kind of theologically subtle, systematic and analytical review of Wesley's theology which Newman found wanting in Southey's biography. Knox's treatment made the later Southey anxious to make peace with his erstwhile Methodist critics. Southey later made clear to Richard Watson that Knox had ‘convinced me that I was mistaken in supposing ambition entered largely into Mr Wesley's actuating impulses’. Still more significant was Southey's additional comment to Watson: ‘The Wesleyan leaders never committed a greater mistake than when they treated me as an enemy.’Footnote ⁸² One can concur with Roy Hattersley's view, in relation to Knox's ‘explanation’ of Wesley's conflicting affections as the reason for his inconsistency on the subject of the American ordinations, that it was a pity that Knox's judgement, instead of influencing Southey's whole work, only appeared at its conclusion as an annexe.Footnote ⁸³ Yet while a close reading of Knox's published ‘Remarks’ reveals sympathy for Southey's line, Knox's readiness to be more critical of Southey and defensive of Wesley in his private correspondence with Hannah More, is significant.Footnote ⁸⁴ Without denying that there were ‘embarrassing particulars’ in the history of Methodism which Southey could not have been expected to leave out, in his letter to More Knox appeared at times to approach the position of Moore and Watson in lamenting that ‘he treats the objectionable features of Methodism rather with a half sceptical ridicule than with sober animadversion’.Footnote ⁸⁵ Yet as Knox made clear to More in a separate letter, Wesley's followers were ‘as little capable of doing him justice as Mr Southey himself’. For Knox, Wesleyan Methodists estimated Wesley too much ‘by the work he did in founding and organising their body’.Footnote ⁸⁶ In contrast, Knox preferred to rest Wesley's spiritual greatness ‘in his individual capacity’, especially his union of depth and cheerfulness as exhibited in his Christian piety.Footnote ⁸⁷ Insofar as Southey discerned this, then he had got close to understanding ‘the real Wesley’.

In conclusion, the varied reactions to Southey's Life of Wesley reveal the divisive and contentious nature of religious biography in the age in which it was composed. While religious biographies had long had a hagiographical tendency to celebrate their subjects as spiritual exemplars, by the 1820s High Church Anglican critics of Evangelical religiosity were increasingly sensitive to religious ‘party’ bias in Evangelical examples of the genre. As one Anglican High Churchman complained a few years later, ‘the self-styled Religious Press is unwearied in the publication of Church Histories, falsely so called, and the biography of learned and pious men is now frequently used as a means only of conveying and recommending the devotional opinion of their respective annalists. But the injury thus done to the cause of religion is irreparable’.Footnote ⁸⁸ It was in this religious climate that Southey's Wesley came to be judged on publication.

Given the increasingly contested nature of religious biography, and the tendency for religious biography to wear confessional blinkers,Footnote ⁸⁹ as well as Southey's known antipathy to Evangelicalism (he actually coined the term ‘Dysvangelical’ and even attributed his first wife's madness to her listening to Calvinist Evangelical sermons), just why did he write the Life? Southey's enemy Lord Byron had one answer when he mocked him for being prepared to write anybody's biography. In fact, Southey was selective about whom and what he would write and was clearly fascinated by Wesley. While he had always hitherto appeared to lack sympathy with the metaphysical and supernatural, as his anti-Catholic strictures bore witness, his genuine interest in the phenomenon of religious enthusiasm and not merely financial reasons was sufficient motivation. Roy Hattersley regards Southey's Life as ‘by the standards of the nineteenth century, unusually sceptical’,Footnote ⁹⁰ thus replicating contemporary Methodist criticism. However, it was much less ‘sceptical’ than such critics acknowledged. The later Southey increasingly shared Wesley's sense of a guiding ‘special’ providence and he has been rightly presented as being part of that ‘mystical backlash’ against the Age of Reason and Revolution characteristic of the 1820s and 1830s.Footnote ⁹¹ Southey's social paternalism, humanitarianism and distaste for political economy was in tune with Wesley's attitudes towards the poor and poor relief. There was also a growing realisation on Southey's part, reflected in the opening pages of the Life, that in his day Wesley upheld the ‘conservative’ principles of society and stood in welcome contrast to the ‘arch-infidel’ Voltaire in France.Footnote ⁹² Such factors may help account for its relative freedom from the more virulent anti-Methodism that had sometimes surfaced in his earlier prose.

While Southey's biography may have had theological limitations,Footnote ⁹³ as a ‘popular account of a most remarkable moral revolution’ as well as for its literary qualities it earned the praise of Lord Macaulay who pronounced that Southey's Life of Wesley ‘will probably live’.Footnote ⁹⁴ Macaulay's judgement has stood the test of time. Indeed an Anglican biographer of Wesley in 1886 argued not only that after half a century Southey's Life ‘still holds its place as a deeply interesting, and on the whole a trustworthy book’ and that it was ‘one of the most justly popular biographies known to English readers’ but that that the passage of time had only further established ‘the surpassing merit of the work’.Footnote ⁹⁵ Recent commentators have agreed with this verdict. The American Methodist scholar, the late Albert Outler, pronounced Southey's Life ‘the most distinguished literary monument to Wesley’.Footnote ⁹⁶

Southey's work was particularly rich in psychological insight into states of mind and did full justice to the more ‘Pentecostal’ dimension of early Methodist piety. Southey's abiding interest in the nature of religious enthusiasm also led him to produce a study of the Evangelical poet William Cowper and even led him to contemplate writing biographies of St Ignatius Loyola and of George Foxe, the founders of the Society of Jesus and the Society of Friends respectively. Southey's fascination with Roman Catholic spirituality probably encouraged his interest in Wesley and helped to underline his awareness of its echoes in early Methodism. It also enabled him to transcend the crudity of the stock-in-trade comparisons drawn by Bishop Lavington.

The more candid and sympathetic of Southey's reviewers recognised the near impossibility of his satisfying a consensus of readers and that nothing short of hagiography would have sufficed for Wesleyan Methodist critics. As Reginald Heber put it in his review

Southey's task was complicated by the fact that his was not merely a biography of an individual but an historical record of a living religious movement. He was also vulnerable to the scorn of surviving members of the Wesley family, notably Sally Wesley, should he adopt less than an unqualified reverential tone. Moreover, Southey's guiding idea that Wesley was an enthusiast with an ambition to form a great religious sect, attracted criticism from even a non-Methodist biographer who was prepared to attack Henry Moore for ‘a bitter and unreasoning dislike to Southey’.Footnote ⁹⁸ None the less, Southey's praise for Wesley the man outweighed the misgivings that he expressed about the theological system and structure that he had created. Even Methodist reviewers grudgingly acknowledged Southey's relatively generous assessment of Wesley as an individual and concentrated their criticism on Southey's negative verdict on Wesley's theology and of the wider movement which was his legacy. As Moore complained, ‘Mr Southey, whatever he may have intended, has written to pull down the faith, though he exalts the man.’Footnote ⁹⁹ None the less, time is a great healer and Southey's own modifications of his earlier views on Wesley and Methodism and readiness to be ‘corrected’ by Alexander Knox helped the process. Later generations of Methodist historians such as Luke Tyerman and John Telford took a much more positive view of Southey's biography. While Tyerman could still criticise Southey for suggesting that Wesley ‘encouraged’ ‘every kind of extravagance’ when once convinced that an individual experienced the doctrine of ‘the new birth’,Footnote ¹⁰⁰ he was happy to cite Southey's tribute to Wesley as having the most influential mind of the eighteenth century and as one who ‘will have produced the greatest effects, centuries, or perhaps milleniums hence’.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Telford, writing at the end of the nineteenth century, could refer to ‘Southey's beautiful and appreciative Life of Wesley’, generously recognising that Southey had allowed himself to be overruled by Alexander Knox on his cardinal accusation of Wesley's ‘ambition’.Footnote ¹⁰² None the less, criticism of Southey's biography for misunderstanding both Wesley and Methodism due to an ‘utter inability to understand evangelical and experimental religion’, and defences of Southey against this charge, persisted.Footnote ¹⁰³

A sense of historical perspective is today deemed conditional upon historical distance in time, as a perquisite for successful historiography or biographical history. However, in the case of John Wesley such a perspective was for a long time obscured by the nineteenth-century evolution of the ‘Wesley legend’ and ‘living’ religious nature of Wesley's ‘Wesleyan’ legacy.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Southey himself was only too aware of the likely hostile reactions to his biography precisely because it was of a religious and not merely literary or political or even military subject. Yet this was itself perhaps a testimony to John Wesley's own greatness, however flawed. Southey recognised as much. He made the point with characteristic eloquence:

It was a prophetic judgement.