Methodism was a divisive force; writers of all theological hues poured forth attacks on it from the press. Yet, as Simon Lewis rightly asserts in this outstanding book, most of these writers, and their publications, have been largely forgotten. This is unfortunate because they make up a large body of work and represent a distinct and distinctive contribution to the intellectual history of the eighteenth century. Those historians who have examined anti-Methodist writing in the period have tended to see it as an internecine warfare that really only engaged a small number of Methodists and their opponents. In contrast, Simon Lewis convincingly demonstrates that the attacks on Methodism represented a much more significant theological enterprise, one that was – as his subtitle asserts – a defence of ‘true religion’. In this respect, anti-Methodist polemic literature should be regarded as part of a wider series of theological controversies that represented a broader intellectual defence of Anglican orthodoxy. Such literature should therefore be treated as comparable to the theological assaults on deism and Protestant Dissent.

An important feature of this study is Lewis's incisive analysis of the nature of eighteenth-century print culture. It is clear that theological writers had an advanced sense of the market for controversial literature, and were adept at addressing their work to lay as well as clerical readers. Moreover, as Lewis shows, the focus of many works was to deter people from attending the mass gatherings that typified Methodism. Many of these works also display a remarkable sophistication. They often sought to identify Wesley and Whitefield as dangerous Antinomians who were not just theologically unorthodox but also a danger to the Church and wider society. All of this was located in the pervasive penumbra of the memory of the violence of seventeenth-century religious struggles. As Lewis shows, the attacks, even those from High Church clergy, were not always consistent. Some treated Methodism as a dangerous Calvinist upsurge; others saw its Arminian rigour as a threat.

In one of the most original features of the book, Lewis advances the view that some aspects of Methodism, often assumed to be novel, were in fact present in previous religious movements. For example, Wesley's and Whitefield's asceticism was by no means a phenomenon that could be exclusively claimed for the Methodists; equally Wesley's much vaunted idea of Christian perfectionism is revealed to be an idea derived from seventeenth-century Anabaptists.

The multiple charges of ‘enthusiasm’, popery and deism might suggest an incoherence in the minds of anti-Methodists, but they shared a sense that Wesley and Whitefield were perverting Anglicanism and corrupting true religion. The most dangerous attacks, and, to Lewis, the most revealing, were those that aligned Methodism with ‘irreligion’. In such an environment, Lewis argues, unreconstructed ideas of the ‘Enlightenment’ and ‘Counter-Enlightenment’ are hard to sustain. Both sides debated miracles and the supernatural in a way that seems to challenge the notion of a rational Enlightenment combatting the embers of superstitious religion. The reference point for almost all the writers, as for almost all theologically controversial literature, was the Reformation. Methodism, to its opponents, either distorted or subverted it, and this made it dangerous in a period in which intellectual buttressing of the Reformation was the key to protecting the Protestant polity. Of course, Wesley and Whitefield regarded themselves as restorers of the Reformation but to many of their opponents they were dangerous innovators or regressives who imperilled it. In both cases, a sense of the direction of history was the source of controversy.

Lewis's conclusion, that there was no single Methodism that could be the focus of a sharply focused attack, is surely right. Just as Methodism represented a ‘hybrid of several religious traditions’ (p. 168), so its opponents also came from and drew on diverse positions for the basis of their attacks. Moreover, as Lewis shows, social and political concerns were as important to anti-Methodists as the theological, so that their attacks tended to operate on a broad and diffuse front.

At the centre of this book is a compelling representation of Georgian society as intensely interested in religion and in which such debates were not simply abstract; they addressed the issue central to the lives of eighteenth-century men and women: their salvation. This is why such debates were so important and hard-fought. It adds more fuel to the fires lit by Jonathan Clark, Robert Ingram and others, that show how intellectually energetic and vigorous eighteenth-century religion was. The readers of the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of attacks on and defences of Methodism were not the slumbering congregations of Hogarth's satire. They were readers who engaged in the active struggle to defend what they saw as ‘true religion’. Simon Lewis makes an important contribution to the wider debate on the intellectual vitality of the eighteenth century.

This is a work of exceptionally fine scholarship, rooted in extensive research in the literature and theology of the eighteenth century. Lewis's work is meticulous and he has left no stone unturned in his examination of the attacks on Methodism. As a result, this is a superb book that advances a groundbreaking and original view of the eighteenth century, and one which will need to be read by all scholars of religion in the future.