‘My first desire (and prayer to God) is that I may live at peace with all men’, declared John Wesley (1703–91), Church of England priest and a founder of the Methodist movement, in 1745.Footnote ¹ Wesley may have yearned for peace, but he often found himself embroiled in controversy, especially in the first thirty years of his ministry.Footnote ² This may be one of the reasons he wrote much of his corpus in pragmatic response to his opponents, even though he claimed he hated writing ‘controversially’.Footnote ³ His 1750 sermon, ‘Catholic Spirit’, was no exception, as the strife he encountered immediately before writing it was probably what provoked its inception.Footnote ⁴ Not only was he at odds with Calvinists who opposed his Arminianism, but he had recently experienced riots instigated by Roman Catholics against him and his preachers in Ireland.Footnote ⁵ Wesley wrote Letter to a Roman Catholic at about the same time as ‘Catholic Spirit’, as he sought to convince Roman Catholics in Ireland to end their violence against the Methodists.Footnote ⁶ The question Wesley wished to answer in the two works was one that many Anglicans had been attempting to answer since the Glorious Revolution of 1688/9: ‘How shall we form our beliefs on fundamental matters of religion and morality so as to live together in social harmony, when we can no longer appeal to a shared and unified tradition?’Footnote ⁷ This enquiry stems from an underlying philosophical problem, which is as old as humanity itself: ‘Is it possible for people to live together in peace and harmony?’

This essay will examine the arguments for creating religious coexistence that emerged from John Wesley's writings on relations with Catholicism. In ‘Catholic Spirit’, Wesley argued that through ‘doubting one's opinions’ it was possible to express liberty of conscience and so pave the way for religious tolerance. He expressed a similar approach in another tract to be examined here, Letter to a Roman Catholic. Doubt therefore became for Wesley a means by which it was possible to reach an accommodation with those who held differing religious beliefs.

In the generation immediately preceding Wesley, British empiricist philosophers attempted to answer the question of how to live in harmony, seeing their task as a vital one. They were confronting questions raised about the treatment of Dissenters and Jews, and trying to keep Britain from revolution.Footnote ⁸ Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), Francis Bacon (1561–1626) and John Locke (1632–1704) all took up this enterprise, giving slightly different resolutions.Footnote ⁹ It is in two of John Locke's treatises, An Essay concerning Human Understanding and (the first) Letter concerning Toleration, that we may find the closest parallel to Wesley's ‘Catholic Spirit’.Footnote ¹⁰ Wesley drew indirectly from Locke regarding the limits of human understanding, which included acknowledgement that one's own opinions could be incorrect, or that doubting one's opinions may lead to admitting that the opinions of another person or Church might be correct. Together, these themes could lead to what Locke called ‘toleration’, which may be seen as a synonym for Wesley's ‘Catholic Spirit’.

Wesley read Locke's Essay in 1725, a month after he had been ordained deacon at Christ Church, Oxford.Footnote ¹¹ Although he was to write an evaluation of it in 1781, this did not address ‘doubt’ or ‘opinions’, although he did say that Locke's work contained ‘many excellent truths’.Footnote ¹² Whilst Wesley used principles from Locke, he was not aiming for a purely epistemological approach to opinion, doubt or tolerance. Instead he used themes from Locke's writings to explore how Methodism could survive alongside other Christian traditions. This essay is not an attempt to prove that Wesley had either of Locke's works in view while penning ‘Catholic Spirit’. It accepts that, as Henry D. Rack has argued, in philosophical terms Wesley was an ‘empiricist disciple of Locke even though with some important limitations’.Footnote ¹³ Timothy J. Crutcher is also correct in arguing that Wesley was influenced by Aristotle; however, this need not lead to denying that Locke influenced Wesley.Footnote ¹⁴ This essay argues instead that ‘Catholic Spirit’ evokes the essential nature of the toleration that was so eloquently expressed in Locke's work and in the Glorious Revolution: the hope that Christians, by doubting their own opinions in humility, could live side by side without violence.

‘Catholic Spirit’ has been described as an influential document in the promotion of Christian tolerance. David Butler, for instance, called it ‘the best example in the Wesleyan corpus of his early understanding of toleration’, and Herbert McGonigle described it as a call for Christians to put aside unkind criticism, judgements and strife.Footnote ¹⁵ Jean Orcibal suggested that even by the end of the twentieth century, ‘Catholic Spirit’ had not been given the recognition it deserved:

In order to grasp the meaning of ‘Catholic Spirit’, Wesley's main argument must be understood. The relevant paragraph, located about a quarter of the way into the message, states that:

To put it simply, Wesley is saying that every person has opinions and believes them strongly, but has no guarantee that his or her system of opinions is true. This lack of assurance and certainty is equivalent to doubt. A thoughtful person will acknowledge that he or she has opinions and is consequently obliged to admit that others also have opinions. In order to admit that another person has different opinions, he or she must doubt the veracity of all their own opinions. This doubt is not a doubt of one's faith, or about whether or not a person has ‘assurance of salvation’, or doubt of the existence of God. It is doubt of one's own capacity for perceiving knowledge.

Of individual Christian groups, at least before 1777, Wesley remarked that their distinctives could often be defined only as opinions.Footnote ¹⁸ In 1745 he had said of the Moravians, from whom he had learned so much and with whom he nonetheless disagreed theologically: ‘I am still afraid their whole Church is tainted with Quietism, universal salvation, and antinomianism – I speak (as I said elsewhere) of antinomian opinions, abstracted from practice, good or bad. But I should rejoice if there lay no other objection against them than that of erroneous opinions’.Footnote ¹⁹ Also in 1745, he began Part II of A Farther Appeal to Men of Reason and Religion with a reflection on the same theme: ‘It is not my present design to touch on any particular opinions, whether they are right or wrong; nor on any of those smaller points of practice which are variously held by men of different persuasions’.Footnote ²⁰ In this case, then, he distinguishes the opinions from the argument, so as to minimize their importance.

In the same way, Locke, in his ‘Epistle to the Reader’ introducing An Essay concerning Human Understanding, admitted concerning his own work: ‘For though it be certain, that there is nothing in this Treatise of the Truth whereof I am not fully persuaded; yet I consider myself as liable to Mistakes as I can think thee; and know, that this book must stand or fall with thee, not by any Opinion I have of it, but thy own.’Footnote ²¹ Locke here illustrated what Wesley would argue sixty years later: doubting one's own opinions leads to humility, which leads in turn to tolerance. However, whilst Locke admitted in humility that he was capable of mistakes, Wesley did not often do the same. This became evident as Wesley and his preachers were caught up in successive conflicts, from the second Jacobite rising to local riots.

Wesley did later admit that he had changed, writing that he had stepped back from his more rigid assertions concerning the Church. He addressed this issue further in his reply to the Anglican bishop of Exeter, George Lavington (1684–1762), who had authored a scathing attack on Wesley in The Enthusiasm of Methodists and Papists Compar'd.Footnote ²² Lavington declared: ‘We may see in John Wesley that he was once a strict Churchman, but gradually put on a more catholic spirit, tending at length to Roman Catholicism.’Footnote ²³ To this, Wesley replied: ‘This is half true (which is something uncommon with you) and half false. It is true for thirty years past I have “gradually put on a more catholic spirit”, finding more and more tenderness for those who differed from me either in opinions or modes of worship.’Footnote ²⁴ Moreover, Wesley exclaimed, ‘not only do you not believe yourself; you do not believe the conclusion which you make as if you would prove’.Footnote ²⁵ This appears to be an astute recommendation to Lavington that he should doubt his own opinions. Yet, even in sharp debate, Wesley assured Lavington: ‘you are at liberty to enjoy this argument also; and let it prove what it can prove’,Footnote ²⁶ thereby assuring him of his ‘liberty of conscience’.

Liberty of conscience was a key issue for Wesley. He used the phrases ‘liberty of conscience’ and ‘liberty of thought / thinking’ interchangeably. Most eighteenth-century Anglicans believed that liberty of conscience was comprised of at least two components: the preservation of an established Church and freedom of worship secured by law for Protestant Dissenters (excluding Unitarians).Footnote ²⁷ Liberty of conscience was a principle that allowed people freedom to choose their own religion (provided that it was Protestant and Trinitarian) and freedom to worship God according to their own conscience; Jews and Roman Catholics were not granted the same rights as Protestants.Footnote ²⁸ Wesley asserted that liberty of conscience was a right ‘by the law of God and nature as well as that of England'.Footnote ²⁹ Regarding religious liberty, Wesley argued for natural right, as in his Thoughts upon Liberty, where he asserted that religious liberty was the right to choose our own religion, ‘to worship God according to our own conscience, according to the best light we have’.Footnote ³⁰

Wesley did not believe that Roman Catholicism at the time allowed for liberty of conscience, as he assumed that belief in papal supremacy did not allow for this. He declared outright that he believed the ‘fundamental doctrine of popery’ to be the ‘universality of the Roman Church and the supremacy of the Bishop of Rome’.Footnote ³¹ This doctrine had been articulated in Unam Sanctam (1302): ‘furthermore, we declare, we proclaim, we define that it is absolutely necessary for salvation that every human creature be subject to the Roman Pontiff’.Footnote ³² Wesley reprinted this declaration in his abridgement of John Williams's Catechism, changing ‘the Roman Pontiff’ to the ‘Pope of Rome’, and replying that Christ alone is the head of the Church.Footnote ³³ In The Advantage of the Members of the Church of England over those of the Church of Rome (1753), Wesley addressed the importance of liberty of conscience, asserting that this liberty had been restored to Protestants in the Reformation.Footnote ³⁴

Much later, Wesley reacted to the Catholic Relief Act of 1778 by publishing his Letter to the Printer of the Public Advertiser (1780). Here Wesley seems to limit liberty nearly to the point of conscience alone for Roman Catholics.Footnote ³⁵ He feared that giving them more freedom would threaten his ideas of liberty, because his understanding was that they were shackled by their allegiance to a foreign power, the pope.Footnote ³⁶ He did not believe that a Catholic could be trusted even if they did take an oath to the government because the pope had the power to overturn any oath a Catholic swore.Footnote ³⁷ This letter seems at first to contradict what Wesley had written thirty years previously in Letter to a Roman Catholic. Nevertheless, while he sought to preserve English liberty, which he believed could be threatened by Roman Catholics, Wesley did not proscribe them from worshipping God in the way that they chose.

Although it appears there was no Roman Catholic response to ‘Catholic Spirit’, there was a later, broader critique of the Methodists. In 1760, Richard Challoner (1691–1781), vicar apostolic of the London district, wrote that Wesley and his followers, along with other Protestants, were not part of the true Church of God.Footnote ³⁸ Challoner's assumption was that salvation is only guaranteed to those who belong to the true Church of God, which he defined as the Roman Catholic Church. It had been this sort of thinking that Wesley had sought to counter in ‘Catholic Spirit’.

Wesley had commented on Challoner's earlier publication, The Grounds of the Old Religion, in his Journal during 1743, criticizing Challoner's claim that ‘the Scripture is not the sole rule of faith; at least if not interpreted by private judgment, because private judgment has no place in matters of religion’. Wesley responded: ‘Why, at this moment you are appealing to my private judgment, because private judgment; and you cannot possibly avoid it. The foundation of your as well as my religion must necessarily rest here.’ He continued: ‘First you must judge for yourself whether you are implicitly to follow the church or no. And also which is the true church. Else it is not possible to move one step forward.’Footnote ³⁹ In appealing to private judgement, one must doubt one's own opinions. This assertion of the importance of private judgement is indicative of the value Wesley attributed to liberty of conscience.

Wesley defined ‘opinion’ in a letter he wrote fifteen years after publishing ‘Catholic Spirit’. Answering John Newton's request that Wesley clarify the difference between ‘essential' and ‘opinion’, Wesley answered, ‘Whatever is “compatible with a love to Christ and a work of grace” I term an opinion.’ Specifically regarding his theological disputes with Calvinists, he designated election and final perseverance as opinions, which, he explained, was why he had not expelled preachers from his connexion who had Calvinist leanings. Nonetheless, some preachers had left of their own accord because ‘they did not hold our doctrine’.Footnote ⁴⁰ These preachers considered ‘Particular Election’ and ‘Final Perseverance’ as essential, but Wesley did not.

Unfortunately, Wesley did not give his definition of ‘essential' in this letter to Newton. Wesley's Letter to a Roman Catholic comprises a list of beliefs shared by both Protestants and Catholics which Ted Campbell has suggested could be viewed as defining Wesley's ‘essentials’. These include: the existence of one God, Christ's incarnation and atonement, his crucifixion and resurrection, the work of the Holy Spirit, forgiveness of sin, and the reality of heaven and hell. From this, Campbell concludes that Wesley would label any religious statements other than these as opinions.Footnote ⁴¹

Herbert McGonigle pointed out that there are connections between ‘Catholic Spirit’, and Letter to a Roman Catholic, in that they were written within months of each other whilst Wesley was in Ireland facing opposition to the Methodist movement, and both address the issue of how Christians with different opinions can live and work together in tolerance.Footnote ⁴² Several scholars have explored the similarities. Thomas Oden called the Letter to a Roman Catholic ‘a model of what is meant by the Catholic Spirit’.Footnote ⁴³ Albert Outler described it as ‘an olive branch to the Roman Catholics’, and declared it an appeal to the ‘potential community of faith and love between Roman Catholics and those commonly called Protestant’.Footnote ⁴⁴

Randy Maddox, on the other hand, in an attempt to clarify Wesley's use of the word ‘opinion’, contrasted it with his use of the word ‘doctrine’. In this reading, doctrines, according to Wesley, were ‘authoritative Christian teachings of religion in their own right’.Footnote ⁴⁵ These included Scripture, the Church Fathers, the Thirty-Nine Articles, and the Anglican Homilies. ‘Opinions’, in contrast, were an individual's personal understanding or interpretation of those doctrines.Footnote ⁴⁶ Maddox observed that ‘such a distinction between opinions and doctrines was essentially a theological expression of the emerging Enlightenment conviction of a disjunction between one's knowledge or ideas (opinions) and their objects (doctrines)’.Footnote ⁴⁷ He traced this conviction to Locke's Essay concerning Human Understanding.Footnote ⁴⁸ The central proposition of Wesley's conviction ‘was not that some ideas were less certain than others, but that all human ideas and judgements were fallible’,Footnote ⁴⁹ and that, therefore, they must forever remain open since further evidence might cause them to change.Footnote ⁵⁰ Wesley articulated it this way: ‘although every man necessarily believes that every particular opinion he holds is true (for to believe any opinion is not true is the same thing as not to hold it), yet no man can be assured that all his opinions taken together can be true’.Footnote ⁵¹ Locke dealt with ‘opinions’ in a similar way in A Letter concerning Toleration:

Locke lamented further that a person who refused to tolerate others was ‘cruel and implacable towards those that differ from him in opinion, be he indulgent to such iniquities and immoralities as are unbecoming the name of a Christian . . . let such a one talk never so much of the Church, he plainly demonstrates by his actions that it is another kingdom he aims at and not the advancement of the kingdom of God'.Footnote ⁵³ Intolerance of others, therefore, according to Locke, had no place in the behaviour of a Christian. Wesley agreed. In his Letter to a Roman Catholic he declared,

Once again he appealed to opinions: ‘Now, can nothing be done, even allowing us on both sides to retain our own opinions, for the softening our hearts towards each other, the giving a check to this flood of unkindness, and restoring at least some small degree of love among our neighbours and countrymen?’Footnote ⁵⁵ He acknowledged the extensive history of strife between Roman Catholics and Protestants, and confessed that fault lay on both sides. Instead of asking Catholics to convert he appealed to them to practise their own religion, which taught love of their neighbour, and to doubt that their particular brand of Christianity was the only one. Wesley then listed rhetorical questions to which he knew Catholics had to answer ‘yes’ about the shared practices between them and Protestants, for example: ‘Do you hurt nobody, by word or deed? Are you true and just in all your dealings? Do you take care to pay whatever you owe?’Footnote ⁵⁶ He concluded:

In the eighteenth century, each side of the Catholic-Protestant debate often declared that the other was heading for hell. Challoner, for example, in his Caveat, argued that their beliefs would result only in the judgement of God.Footnote ⁵⁸ On the other side, the Anglican bishop George Lavington argued that the Methodists taught ‘popish doctrine’, for which there was no escape from the ‘damnation of hell'.Footnote ⁵⁹ Instead, Wesley here asked his Catholic readers to suspend that certainty, and by doing so to doubt that they were the only ones who would be in heaven. Locke had been concerned with the same issue:

If there is no judge that can determine whether what one Church believes is correct over against another Church's doctrine, then even a Church must doubt some opinions. Wesley adopted the same point of view.

In the Letter to a Roman Catholic, Wesley tried to reason with Catholics and to persuade them to acknowledge that their shared heritage with Protestants could be a bridge across the great divide of schism. Outler is right to understand the historical background to Letter to a Roman Catholic as the Methodist movement's first attempts at preaching and founding societies in Ireland. He views it as a letter to a presumably friendly Irish Catholic, and suggests that nothing ‘like this little essay in ecumenical theology appears anywhere else in Wesley's writings, but it is consistent with his essential beliefs and heterogeneous opinions; it is also a fair sample of what he actually meant by “catholic spirit”’.Footnote ⁶¹ For Outler, ‘Wesley's point, here and elsewhere, is that religious reality lies deeper than religious conceptuality – as evidenced by those simple but true believers whose “opinions” may be incompetent and those impeccably orthodox persons whose hearts nevertheless remain estranged from God.’Footnote ⁶²

Wesley's method in ‘Catholic Spirit’ may seem practical, but problems of applying it arose when he encountered Christians who disagreed with his definition of essentials and opinions.Footnote ⁶³ Gilbert Boyce (1712–1800), for instance, pastor of the General Baptist church in Coningsby, Lincolnshire, argued that believers’ baptism was an essential, but Wesley argued it was not: an apparently irreconcilable difference.Footnote ⁶⁴ The solution to the problem of applying the method of ‘Catholic Spirit’ may, nonetheless, lie in a letter from Wesley to Boyce. Wesley engaged Boyce in a civil and calm exchange, explaining that he ‘held nothing to be (strictly speaking) necessary to salvation but the mind which was in Christ’. If he were to hold to believer's baptism as necessary for salvation, then he would have to conclude that every Quaker was not a Christian, and this Wesley was not willing to do. Wesley therefore qualified believer's baptism as an ‘outward mode of worship’, remarking: ‘I do not conceive that unity in the outward modes of worship is so necessary among the children of God that they cannot be children of God without it – although I once was.’Footnote ⁶⁵ Wesley had made the same point in ‘Catholic Spirit’.Footnote ⁶⁶ Never in the correspondence did he claim that Boyce's salvation was at risk due to his different beliefs, but he knew that he was unlikely to convince Boyce to change his mind, so he conceded that the debate was finished. His work, he wrote, was not the making of Baptists or Anglicans but the making of Christians.Footnote ⁶⁷ He allowed Boyce to keep his own opinion, for he did not insist that Boyce agree.

This essay has argued that Wesley's idea of ‘doubting one's opinions’ led to an emphasis on liberty of conscience, which informed his ‘Catholic Spirit’. Locke's epistemic doubt, upon which Wesley drew – which may be expressed as ‘I do not know whether or not I know’ – became a key element of this ‘Catholic Spirit’. Although Wesley defined ‘opinion’ in his letter to Newton, scholars such as Maddox and Campbell have attempted to clarify what he meant. In his Letter to a Roman Catholic, Wesley articulated beliefs that Catholics and Protestants shared, and these may be seen as ‘essentials’, which he considered vital to faith.

The Anglican Lavington correctly accused Wesley of having formerly been rigid in his beliefs, but Wesley not only argued that he had changed, he slyly encouraged Lavington to doubt his opinions and assured him of his own liberty of conscience. In remarking on the Catholic Challoner's writings, Wesley argued that Challoner was not allowing for liberty of conscience, which was one of Wesley's main issues with Catholicism. In Baptist pastor Gilbert Boyce, Wesley encountered the conflict caused by differing definitions of opinions and essentials. Although he had once been rigid about ‘outward modes of worship’ as essentials, he had ‘gradually put on a more catholic spirit’.

Wesley never employed this idea of doubt in a way that would lead to a lack of assurance of faith or lack of trust in God. As a Protestant, he did not ask Roman Catholics to deny transubstantiation. As an Arminian, he did not expect Calvinists to put aside predestination or the Moravians their quietism to attain salvation.Footnote ⁶⁸ All of these, Wesley concluded, were opinions, and opinions could be doubted. In a ‘Catholic Spirit’, all Christians were asked to humbly doubt the truth of their own opinions, for by doubting they allowed others liberty of conscience.