John Wesley (1703-1791)

Samuel and Susanna Wesley, a family of Nonconformist clergy won over to the Established Church

John Wesley was born on 17 June 1703 (Julian calendar) at the rectory of Epworth, a small town in Lincolnshire, the fifteenth of the nineteen children of Samuel Wesley and Susanna Wesley, née Annesley^[9][10]. Samuel Wesley, rector of Epworth and an occasional poet, came from a line of Nonconformist ministers who had joined the Established Church of England; Susanna, daughter of the Puritan theologian Samuel Annesley, had herself left Nonconformity for Anglicanism in her teens^[11]. From this double family conversion Wesley inherited a rigorous piety, disciplined by the very strict domestic timetable Susanna imposed on her surviving children — of nineteen births, only ten children reached adulthood^[12].

Susanna Wesley devoted to each of her children one hour of individual religious instruction per week; she herself taught reading, writing and the catechism, before Greek and Latin^[13]. John kept up a steady correspondence with his mother all his life, consulting her on questions of government of conscience and spiritual discipline until her death in 1742^[14].

The rectory fire (9 February 1709): "a brand plucked from the burning"

On 9 February 1709, when John was five, the Epworth rectory was destroyed by a fire whose exact origin remains undetermined^[15]. The servant Betty got several children out, but John remained trapped upstairs; he appeared at a window just as the roof threatened to collapse, and a neighbour, climbing onto another's shoulders, pulled him out through the window at the very moment the roof caved in onto his room^[16]. Many years later, in her famous letter to John of 24 July 1732 on the education of her children, Susanna still evoked "that fatal dispersion" of the children into several families after the fire^[17].

From then on Susanna took to calling John "a brand plucked from the burning" (a brand plucked from the burning), with reference to Zechariah 3:2, convinced that God had reserved him for a particular mission^[18]. The earliest Methodist biographies would retain this episode as a providential sign foreshadowing Wesley's vocation^[19].

Charterhouse, Christ Church, Lincoln College: the making of an Oxford fellow

In 1714, John Wesley entered Charterhouse School in London, then, in June 1720, Christ Church, one of the most prestigious colleges of Oxford^[20][21]. He graduated in 1724, was ordained deacon of the Church of England on 19 September 1725, then elected fellow of Lincoln College on 17 March 1726 — a post which secured him an income and lodgings for life so long as he remained unmarried and ordained^[22][23]. He was ordained priest on 22 September 1728^[24][25]. During those years he served for a time as curate to his father at Epworth and Wroot, before returning to Oxford for good in the autumn of 1729 to take up his duties as tutor^[26][27].

A methodical discipline of prayer, fasting and prison visiting

On his return to Oxford in 1729, John Wesley took over the leadership of a small prayer group founded a little earlier by his younger brother Charles Wesley and a few other students^[28]. The group imposed on itself a methodical rule of life: weekly communion, twice-weekly fasting, daily study of the Scriptures in Greek, regular visits to the prisoners of Oxford Castle and to the town's sick, and help for poor children^[29]. This almost monastic regularity — remarkable in an eighteenth-century university where the students' religious practice had largely slackened — earned the group several mocking nicknames from their fellow students: "the Holy Club", the "Sacramentarians", the "Bible Enthusiasts", and above all the "Methodists", on account of their scrupulous method of self-examination and use of time^[30]. This last nickname, at first derisive, would be claimed by Wesley and his disciples in the following decade.

Charles Wesley, George Whitefield and the "Oxford Methodists"

The Holy Club never counted more than some twenty active members, but it brought together two figures who would later dominate, alongside John, the whole history of early Methodism: Charles Wesley (1707-1788), his younger brother, the future hymn-writer of the movement — author of several thousand hymns including the famous Hark! The Herald Angels Sing — and George Whitefield (1714-1770), a younger student of more modest condition, who would become the most resounding preacher of the Anglo-American Great Awakening before parting theologically from Wesley over the question of predestination^[31]. This Oxford youth fellowship partly explains why the Calvinist breach of 1741 between Wesley and Whitefield, though doctrinally irreducible, never quite broke the personal friendship of the two men, as will be seen below.

An orderly but fruitless mission

On 14 October 1735, John Wesley embarked aboard the Simmonds with his brother Charles for the infant colony of Georgia, in North America, at the invitation of Governor James Oglethorpe, who entrusted him with the pastoral charge of Savannah and the mission to the settlers and the Native Americans^[32][33]. The ship made land in February 1736^[34][35]. There, Wesley's liturgical and disciplinary rigidity — insistence on baptism by immersion, refusal to admit to communion parishioners deemed unworthy, extended hours of prayer — provoked sharp resistance among a colonial population little inclined to such spiritual exactingness^[36].

The Moravian Brethren met at sea: "Have you saving faith?"

During the crossing, a violent storm several times nearly broke the ship; Wesley was struck by the utter calm of a group of Moravian Brethren on board, who went on singing psalms without showing the least fear, while he himself confessed he had feared death^[37]. This encounter left a lasting mark on him: it would be the first link in a series of contacts with Moravian piety culminating, two years later, in the Aldersgate Street experience. In Georgia itself, the Moravian pastor August Gottlieb Spangenberg questioned Wesley in a way that profoundly unsettled him:

"My brother, I must first ask you one or two questions. Have you the witness within yourself? Does the Spirit of God bear witness with your spirit that you are a child of God?" — August Gottlieb Spangenberg to John Wesley, Savannah, 1736, as reported in John Wesley's Journal^[38][39]

Wesley admits in his Journal that he was "surprised" and knew not what to answer — a sign, in retrospect, that he then possessed a religion of duties and disciplines rather than a lived certainty of forgiveness received^[40].

The Sophia Hopkey affair and the humiliated return to England

The Georgian mission ended in personal scandal: Wesley courted then broke off his relationship with a young parishioner, Sophia Hopkey, who quickly married another man; when Wesley then refused her communion, invoking her conduct, Sophia's husband brought a defamation suit before the Savannah grand jury^[41]. Fearing an unfair trial, Wesley fled the colony on 2 December 1737 (Julian calendar then in force in England; it was on 22 December that he embarked at Charleston aboard the Samuel for the return crossing) and regained England in early 1738, his mission declared a failure by himself as much as by his contemporaries^[42][43]. It was in this state of spiritual exhaustion and doubt over the reality of his own faith that Wesley returned to London in the spring of 1738.

Peter Böhler and the counsel to "preach faith till you have it"

Back in London, Wesley became close to a young Moravian pastor, Peter Böhler, passing through on his way to America, with whom he talked at length about the nature of saving faith^[44]. On 4 March 1738, Wesley, troubled to find himself preaching a faith he did not himself experience with certainty, asked Böhler whether he should stop preaching; Böhler answered with a formula that would become famous throughout Methodist historiography:

"Preach faith till you have it; and then, because you have it, you will preach faith." — Peter Böhler to John Wesley, 4 March 1738, as reported in John Wesley, Journal^[45][46]

Wesley followed this counsel from the very next Monday, 6 March 1738, and began publicly preaching the doctrine of salvation by faith alone — several weeks before experiencing it himself decisively^[47].

The Journal account: "I felt my heart strangely warmed"

On the evening of 24 May 1738, Wesley went, he says, "very unwillingly", to a Moravian devotional meeting in Aldersgate Street, London, where someone was reading aloud Martin Luther's preface to the Epistle to the Romans^[48]. His Journal reports what happened there in words that have remained, ever since, the founding text of all Methodist spirituality:

"In the evening I went very unwillingly to a society in Aldersgate Street, where one was reading Luther's preface to the Epistle to the Romans. About a quarter before nine, while he was describing the change which God works in the heart through faith in Christ, I felt my heart strangely warmed. I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone, for salvation; and an assurance was given me that He had taken away my sins, even mine, and saved me from the law of sin and death." — John Wesley, Journal, 24 May 1738^[49][50]

Wesley adds that he then "began to pray with all his might" for those who had ill-treated and persecuted him, and "testified openly, to all there", to what he had just felt in his heart for the first time^[51]. This experience — remembered in Methodist memory as Aldersgate, commemorated each year on 24 May as "Aldersgate Day" in many Methodist Churches around the world — is not, in the eyes of Methodist historians, a conversion strictly speaking from unbelief to the Christian faith, since Wesley had already been a priest for ten years; it marks rather the passage from a religion of duties and personal efforts to a lived, felt certainty of forgiveness received by faith alone^[52].

The journey to Herrnhut

A few months after Aldersgate, in August 1738, Wesley travelled to Herrnhut in Saxony, seat of the Moravian community founded by Count Nikolaus von Zinzendorf, in order to observe at close hand the spiritual life of this movement which had so deeply marked him^[53][54]. He returned edified by some aspects of Moravian piety, but already critical on several points of doctrine and discipline which he would judge, in the following months, dangerously quietist — the seed of a breach consummated in July 1740: excluded from the Fetter Lane chapel on 16 July, Wesley withdrew from the society on the 20th^[55].

Bristol, April 1739: Whitefield draws Wesley out of the churches

Back from Germany, Wesley found most Anglican parish pulpits now closed to him, his fiery preaching on the new birth and the assurance of salvation alarming the established clergy^[56]. It was George Whitefield, already practised since February 1739 in open-air preaching before the Kingswood miners near Bristol, who persuaded Wesley to take this step which he first judged "almost a sin", so firmly did custom confine preaching to consecrated buildings^[57]. On 2 April 1739, Wesley preached for the first time in the open field, near St Philip's Marsh, Bristol, before some three thousand people; he would note in his Journal how hard he found it to "reconcile himself to this strange way of preaching in the fields"^[58][59]. This initial reluctance overcome, open-air preaching henceforth became the characteristic missionary method of Wesley's entire ministry, which he would practise thus several tens of thousands of times over the following fifty years.

"I look upon the world as my parish"

This irregular practice — preaching in parishes of which he had no canonical charge — earned him sharp reproaches, notably from his former friend James Hervey, who asked him how he could justify, "on catholic [that is, universal] principles", thus encroaching on the ministry of other pastors^[60]. Wesley answered in a letter that has remained famous:

"I look upon all the world as my parish; thus far I mean, that in whatever part of it I am I judge it meet, right, and my bounden duty to declare, unto all that are willing to hear, the glad tidings of salvation." — John Wesley, letter to James Hervey dated 20 March 1739 according to the Telford edition^[61][62]

Holding himself no parish of his own, Wesley explained that to confine himself to parish boundaries would amount, for him, to having to stop preaching altogether anywhere in Christian land — something no human ordinance, he held, could legitimately impose on him against his duty to proclaim the Gospel^[63].

Societies, classes, bands: the architecture of the movement

From 1739 onward, Wesley organized his Bristol and London converts into "societies", then had built at Bristol the movement's first purpose-built place of worship, the New Room, before opening in London a disused former cannon foundry, The Foundry, as the centre of his London ministry^[64]. In 1742, he introduced the system of "classes": each society was subdivided into groups of about a dozen members, entrusted to a "class leader" charged with collecting a modest weekly contribution and watching over each one's spiritual conduct^[65][66]. Smaller and more exacting groups, the "bands", gathered those seeking more intense accompaniment toward Christian perfection. Several neighbouring societies formed a "circuit", travelled by itinerant preachers, mostly laymen, whom Wesley authorized to preach from 1741-1742 onward, following the precedent of Thomas Maxfield (see below), despite their lack of ordination — an innovation which aroused lively controversy at the time even among the Anglican clergy sympathetic to the revival^[67].

The first Conference of 1744

In 1744, Wesley gathered in London the first Methodist Conference, which brought together six Anglican ministers — the two Wesley brothers included — and four lay preachers, to decide in common on the doctrine and discipline of the movement^[68]. This yearly assembly became the permanent governing body of Methodism, whose decisions — the Minutes of Conference — progressively served as a common rule, until the Deed of Declaration of 1784 gave them formal legal status, as will be seen below.

The Free Grace sermon (1739)

From 1739 onward, the missionary collaboration between Wesley and Whitefield was shadowed by a fundamental theological disagreement. Whitefield, formed in the Calvinist tradition, preached absolute predestination: God would have decreed from all eternity the salvation of some and the damnation of others, irrespective of any foreseen merit or demerit^[69]. Wesley then published, under the title Free Grace, a sermon preached at Bristol which frontally attacked this doctrine:

"But if this be so, then is all preaching vain. It is needless to them that are elected: for they, whether with preaching or without, will infallibly be saved. It is useless to them that are not elected: for they cannot possibly be saved." — John Wesley, Free Grace: A Sermon Preached at Bristol, Bristol, 1739^[70][71]

For Wesley, the Calvinist doctrine of unconditional election rendered, by relentless logic, all moral exhortation and all missionary preaching radically useless — since the eternal fate of each listener would already be sealed regardless of his response to the Gospel call^[72].

Wesleyan Arminianism versus Calvinism: two Methodisms

This disagreement, far from remaining an academic quarrel, lastingly divided the Methodist movement into two distinct branches: Wesleyan Methodism, Arminian, centred on Wesley, and Calvinist Methodism, gathered around Whitefield and the Dowager Countess Selina Hastings of Huntingdon, who financed many Calvinist chapels in England and Wales^[73]. The controversy flared up again violently in the 1770s, when Augustus Toplady — author of the famous hymn Rock of Ages — published pamphlets of extreme harshness against Wesley, accusing him notably of theological plagiarism and of drifting toward Pelagianism^[74]. The following table summarizes the main points of disagreement:

A friendship preserved despite the doctrinal breach

Despite the severity of their public exchanges, Wesley and Whitefield never wholly broke off personal relations: the two men went on writing to each other, meeting and collaborating occasionally until Whitefield's death in 1770, the year Wesley agreed to preach his funeral sermon himself, despite their never-resolved theological disagreements^[75]. This contrast between doctrinal intransigence and personal charity remains, in Methodist historiography, one of the most often cited traits of Wesley's character.

An entire sanctification, not a sinless impeccability

Beyond the assurance of salvation received at Aldersgate, Wesley developed, from the 1740s until the synthesis he gave in A Plain Account of Christian Perfection (Bristol, 1766), an original doctrine of Christian perfection, understood as the possibility, for the justified believer, of attaining even in this life a state of entire sanctification — a heart filled with a love of God and neighbour that excludes all deliberate wilful sin^[76]. This perfection, Wesley stressed insistently against his detractors, in no way implies exemption from errors of judgment, bodily infirmities or temptations:

"The loving God with all our heart, and mind, and soul, and strength, does imply that no wrong temper, none contrary to love, remains in the soul; and that all the thoughts, words, and actions are governed by pure love." — John Wesley, A Plain Account of Christian Perfection, Bristol, William Pine, 1766, § 19^[77][78]

To the question he put to himself in that same treatise — "Do you affirm that this perfection excludes all infirmities, ignorance, and mistake?" — Wesley answered without evasion: "I continually affirm quite the contrary, and always have done so^[79][80]." Errors of judgment, he specified, proceed from the condition of the soul "dwelling in flesh and blood", not from sin itself^[81]. This distinction, often misunderstood by his contemporaries as by some later historians, rules out any claim by Wesley to absolute impeccability: it is a pure love reigning in the heart, not a practical infallibility of conduct.

Assurance of salvation and the witness of the Spirit

Correlative to Christian perfection, Wesley taught that the justified believer may receive, through the "witness of the Spirit", an inward and direct conviction of his state of grace — a doctrine directly inherited from his Aldersgate experience and regarded by the Catholic Encyclopedia as one of the "distinctive doctrines of Methodism"^[82]. This assurance, Wesley insisted, is not a matter of proud presumption but of lived experience, comparable in a sense to that reported by the first Christians of the New Testament; it is accompanied nevertheless, in his theology, by the real possibility of a later fall from grace received, unlike the certain final perseverance taught by Whitefieldian Calvinism.

Exclusion from Anglican sacraments and lay preachers (1741-1742)

Over the 1740s, several Anglican parishes closed their doors to Wesley and his disciples, and some bishops refused them access to the ordinary parish sacraments, judging their "enthusiastic" zeal disruptive of good ecclesiastical order^[83]. The decisive precedent was that of Thomas Maxfield: in 1741 he began preaching on his own initiative within the Methodist societies, without Wesley's approval, Wesley being at first reluctant; after hearing and examining him, Wesley authorized him to continue and entrusted him with the charge of the Foundery in 1742^[84][85]. It was from this precedent, in 1741-1742, that Wesley more broadly authorized laymen without ordination to preach, thus breaking an essential convention of Anglican church government which reserves preaching to the ordained clergy alone^[86].

Reading Lord King (1746): priest and bishop, one and the same ordaining authority?

In 1746, reading a work by the Anglican historian Peter King (Lord King), An Enquiry into the Constitution, Discipline, Unity and Worship of the Primitive Church, convinced Wesley that, in the Church of the very first centuries, priests and bishops constituted one and the same order, the episcopate being only a function of precedence and not a distinct third sacramental degree^[87][88]. This conviction, matured over nearly four decades, would become the theological foundation Wesley invoked in 1784 to justify ordinations which no Anglican bishop then consented to grant to his American preachers.

The Deed of Declaration of 1784 and the "Legal Hundred"

In 1784, Wesley had legally enrolled with the High Court of Chancery a Deed of Declaration which defined the Methodist Conference in law as an assembly of one hundred preachers designated by name — the "Legal Hundred" — empowered to govern the movement after his death and to dispose of its chapels^[89][90]. This document, intended to guarantee Methodism's institutional survival after its founder's passing, directly prepared the organizational breach which occurred that same year across the Atlantic.

1784: Wesley himself ordains Coke, Whatcoat and Vasey for America

The loss of the Church of England in America after the independence of the thirteen colonies (1783) left the American Methodist societies without any clergy empowered to celebrate the sacraments, the Anglican ministers having largely fled to Canada or England^[91]. Wesley vainly solicited the Bishop of London to ordain one or more ministers and a superintendent for America; faced with this refusal, and fortified by his conviction drawn from reading Lord King, Wesley took the decisive step:

"On the refusal of the Bishop of London to ordain two ministers and a superintendent for America, Wesley, convinced that bishop and priest enjoyed equal rights [of ordination], performed the ordination himself (1784)." — The Catholic Encyclopedia, summary of the 1784 ordination^[92][93]

On 1 and 2 September 1784, at Bristol, Wesley, assisted by the Anglican presbyters Thomas Coke and James Creighton with whom he formed a presbyterium, ordained Richard Whatcoat and Thomas Vasey deacons on 1 September, then elders (presbyters) on 2 September; on that same 2 September, he set apart Thomas Coke, doctor of civil law and already an Anglican presbyter, as "superintendent" of the Methodist societies in America^[94]. Coke received a mandate in turn to confer superintendent's ordination on Francis Asbury, already active as a lay preacher in America^[95]. This act, performed by a mere priest without the participation of any bishop, effectively broke the chain of historic episcopal succession which the nascent Methodism had hitherto claimed within Anglicanism.

The Christmas Conference at Baltimore and the birth of the Methodist Episcopal Church

In December 1784, Thomas Coke and Francis Asbury presided at Baltimore over the Christmas Conference, which formally organized the Methodist Episcopal Church of the United States^[96], endowed with its own superintendents — soon called "bishops" despite Wesley's own initial reluctance before this title, which he judged premature and excessive for a function he continued to regard as equivalent to that of presbyter^[97]. Wesley protested vigorously, in a later letter to Asbury, against the use of the title "bishop", which he judged contrary to the humble spirit of the movement; his protest remained without lasting effect, and the title imposed itself definitively in American Methodism^[98]. In England itself, Wesley continued, until his death, to declare himself a faithful member of the Church of England, but the organizational breach of 1784 made this fidelity increasingly formal: his successors would constitute, from 1795 onward, a British Methodist Church fully autonomous from Anglicanism.

The Letter to a Roman Catholic (1749): "think alike but love alike"

On 18 July 1749, while staying in Dublin in a climate of strong confessional tension between Irish Protestants and Catholics subjected to the Penal Laws, Wesley published a Letter to a Roman Catholic in which he lamented the reciprocal prejudices nourished by the two communities:

"You have heard ten thousand stories of us, whom you commonly call Protestants, of which, if you believe one in a thousand, you must have a very bad opinion of us. But this is quite contrary to our Lord's rule: 'Judge not, that ye be not judged.'" — John Wesley, A Letter to a Roman Catholic, Dublin, 18 July 1749^[99][100]

Wesley then listed a body of beliefs he held common to both confessions — the Trinity, the redeeming incarnation of Christ, his death and resurrection, the last judgment, the forgiveness of sins through repentance and faith — before concluding with an appeal to practical charity:

"We ought, without this endless jangling about opinions, to provoke one another to love and to good works." — John Wesley, A Letter to a Roman Catholic, Dublin, 18 July 1749^[101][102]

A pastoral letter, not a theological treatise

It should be noted that this letter, of deliberately irenic making, directly addresses none of the substantive doctrinal controversies separating Wesley from Roman Catholicism — neither eucharistic transubstantiation, nor purgatory, nor the invocation of the saints, nor pontifical primacy is discussed or refuted in it^[103]. Wesley pursued in it a precise and circumstantial pastoral aim: soothing concrete confessional tensions in Ireland, not expounding systematic comparative theology. On substantive doctrine, Wesley remained moreover, in his contemporary sermons and polemical writings against Jacobitism, highly critical of several classic Roman Catholic positions; this 1749 letter must therefore not be over-interpreted as a doctrinal recognition, but it testifies to a genuine search for fraternal charity despite disagreement — an attitude rare enough, in the eighteenth-century England and Ireland marked by anti-Catholic penal laws, to deserve honest mention.

Thoughts Upon Slavery (1774)

In 1774, Wesley published a short tract, Thoughts Upon Slavery, in which he bluntly denounced the transatlantic slave trade and the lot of slaves in the British colonies^[104]. Two years earlier, he had already noted in his Journal, upon reading a work by a Quaker against the trade, his famous formula: "that execrable sum of all villainies, commonly called the Slave-trade"^[105][106]. The 1774 tract, one of the most widely read abolitionist indictments of its time among the English clergy, helped spread through British evangelical circles an abolitionist consciousness that would directly influence the next generation, that of William Wilberforce and the "Clapham Saints" movement.

The last letter to William Wilberforce (24 February 1791)

Six days before his death, as the young parliamentarian William Wilberforce was going through a period of discouragement in his parliamentary fight for the abolition of the trade, Wesley addressed to him, on 24 February 1791, what would remain his last known letter^[107]:

"If God be for you, who can be against you? Are all of them together stronger than God? O be not weary of well doing. Go on, in the name of God and in the power of His might, till even American slavery (the vilest that ever saw the sun) shall vanish away before it." — John Wesley, letter to William Wilberforce, 24 February 1791^[108][109]

This final missive, written when Wesley could barely hold his pen, is today regarded by historians of the British abolitionist movement as a symbol of the continuity between early Methodism and the evangelical abolitionism which would triumph in law in 1807 and then in 1833^[110].

A recovered national popularity

In the 1780s, the preacher once spurned from parish pulpits became, in his own lifetime, one of the most respected religious figures in England: his preaching tours, now received with deference in many towns which had once chased him away with stones, drew considerable crowds even in his great age^[111]. He went on preaching almost daily, supervising his abundant correspondence and directing the annual Conference until a few months before his death.

"The best of all is, God is with us"

John Wesley died in London on 2 March 1791, at the age of eighty-seven, surrounded by several friends to whom he is said to have repeated, clasping their hands: "Farewell, farewell^[112]." Gathering his last strength, he is said to have raised his arm in triumph and repeated in a weakened but assured voice:

"The best of all is, God is with us!" — Last words attributed to John Wesley, London, 2 March 1791^[113][114]

He was buried in a vault at the rear of Wesley's Chapel on City Road, London, which he had himself had built in 1778 as the centre of his London ministry after the closing of the Foundry^[115][116].

Charles Wesley and the hymns of the revival

Alongside John, his brother Charles Wesley composed several thousand hymns which became the most effective popular vehicle of Methodist doctrine — the movement's theology, in a phrase often repeated by Methodist historians, spread as much "by being sung as by being preached". Charles Wesley's hymnographic work and life are the subject of a separate Ignispedia article, Charles Wesley (1707-1788), to which the reader is referred to explore this dimension of early Methodism further.

Expansion in the United States and around the world

The Methodist Episcopal Church born in 1784 underwent, under the missionary impulse of Francis Asbury, a dazzling expansion across American territory at the turn of the nineteenth century, carried notably by the system of "circuit riders", itinerant preachers on horseback who evangelized the rural zones of the American frontier^[117]. British Methodism, definitively separated from the Church of England in 1795, in turn spread throughout the British Empire — southern Africa, India, Australia, the West Indies — while American Methodist missions took root in Korea from the end of the nineteenth century, where they would grow with particular vigour in the following century. The number of faithful directly or indirectly attached to the Wesleyan heritage is today estimated at several tens of millions, counting the United Methodist Church, the many national Methodist Churches born of successive splits and mergers, as well as the churches of the "Holiness movement" born in the nineteenth century directly from the Wesleyan doctrine of Christian perfection, which would in turn influence, through that channel, part of nascent Pentecostal theology at the start of the twentieth century.

What may rightly be recognized in Wesley's witness

An honest Catholic reading of John Wesley's life cannot ignore what is authentically evangelical in it. His tireless zeal for evangelizing the poor and the working classes abandoned by part of the Anglican clergy of his time, his personal discipline of prayer and fasting inherited from the Holy Club, his insistence on the need for a real conversion of the heart and not a merely outward religion, his fight against slavery to his very last days, his constant care for prisoners and the sick: all this belongs to an evangelical demand of charity which the Catholic Church recognizes and honours in many non-Catholic reformers, without canonizing them doctrinally^[118]. His Letter to a Roman Catholic of 1749, at a time of sharp anti-Catholic persecution in Ireland, bears witness moreover to a real fraternal charity toward Catholics whom a large part of his Protestant contemporaries then treated with openly hostile contempt — an attitude which the Second Vatican Council would hail, two centuries later, as one of the possible foundations of ecumenical dialogue between separated Christians^[119].

Why the 1784 self-ordination breaks apostolic succession

The point at which Wesley's trajectory departs most gravely from Catholic ecclesiology concerns the ordinations of 1784. Convinced by his lone reading of Lord King that priest and bishop share an identical ordaining authority, Wesley ordained Coke, Whatcoat and Vasey on his own authority as a mere presbyter, without any episcopal participation or any mandate received from a bishop in communion with historic apostolic succession^[120]. Yet the Catholic Church teaches, following a tradition going back to the Apostolic Fathers, that the episcopate constitutes the full degree of the sacrament of Holy Orders, to which alone belongs the power validly to ordain new bishops and priests, through the unbroken transmission of the laying on of hands received from the Apostles themselves^[121]. The Council of Trent, exactly two centuries before Wesley's act, had already solemnly defined this hierarchy:

"If anyone says that there is not in the Catholic Church a hierarchy instituted by divine ordinance, which consists of bishops, priests and ministers, let him be anathema." — Council of Trent, 23rd session (15 July 1563), Doctrine on the sacrament of Orders, canon 6, Denzinger-Hünermann, no. 1776^[122]

A presbyter, however sincere and zealous in his personal conviction, cannot therefore, on the sole strength of a patristic study conducted in private, arrogate to himself an episcopal ordaining power which the Church has always reserved to those who have themselves received it through the unbroken chain of apostolic succession^[123]. It is on an analogous point that the Catholic Church, in its 1896 decision Apostolicae Curae on Anglican ordinations, declared null the ordinations conferred according to the reformed Ordinal of the sixteenth century, for defect of form and intention in the rite itself^[124]; the Methodist case — where no bishop, even Anglican, takes part in the ordinations of 1784 — presents, by analogy, the same structural difficulty, carried here to a still more radical degree.

Why assurance of salvation offends Trent's Catholic doctrine

The Wesleyan doctrine of the "witness of the Spirit" — that inward conviction, received at Aldersgate, that the believer can know with certainty that his sins are forgiven — directly collides with a precise teaching of the Council of Trent, pronounced nearly two centuries before Wesley's birth against a Protestant claim already widespread in his own day:

"If anyone says that it is necessary, in order to obtain the remission of sins, for each one to believe with certainty and without any hesitation arising from his own weakness and indisposition that his sins are forgiven him, let him be anathema." — Council of Trent, 6th session (13 January 1547), Decree on Justification, canon 13, Denzinger-Hünermann, no. 1563^[125]

The Catholic Church thus teaches that, apart from a special revelation, no one can know with an absolute certainty of faith, excluding all possibility of error, that he presently stands in a state of grace — not from scepticism about divine mercy, but from a just and humble discernment of the limits of a man's knowledge of his own heart, subject as it is to illusion and self-deception^[126]. This difference in no way diminishes the sincerity of the experience Wesley lived at Aldersgate; it merely situates that experience — which Catholic theology would readily recognize as a real grace of spiritual consolation — in the order of a moral certainty and a confident hope, not in that of a properly dogmatic certainty of faith about the future state of his soul.

Christian perfection and the Catholic doctrine of sanctifying grace

On the question of Christian perfection, the gap between Wesley and Catholicism is in reality less clear-cut than on the two preceding points. The Catholic doctrine of sanctifying grace, developed notably by St Thomas Aquinas and taken up by all the Church's later teaching, likewise admits that a Christian may, by cooperation with grace, advance to a very high state of charity, capable in a sense of excluding all deliberate mortal sin and of inclining the soul toward the Gospel perfection commanded by Christ himself: "Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect" (Mt 5:48)^[127]. The essential difference lies in Catholic theology's assigning to this perfection no precise, experientially identifiable moment at which it would be definitively acquired and could be proclaimed as such by the subject himself; it insists instead on the humility and perpetual vigilance required by all genuine spiritual progress, even in the greatest saints, until death. Sanctification, for the Catholic Church, always remains a gratuitous gift of God to be received and made fruitful, never a state one could ascribe to oneself as an assured possession.

• Charles Wesley (1707-1788) — the hymn-writer brother and co-founder of Methodism.
• Jacob Arminius (1560-1609) — the Dutch theologian whose doctrine of resistible grace inspires Wesleyan Arminianism.
• John Calvin (1509-1564) — the reformer whose doctrine of predestination founds the Calvinism Wesley opposed to George Whitefield.
• Martin Luther (1483-1546) — whose preface to the Epistle to the Romans, read at Aldersgate Street, prompted Wesley's decisive experience.
• George Fox (1624-1691) — another great figure of English religious dissent, an older contemporary of the Quaker movement.
• John Knox (c. 1514-1572) — Scottish reformer and founder of Calvinist Presbyterianism.
• Sola Scriptura — the Protestant principle of the exclusive authority of Scripture.
• Answers to Protestantism — a Catholic synthesis of the great objections stemming from the Reformation.
• The Council of Trent (1545-1563) — the Catholic doctrinal definitions on justification, the sacraments and Orders invoked in this article.