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From ‘The State of my Soul’ to ‘Exalted Piety’: Women’s Voices in the Arminian/Methodist Magazine, 1778–1821

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 March 2016

Margaret P. Jones
Margaret P. Jones*
Affiliation:
Wesley House, Cambridge
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Extract

John Wesley’s version of evangelical Christianity was distinguished by its insistence on the universal availability of salvation (‘Free Grace’), an insistence which rapidly led to the definition of Wesleyan theology as ‘Arminian’ in contradistinction to the Calvinist evangelicalism of Whitfield, Toplady, and others. Controversy was violent in the 1740s, and flared up again in the 1770s. It was against this background that John Wesley founded the Arminian Magazine in 1778. It was to function in defence of Arminianism, and to consist of ‘tracts on the universal love of God, wrote in this and the last century’, together with ‘Original Pieces’. This might seem an unlikely place for women to speak, or even to be spoken about, but Arminianism was not defended solely by means of tracts. By the year of Wesley’s death (1791), besides significant amounts of poetry and short anecdotes (the latter characterized by Wesley in 1781 as ‘bits and scraps’, with which he would scorn to fill up the Magazine), there are also fifteen letters written by women, and eleven accounts of women’s lives (slightly outnumbering both letters from and accounts of men). Later years show an even greater preponderance of women’s ‘Lives’. Leaving on one side the value of this source to the historian, this paper seeks only to analyse women’s opportunities to speak publicly in their own voice in the Arminian (later Methodist) Magazine under John Wesley’s editorship and later.

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in Church History , Volume 34: Gender and Christian Religion , 1998 , pp. 273 - 286
Copyright
Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 1998

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References

1 Arminian Magazine (hereafter AM), 1 (1778), p. v.

2 John Wesley’s title was changed in 1798 to The Methodist Magazine, but volume numbers continued in sequence.

3 Cited in R. Altick, The English Common Reader: A Social History of Mass Publishing, 1800–1900 (Chicago, 1957), p. 168.

4 Ibid., p. 392.

5 Wesleyan Methodist Magazine, 6th ser., 1 (1877), p. 11.

6 AM, 4 (1781), p. 375; Methodist Magazine [hereafter MM], 37 (1814) [for vol. nos see above, n. 1], pp. 629–30; AM, 10 (1787), pp. 476–8, 533–5, 601; AM, 13 (1790), pp. 46–7.

7 AM, 1 (1788), p. vi.

8 The Witness of the Spirit’, I, in The Works of John Wesley, vol. 1: Sermons, I, 1–33, ed. A. C. Outler (Nashville, TN, 1984), p. 283.

9 Ibid.

10 AM, 5 (1782), p. v.

11 AM, 4 (1781), pp. 217–18.

12 AM, n (1788), p. 216.

13 J. Banks, Nancy, Nancy (Leeds, 1984.) p. 2.

14 AM, n (1788), pp. 185–8, 238–42.

15 Ibid., pp. 91–3.

16 Hempson, D., The Religion of the People: Methodism and Popular Religion c. 1750–1900 (London, 1996), p. 179 Google Scholar and n.

17 AM, 5 (1782), pp. 214–15, 266–9.

18 Ibid., pp. 268–9.

19 Ibid., p. 44.

20 R. Maddox, Responsible Grace (Nashville, TN, 199s).

21 The Works of John Wesley, vol. 25, Letters, I, 1721–1739, ed. F. Baker (Oxford, 1980), p. 34.

22 The Works of John Wesley, vol. 19, Journal and Diaries, II (1738-43), ed. W. R. Ward and R. P. Heitzenrater (Nashville, TN, 1990), p. 163 (9 Aug. 1740); The Works of John Wesley, vol. 22, Journal and Diaries, V (1765-75), ed. W. R. Ward and R. P. Heitzenrater (Nashville, TN, 1993), p. 213 (26 Dec. 1769).

23 AM, 6 (1783), pp. 528–30, 582–4, 641–3.

24 AM, 2 (1779), pp. 296–310.

25 AM, 6 (1783), pp. 468–71, 524–6 (emphasis added).

26 AM, 16 (1793), pp. 211–18, 254–9, 307–13, 357–62, 418–23.

27 MM, 22 (1799), pp. 167–22.

28 MM, 25 (1802), pp. 83–5.

29 MM, 23 (1800), pp. 219–20.

30 Ibid., p. 266.

31 Ibid., pp. 222–3.

32 MM, 28 (1805), p. 174.

33 MM, 31 (1808), p. 509.

34 MM, 26 (1803), p. 360.

35 MM, 30 (1807), pp. 606–8.

36 MM, 33 (1810), pp. 476–80.

37 MM, 36 (1803), p. 453.

38 MM, 28 (1805), p. 555.

39 MM, 32 (1807), p. 520.

40 MM, 37 (1814), p. 873 (emphasis added).