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Methodism in Irish Society, 1770–1830

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 February 2009

David Hempton
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Extract

JOHN WALKER, sometime fellow of Trinity College Dublin and arch-critic of everyone's religious opinions but his own, wrote his Expostulatory Address to the Methodists in Ireland during one of the most remarkable outbreaks of rural revivalism in Irish history. Walker, who inevitably founded the Walkerites, not only condemned Methodist acquisitiveness, but also drew up a list of its Arminian sins after the style of the eighteenth-century Calvinistic polemicists. He alleged that Methodists were idolatrous in their veneration of Wesley, hypocritical in their class-meeting confessions, irrational in their pursuit of religious experience, arrogant in their supposed claims of Christian perfection and heretical in their interpretation of the doctrines of justification and sanctification. The chief importance of Walker's pamphlet was the reply it provoked from Alexander Knox, Lord Castlereagh's private secretary. As an admirer of Wesley's transparent piety and of the beneficial influence of Methodism on the labouring classes, Knox wrote a sensitive and sympathetic riposte.

Type
Research Article
Information
Transactions of the Royal Historical Society , Volume 36 , December 1986 , pp. 117 - 143
Copyright
Copyright © Royal Historical Society 1986

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References

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83 See map (Fig. 1) for the approximate area of the sample. Since Methodist circuits changed their boundaries through expansion in this period the actual geographical area is not absolutely precise. The circuits included in the sample are Armagh, Tandragee, Newry, Lisburn, Charlemont, Lurgan and Dungannon. From 1817 on-wards the figures include Wesleyan and Primitive Wesleyan Methodists, though their circuits were not identical. Figures exist for the 1770s, but are unreliable for present purposes because of circuit expansion.

84 ‘Ministers’ includes full ministers, probationers, supernumeraries and missionaries, all of whom were supported by the connexion.

85 The figures for the years 1820–30 include Wesleyan Methodists and Primitive Wesleyan Methodists.