Methodism in Irish Society, 1770–1830

Bibliographic Data

ID11005255
AuthorsDavid Hempton (corresponding author)
Year1986
Volume36
Pages117-143
Publication date1986-12-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueTransactions of the Royal Historical Society (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0080-4401 • E-ISSN: 1474-0648
PublisherCambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.2307/3679062
OpenAlexW2262954638
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited18

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

Interpretation (philosophy · Irish · Methodism · Political science · Sanctification · Theology · Veneration · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Classics · Historical Studies of British Isles · History · Law · Philosophy · Religious studies