Methodists and Papists. John Wesley and the Catholic Church in the Eighteenth Century.

John Wesley's theological position has been variously assessed - as a firm evangelical, as a partially reconstructed High Churchman and as a combination of the two. Even some Catholic writers have found, to their surprise, that Wesley had certain affinities with their branch of the Christian tradition. Butler has set himself a different task - to survey the whole range of Wesley's views on, and contact with, the Catholic world of the eighteenth century in England. After a judicious survey of the legal and practical situation of Catholics in England, Wesley's encounters with 'papists' are noted, then the charges of 'popery' against the Methodists themselves, the question of riots and toleration. Next, Wesley's charges against Catholics and their replies; his attitudes to Catholic saints, spirituality and practices; and, finally, some examples of other Methodists' attitudes to Catholicism. The picture that emerges is as ambiguous as that in other areas of Wesley's thought and practice: that is to say, a rather inconsistent mixture of popular traditional anti-Catholicism along with the more relaxed and tolerant attitudes of the educated classes of the time. The former attitude tends to predominate and took an ugly turn in Wesley's support for Lord George Gordon's Protestant Association (more marked, perhaps, than Butler allows). The remarkable Letter to a Catholic with its plea for peace between Catholic and Protestant on the basis of a few basic Christian truths, is wholly exceptional. Less exceptional is ...