'A GOOD AND SENSIBLE MAN': JOHN WESLEY'S READING AND USE OF JONATHAN EDWARDS Glen O’Brien Abstract: This paper will examine John Wesley's reading of Jonathan Edwards and the manner in which he mediated Edwards to 'the people called Methodist' through the editing, publishing, and dissemination of Edwards' works. It will include a consideration of the 1778 sermon, 'Some Account of the Late Work of God in America' in which Wesley co-opts Edwards for use in a historical narrative designed to legitimate Methodism as a genuine work of God as well as to extend Wesley's opposition to the democratic spirit that had led to the American Revolution. Wesley describes his own work in Georgia and the awakening in Northampton reported in Edwards' Faithful Narrative of a Suprising Work of God (1736), as though they were two parts of a continuous and converging stream. In so doing he smooths over the historical complexities and continuities, rewriting history to serve his own purposes. Though Wesley's admiration for Edwards is clear his selective use of the latter's writings was guided by the conviction that they contained 'wholesome food...mixed with much deadly poison.' __________________________________________________________________________ Introduction There is a clear trend in the study of the origins of evangelicalism to stress its international dimensions. Britain and America were by no means isolated from events in central Europe that gave rise to new religious minorities which were focused on personal spiritual renewal, partly as a means of resisting absorption by church and state. As David Hempton states it, ‘Religious identities in the British Isles are not as hermetically sealed as they first appear.’ 1 In [the displaced and persecuted minorities of Habsburg-dominated central Europe] a tangled web of circulating literature, itinerant revivalists and folk migrations combine to show that the great awakening of the eighteenth century was more of an international event than many have imagined, and cannot be reduced to the social and economic peculiarities of specific places, however much they may have shaped the distinctive local expression of revival enthusiasm. 2 Reg Ward insisted that eighteenth-century revivalism could ‘only be understood in the widest possible area “between the Russian and American frontiers of the European world.”’ 3 That’s a lot of territory indeed. Methodism emerged largely as a result of international networks of piety and cannot be understood apart from this global context. In earlier histories of revival, the tendency has been to use the term ‘Great Awakening’ for the American context and ‘Evangelical Revival’ for the British context but using separate nomenclature obscures the international nature of the movement. The term ‘transatlantic’ also has its limitations because it is usually understood to mean Britain on the one side and America on the other. The global dimensions of religious revival make the story more 1 David Hempton, Religion and Political Culture in Britain and Ireland: From the Glorious Revolution to the Decline of Empire (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 151. 2 Hempton, Religion and Political Culture in Britain and Ireland, 151. 3 W.R. Ward, ‘Power and Piety: The Origins of Religious Revival in the Early Eighteenth Century,’ Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester, 63, no. 1 (1980): 231-53, cited in Hempton, Methodism and Politics in British Society, 1750-1850