ABSTRACT
The vocation of the clergy was demanding. They lived in secular society alongside many temporal figures of authority, such as lawyers and magistrates. But the clergy were spiritual pastors in a profession of great antiquity. They had their own special knowledge, based upon the teachings of God and explicated by a sophisticated theology. John Wesley, whose father and both grandfathers were ministers, put it very grandly in 1756. Each clergyman was ‘an Ambassador of Christ, a Shepherd of never-dying Souls, a Watchman over the Israel of God, [and] a Steward of the Mysteries which Angels desire to look into’.2 Moreover, these pastors were sustained by solid church institutions, that framed their individual roles within wider organisational structures.
