Locke with his sensationalist psychology and his description of the mind as a tabula rasa, or as wax to be moulded and fashioned as one pleased, and Adam Smith with his picture of the competitive individual, ever ambitious, ever striving to better his own condition. So, another way to construe the task is to ask whether there was an ideol-ogy of Enlightenment individualism that underlay the popular practices of an involved evangelical laity in the eighteenth century. The lay followers of Wesley and Whitefield, the motivated laity within the Anglican parishes of evangelical ministers such as Henry Venn or John Newton, the lay members of Moravian communities, and the lay members of Dissenting congregations touched by revival – all of these laypeople were typically active not only in public religious observance but also in hearing and speaking of personal reli-gious experience, hymn-singing, exhorting or even preaching, extemporaneous prayer, and also in private religious practices such as devotional reading, prayer, meditation, fasting and diary-keeping. These practices constituted a culture of lay activism which was new to many evangelical converts. John Pawson wrote that before being introduced to Methodism, ‘Going constantly to church and sacrament included the whole of religion, as far as I knew.’

doi:10.4324/9780203166505-39

Chapter

Locke with his sensationalist psychology and his description of the mind as a tabula rasa, or as wax to be moulded and fashioned as one pleased, and Adam Smith with his picture of the competitive individual, ever ambitious, ever striving to better his own condition. So, another way to construe the task is to ask whether there was an ideol-ogy of Enlightenment individualism that underlay the popular practices of an involved evangelical laity in the eighteenth century. The lay followers of Wesley and Whitefield, the motivated laity within the Anglican parishes of evangelical ministers such as Henry Venn or John Newton, the lay members of Moravian communities, and the lay members of Dissenting congregations touched by revival – all of these laypeople were typically active not only in public religious observance but also in hearing and speaking of personal reli-gious experience, hymn-singing, exhorting or even preaching, extemporaneous prayer, and also in private religious practices such as devotional reading, prayer, meditation, fasting and diary-keeping. These practices constituted a culture of lay activism which was new to many evangelical converts. John Pawson wrote that before being introduced to Methodism, ‘Going constantly to church and sacrament included the whole of religion, as far as I knew.’

Chapter

Locke with his sensationalist psychology and his description of the mind as a tabula rasa, or as wax to be moulded and fashioned as one pleased, and Adam Smith with his picture of the competitive individual, ever ambitious, ever striving to better his own condition. So, another way to construe the task is to ask whether there was an ideol-ogy of Enlightenment individualism that underlay the popular practices of an involved evangelical laity in the eighteenth century. The lay followers of Wesley and Whitefield, the motivated laity within the Anglican parishes of evangelical ministers such as Henry Venn or John Newton, the lay members of Moravian communities, and the lay members of Dissenting congregations touched by revival – all of these laypeople were typically active not only in public religious observance but also in hearing and speaking of personal reli-gious experience, hymn-singing, exhorting or even preaching, extemporaneous prayer, and also in private religious practices such as devotional reading, prayer, meditation, fasting and diary-keeping. These practices constituted a culture of lay activism which was new to many evangelical converts. John Pawson wrote that before being introduced to Methodism, ‘Going constantly to church and sacrament included the whole of religion, as far as I knew.’

ABSTRACT

Most eighteenth-century converts were, of course, baptized members of the established church. Indeed, the Church of England could claim the nominal allegiance of over 90 per cent of the population of England throughout most of the century. Consequently, most evangelicals described their experience in terms of passing from nominal adherence to earnest faith, rather than in terms of proselyte conversion. As Sarah Middleton looked back on her life before conversion she was scathing: ‘We went to church and did all the outward things [but] we were but baptized heathens.’8 So often the convert used the metaphor of being woken from a deep sleep to describe their experience, so much so that to be ‘awakened’ was almost a cliché. Margaret Austin summarized her experience in stark terms when she signed off a letter to Charles Wesley: ‘Margaret Austin, awakened by the Reverend Mr Whitefield: Convicted by the Reverend Mr John Wesley: Converted by the Reverend Mr Charles.’9 The other term that converts often used was ‘serious’ – as when describing someone as a ‘serious professor’ to indicate that their religion was more than public observance, more than ‘going constantly to church and sacrament’.