ABSTRACT
The propaganda of certain Wesleyans notwithstanding, Kilham and the early members of the New Connexion cannot justly be accused of having been Jacobin revolutionaries.42 A more plausible charge might be that the New Connexion sought to import the secular values of liberal democracy into the church. This accusation presumes that these two forces ought to be incompatible. Many people, however, would shrink from the extreme expression of this opinion made famous in Jabez Bunting’s dictum that, ‘METHODISM [was] as much opposed to DEMOCRACY as to SIN.’43 For better or worse, New Connexion apologists unashamedly argued that the spirit of the age was correct in its liberal tendency and that they were proud to be in step with it in this regard. They did not even blush to tell the church that it ought to catch up with the British constitution: ‘The representative system of government, which, as Britons, we hold so dear, and on which alone, as we have been made to feel, our civil liberties can securely rest, is equally adapted to religious society . . .’44 Such comments are ubiquitous in New Connexion literature. If the charge of Jacobinism had to be endured, the counter-charge was also hurled that the Wesleyan powers were ‘ecclesiastical tories’.45 The New Connexion was dimly aware that some would argue that it was undignified and corrupting for the church to borrow its beliefs from the body politic: ‘Civil government, we are told, is earthly . . . but the Christian church is a purely Divine institution.’ It answered this objection with the claim that ‘great principles and modes of procedure may exist which are equally applicable to both’.46 For those who were still uncomfortable, the eye of faith might just be able to discern the process happening in reverse: ‘The method of government practised in the Apostolic Churches in many respects resembles that embodied in the civil constitution of England.’47
