ABSTRACT
John Cennick found in religious activism an outlet for his energies, discovered an innate capacity to engage an audience by a combination of personal authenticity, an undaunted spirit, fervent convictions, and an emotional directness shorn of pretensions to learning, yet biblically secure. A contemporary of Cennick’s published a verse assessment of Cennick’s qualities in 1763. It pinpoints his appeal to both heart and head, his characteristic combination of mystical blood-and-wounds piety with a combative doctrinal rectitude. Cennick’s Marienborn Diary has enabled us to glimpse his insecurities, his fascination with the aesthetic framing of religious observance, his profound interest in liturgy, and the compulsion that drew him to blood-and-wounds piety and its complement in bridal mysticism. It became clear that the experience of living in the continental Moravian centres was a seminal element in his religious formation. Opinions of Cennick have varied, as they do over any prominent religious figure in history.
