SOURCE: Andrews, Stuart. “The Intellectual Climate.” In Methodism and Society, pp. 3-9. London: Longman, 1970.

In the following essay, Andrews examines Wesley's place as a Methodist religious thinker within the Deist controversy of the Age of Reason.

The Methodism movement grew up in a climate of irreligion. Montesquieu observed in his Notes sur l'Angleterre that ‘in England there is no religion and the subject, if mentioned in society, excites nothing but laughter’. And it was only two years before John Wesley's Aldersgate Street experience that Joseph Butler, soon to be Bishop of Bristol, penned an even more famous indictment:

It is come, I know not how, to be taken for granted by many persons that Christianity is not so much as a subject of inquiry; but that it is now at length discovered to be fictitious. And accordingly they treat it as if, in the present age, this were...