Of Bowels and Bigotry: Reading John Wesley’s Editions of John Bunyan’s Fictions

The literary fame of the Englishmen John Wesley (1703–1791) and George Fox (1624–1691) resides chiefly in their respective memoirs, commonly titled The Journal. Wesley’s pietism echoed Fox’s mystical emphases on personal holiness and complete sanctification, but whereas the Quaker criticized the practitioners of formal “religions and worships and ways” for subordinating individual spirituality to “other men’s words”, the founder of Methodism believed that his own addressees could accrue great personal benefit by patterning their religious habits upon the devotional writings of gifted Christian authors. To that end, Wesley edited and reissued spiritual classics from all eras of the church’s history so that his followers might be able to read edifying practical divinity that was not only affordable but also non-controversial from the Arminian theological perspective he espoused. Among these reprinted classics were the allegories of another noted English autobiographer and one-time disputant with Fox, John Bunyan (1628–1688), who once confessed that he, too, “did greatly long to see some ancient Godly man’s Experience”, and who, like Wesley, found one such precedent in a New Testament commentary by Martin Luther.

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