On August 14, 1775, Francis Okely of Northampton, England, wrote a letter to the General Synod of the Moravian Church. Though a Moravian minister, his letter sought permission to preach for John Wesley in Towcester. Within his letter, Okely gave background to his request, including a paraphrase of a letter he had written to Wesley between July 24 and 31, 1775. His letter also reproduced a verbatim copy of the reply he later received from Wesley, dated July 31. This correspondence, apparently only preserved within Okely's August 14 letter, has never been published. It offers important insights into some of the interdenominational efforts to promote evangelical unity and to re-ignite evangelical revival in England.On August 14, 1775, Francis Okely, the Moravian minister in Northampton, England, wrote to the General Synod of the Moravian Church in Barby, Germany, explaining the occasion of a recent two-letter correspondence he had had with celebrity evangelist and founder of the Methodist movement
interpretation of the title ought not to be there, but they are two of the best and it would be a shame not to have them. Christopher Clark has a very interesting chapter on Spener's interest in the conversion of the Jews and the way his doctrine developed later in Germany; no transatlantic reference here, not even the seventeenth-century fantasy that the Indians were really Jews, gets in. The other chapter, on the Salzburg Protestants, is by one of the editors, James Van Horn Melton. His evidence, which includes new material from the Salzburg archives, confirms what has always been known, that they were Lutheran Orthodox, which did not stop them finding their way into revivalism; and of course their cause was adopted and their migrations assisted by Pietists. Melton has a lively theme and treats it in an appropriately lively way. The future of Pietist studies is perhaps best left to the ingenuity of their practitioners ; the general significance of this book is that it strikes a powerful blow against the German school which wishes to understand Pietism as a German phenomenon, in favour of a broader but less tidy concept.
Until recently, scholars mainly understood the anti-Moravian campaign that started in 1753 as a reaction to the so-called Sifting Time and as the initiative of the enigmatic figure, Henry Rimius. In his 1998 study of the Moravian Church in England, Podmore drew attention to the role Thomas Herring, archbishop of Canterbury, played as being more than only an accommodating spectator. In this article new evidence from a correspondence between Samuel Richardson and his Dutch translator, Johannes Stinstra, has been used to establish that the archbishop himself, and not Rimius, inspired, designed, initiated, and directed the 1753 anti-Moravian campaign. New manuscript evidence also highlights that Herring's campaign was chiefly political in focus, aimed at repealing the 1749 Act of Parliament, and was never principally interested in theological or social issues.
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