The Dreaded 'Backsliding', Where Human Frailty Too Readily Reverts to Wicked Ways

SOLID METHODIST FOUNDATIONS 31 the dreaded 'backsliding', where human frailty too readily reverts to wicked ways. In this light, Wesley urged strictness at schools and few diversions from hard labour. Children, he said, were not innocent but rather beings of a corrupt nature and evil dis position. 'Break their will betimes. Begin this work before they can run alone, before they can speak plain . Whatever pain it costs, break the will if you would not damn the child. Let a child from a year old be taught to fear the rod and to cry softly'." Further, Thompson detected deeper psychological peculiarities in Methodism. There was an impaired or frustrated sexuality, he maintained, in the paroxysms that accompanied conversions at early Methodist meetings. It was a religion hostile to intellectual capacity and to artistic values—a cult of Love that feared Love's effective expression. 'Method ists wrote hymns but no secular poetry of note', he asserts. 'The idea of a passionate Methodist lover in these years is ludicrous.'"' By the time of Wesley College's foundation, the open-air religious emotionalism of Methodism had largely gone. Now in their own handsome and even grand churches, Methodist services could be as sedate as the Anglican. It was also the case that after John Wesley's death, inevitable divisions of opinion led to fractures in the organisation. Minority offshoots were also transplanted in Australia. More extreme or fundamental ist Methodists would be found in small breakaway denominations such as the New Connexion (1796), the Primitive Methodists (1811), the Bible Christians (1815) and the United Methodist Free Church (1857) until their eventual reunification in 1902. Each regarded itself as the upholder of true Methodism, but it was the Wesleyan Methodists who remained the dominant branch. There were many things they held in common with Presbyterians, who had broken away in similar style from the established church in Scotland; but Methodists were always more comfortable with emotion in their reli gion, and more enthusiastic about song. An emotionalism, particularly through singing, came to play an important part in the culture of Wesley College. As we shall see, the impetus for this came from a man who had an Anglican background, not a Methodist one, but the way had been well prepared. So although Methodism had achieved social respectability when Wesley College was founded, the freshness of its controversial origins ensured that some instinctive hostility remained towards it from other denominations. Today religious differences in Australia among Christian denominations only occasionally emerge as points of hatred or exclusion. In the nineteenth century, as the world came to terms with scien tific discoveries that challenged traditional patterns of thought, religious differences were hotly debated. Sermons by prominent clergymen were eagerly heard and analysed. Many were reported in full in the daily newspapers. Religious jealousy, also called sectarianism, was alive. By the late 1850s, while the Methodists laboured without result in their efforts to open their school, rival denominations had already made a start. In looking at all the factors that prompted Melbourne's Methodists to build a college, we should not disregard a basic one: old-fashioned competition. DANIEL DRAPER SHOULD HAYE found his way into Wesley College's history through his efforts on behalf of the organising committee. Instead he is best remem bered as the college founder who drowned when his ship sank on the date of the .

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