John Wesley's Manuscript Prayer Manual

John Wesley’s Manuscript Prayer Manual1 (c. 1730–1734) Editorial Introduction During his years as a student and active fellow at Oxford University, John Wesley filled a number of manuscript notebooks with material. Some were devoted to extracts from letters he had received, inventories of his personal library and expenses, and (after 1725) a diary. Others contained extended extracts from books he did not own, or collected short extracts from various sources on a topic (like his MS Poetry Miscellany). The survival of many of these notebooks is one of the rich resources for Wesley Studies. The largest portion that survive are part of the Colman Collection, now held in the Methodist Archives at The John Rylands Library in Manchester, England. Among these is a volume of prayers and psalms, mainly excerpted from published collections.2 A transcription of the contents of this notebook is provided below, identifying most of Wesley’s sources. (Those portions for which no source has been located are shown in blue font; they may be Wesley’s own creation, or from a yet unidentified source.) Before turning to the transcription it will be helpful to consider the context and purpose of the notebook. In the spiritual retrospective that he wove into his published Journal account of the transition he experienced on May 24, 1738, John Wesley emphasized that his earliest years at Epworth were in a home that adhered staunchly to the practice in the Church of England of morning and evening prayers, typically at the parish church. While he spoke of being ‘more negligent’ of spiritual matters after he left Epworth at age 11, to attend Charterhouse school in London, Wesley stressed that ‘I still … said my prayers, morning and evening.’ This carried over to his years at Christ Church Oxford (1721–25), where Wesley elaborated: ‘I still said my prayers both in public and private.’ The claim of praying in private over the full span of his time at Christ Church may be a bit embellished, since Wesley next emphasized that in 1725, under pressure from his father to enter holy orders, he read Thomas à Kempis—and as a result: ‘I began to alter the whole form of my conversation, and to set in earnest upon a new life. I set apart an hour or two a day for religious retirement.’3 What did Wesley do during these hours of ‘religious retirement’? We are helped in answering this question by another resolution Wesley embraced in early 1725 (this time in response to reading Jeremy Taylor) of keeping a spiritual diary. Much of the first decade of the diary (1725–35) has survived. The one significant gap runs from late February 1727 through April 1729.4 In browsing this material it 1The present transcription was finalized by Randy L. Maddox, General Editor of The Wesley Works Editorial Project. Last updated, January 29, 2018. 2Methodist Archive and Research Centre (MARC), MA 1977/503, Colman Collection, Vol. 8. The transcription offered here is published with the permission of The John Rylands Library, University of Manchester, and the Trustees for Methodist Church Purposes, The Methodist Church in Britain. 3JW, Journal, May 24, 1738 (Works, 18:242–44). 4Most of the notebooks containing portions of this diary are in the Colman Collection; but the earliest section (through Feb. 1727) is held in MARC, MA 1977/157, JW.III.III. These early years of Wesley’s diary will be published in volume 17 of Works, under the title of ‘Oxford Diaries’. -i- becomes clear that Wesley’s time in religious retirement was not devoted solely to prayer, but also to reading spiritual works. Indeed, one characteristic of the diary covering the earliest years (through Feb. 1727) is that the phrase ‘private prayers’ is quite rare. When prayer is mentioned, it is usually a record either that Wesley ‘read prayers’ (i.e., served as officiant in a public service of morning or evening prayers) or that he was ‘at prayers’ (attending such a service). One of the resolutions made during this period was ‘never to miss prayers’—again likely referring to the public service.5 By contrast, when surviving copies allow us to take up Wesley’s diary on April 30, 1729, the very first entry is ‘private prayer’; and this phrase appears multiple times a day as the records progress from that point. Thus private prayer became a more central component of Wesley’s devotional life sometime during the two years for which we have no diary record. The most significant change in Wesley’s circumstances during this period was that he left Oxford, to serve as his father’s curate in Epworth and Wroote. Immersion in this ministerial role, and the relative isolation of Epworth and Wroote, likely contributed to this development. In Wesley’s Anglican context ‘private prayer’ did not mean extemporaneous prayer. When one could not attend public morning and evening prayers, they were encouraged to read the appropriate service, including the assigned psalms, from the Book of Common Prayer at home. Given the brevity of this service, some desired further resources. Thus a number of manuals of prayers and psalms designed for devout members of the Church of England were available by 1727. From the Oxford diaries we know that Wesley drew upon the poetic rendering of the psalms in Tate and Brady’s New Version as early as July 1726, and consulted Thomas Ken’s Manual of Prayers for the Use of the Scholars of Winchester College, and all other Devout Christians by February 1727. A compilation of all such works that appear in the Oxford diaries through 1735—and the few others not mentioned in the diaries but excerpted in his notebook—can be found at the end of the transcription. At some point Wesley moved beyond just reading published collections. He began to compile his own collection of excerpted prayers and psalms for use in morning and evening prayer in a notebook. He may have begun while in Lincolnshire as curate; or the summer of 1729, as he was preparing to return to Oxford, to resume his role of tutor at Lincoln College and to provide guidance to a small group of devout students that had gathered around his brother Charles. It seems certain that Wesley was working on this notebook by 1732, when he included material of John Clayton and Nathaniel Spinckes—both of whom he had recently met.6 Whenever he began collecting it, the notebook was likely intended at first for Wesley’s personal use. It is recorded in a highly abbreviated form, including a few standard symbols for common words.7 For example, the first entry on the recto of the first page appears as thus: Alm G, u wm all Hts are Op, all ds knn, – frō wm no Ss are hid; Cl ye Thts of o Hts b the Insp of th H Sp, Yt we ma pf L T, – wor magn Th H Nāe, thro’ Xt o L! This entry will be puzzling to most readers, but a pious Anglican might soon recognize that it expands into the Collect for Purity in the BCP: 5Oxford Diaries, Mar. 12, 1726. 6The first mention of Clayton in the Oxford Diaries is Apr. 20, 1732 (in a summary for the month); Spinckes, Oct. 8, 1732. 7This notebook is not in the shorthand developed by John Byrom that both Wesley brothers would later use on occasion. JW provided a table of frequent abbreviations at the front of some of his notebooks; see for example his MS Poetry Miscellany (Colman Collection, Vol. 1). Such abbreviations were standard in many medieval manuscripts. -ii- Almighty God, unto whom all hearts are open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hid; cleanse the thoughts of our hearts by the inspiration of thy Holy Spirit, that we may perfectly love thee and worthily magnify thy holy name, through Christ our Lord! Wesley’s purpose in using this abbreviated form was not to encrypt the contents, but to save space on the page. It would have served well as a trigger for recalling memorized prayers. While Wesley’s notebook grew to include a number of sources, the prominence in the opening sections of the BCP, including its psalter and the New Version of the psalms by Tate and Brady, is quickly evident. Readers are less likely to recognize the influence—from the beginning—of Robert Nelson’s Practice of True Devotion (1715). Wesley never mentions this volume by Nelson specifically in the notebook, and he included only a couple of excerpts from it. But Nelson was an important source for the general structure for his collection. Wesley follows Nelson in focussing Sunday on ‘love of God’, Monday on ‘love of neighbour’, Tuesday on ‘humility’, etc.8 Unfortunately, this resonance with Nelson is of limited help in dating more precisely when Wesley began the notebook. The first time Wesley records reading a work by Nelson in surviving sections of his Oxford diary is mid-May 1729, but he does not specify a title. The earliest specific reference we have to Nelson’s Practice of True Devotion is in a list of books Wesley assigned to students he was tutoring at Lincoln College during the 1730–31 school year.9 Wesley’s concern for the spiritual lives of his Lincoln students (and of the cluster of members of other Oxford colleges who gathered around John and his brother Charles) may have led him to share his manuscript collection of morning and evening prayers with them. But its abbreviated format was ill-suited for more public use.

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