A Brand from the Burning, by Roy Hattersley

Lock up your sons and daughters, John Wesley is riding into town! According to Roy Hattersley, Wesley was a man of "dubious conduct." Maybe he was even a psychologically disturbed religious megalomaniac who used the Methodist movement as a vehicle for establishing his own status and salvation.

As a man, Wesley was "silly about women" and "remained, into old age, dangerously susceptible to every woman who seemed to admire him," Hattersley charges. His relationships were characterized by "emotional irresponsibility" and even bordered on "emotional masochism." Perhaps the problem of sexual impotence accounted for his "juvenile pursuit of women" well into middle age?

As a theologian, Wesley was "not an original thinker" but "susceptible to whatever influence was most recently upon him," to the point of being "intellectually footloose," according to Hattersley. If "women were his weakness, doctrinal promiscuity was his abiding sin." He had "a unique facility for ignoring inconvenient truths" and "was not the man to allow a malign purpose to prevent the endorsement of a convenient conclusion." Wesley was a pragmatist after all, for whom theology at times "had to be forgotten in order to attract men and women who were frightened by long words and complicated ideas."