Enthusiasm for John Wesley’s contemporaries was no less than a dread disease. It was the opposite, even the deadly enemy of rationality, which was for eighteenth-century man the only healthy state of mind.
The Greek from which “enthusiasm” was taken meant possession by a divine spirit. For people who found fulfillment in being possessed in this way, enthusiasm was the most favorable state of existence. For their enemies enthusiasm was a term of ridicule or worse. So it is today.
Meric Casaubon wrote a treatise against the disease of enthusiasm before Wesley’s ministry began. This treatise became a handbook of symptoms of the disease. Other treatises and pamphlets flooded the presses to warn people against enthusiasm.
So when George Whitefield and John Wesley began their ministry, they were called enthusiasts because they preached the Holy Spirit. The majority of people hungered for their appeal to non-rational impulses, but ministers of the Anglican Church, who hated enthusiasm, shut their ...
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