BRITISH IDENTITY AND THE GERMAN OTHER A Dissertation ...

etween 1706 and 1716, but a more significant religious link between England and Germany
took shape in the Wesleyan/Moravian connection. John Wesley and his brother Charles first
encountered the German Moravians in 1735 while aboard a ship bound from England to the
American colony of Georgia. Wesley admired the Morravians’ “servile” humility, meekness and
courage, and he recorded in his journal of 25 October the reactions of his shipmates during a
storm at sea:
In the midst of the psalm wherewith their service began, the sea broke over, split the main
sail in pieces, covered the ship, and poured in between the decks, as if the great deep had
already swallowed us up. A terrible screaming began among the English. The Germans
calmly sung on. I asked one of them afterwards, “Were you not afraid?” He answered, “I
thank God, No.” I asked, “But were not your women and children afraid?” He replied
mildly, “No; our women and children are not afraid to die.” From them I went to their
crying trembling neighbours, and pointed out to them the difference, in the hour of trial,
between him that feareth God, and him that feareth him not. 56
On returning to England Wesley pursued his connections with the Moravians and, with
his brother, translated and published several volumes of hymns from the German. Wesley’s
spiritual transformation, the driving force behind the “Great Awakening” in England, apparently
drew inspiration from the German Pietist doctrine of personal salvation by faith as preached by
the German Moravians. 57 His infatuation with the Moravians, and the religious emotionalism of
both Pietism and Wesleyanism, encouraged the acceptance in England of German literature that
possessed a “sentimental, moralizing, didactic tendency” which appealed to the middle-classes of
both countries during the eighteenth century. 58
56 Quoted in Davis, German Thought and Culture, 25.
57 Ibid., 29-30, 42-43. Davis connects the subjectivity and emotionalism of these hymns to
the roots of English romanticism, particularly in the work of Shelley (pp. 37-40).
58 John P. Hoskins, “German Influence on Religious Life and Thought in America during
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