A 270-YEAR-OLD diary, written in code, has been cracked for the first time by a Liverpool professor, revealing a secret history of the Methodist church.
After nine years of painstaking work, more than 1,000 handwritten pages from 1736 - 1756 have been deciphered from the personal diary of Charles Wesley.
As co-founder of the Methodist Church, with his brother, John, the long passages of “hidden” material give a fascinating insight into the personal life and religious beliefs of the younger Wesley.
Charles used his shorthand code to write about sensitive matters including his sharp disapproval of his brother John’s marriage, and their disagreements over the Church of England.
The Rev Professor Kenneth Newport, Liverpool Hope University’s pro vice-chancellor for research and academic development, used photocopies of the original manuscript to unlock the secrets of the code.
He said: “The code is abbreviated severely, sometimes to just one letter, vowels are omitted and it’s literally a string of consonants without breaks in parts.
“He often runs whole sentences into one and writes phonetically, not how words are spelt.
“I kept finding ‘hr’ and it took ages to uncover this meant ‘holy writ’.”
Prof Newport, an Anglican priest, spent time studying the diary alongside other letters and sermons which helped him solve the code.
The breakthrough came when he transcribed gospels written in the code with help from the King James bible.
Using the symbols and abbreviations as a key, he was then able to fully transcribe the diary.
Previous versions of the Wesley manuscripts have offered a sanitised version of the brothers’ disputes and beliefs, and often omitted the arguments.
But the transcribed diary shows the extent of Charles’s anger towards his brother over his marriage plans, and the idea of separating from the Church of England.
Prof Newport said: “Charles was horrified at the thought of leaving the Church of England.
“There was a suspicion of lay preaching and Methodism was frowned upon by the established church.
“Charles had a very clear line on separation. He wrote ‘I am for church first and then Methodism’.
“He also wrote about his worries over Islam and ‘Mohamidons’ as he called them, and the possible encroachment of the religion to the West.
“But, at the same time, he also wrote about day-to-day events, about his family, his great trepidation before his first preaching mission, one of his children dying of smallpox and his wife’s miscarriage.”
A section uncovers that Charles and his brother agreed that neither would marry without the other’s approval.
Charles wrote: “My brother and I having promised each other that we would neither of us marry, or take any step towards it, without the other’s knowledge and consent.”
Yet he later wrote of his frustration when John secretly planned to wed Grace Murray.
He wrote: “He (John) is insensible of both his own folly and danger, and of the divine goodness in so miraculously saving him.”
He also questioned the effect the dispute was having on his own new wife and whether stress and anxiety was the cause of the miscarriage.
He wrote: “Sally is slowly recovering her strength after her miscarriage last week.
“How far it was occasioned by our late affliction, I cannot say, but my brother has cast poison into the cup of temporal blessings, and destroyed as far in him lay all future usefulness to the church.” Prof Newport has also transcribed a collection of sermons from the early 1730s before Charles became so experienced he could recite from memory.
He has also uncovered 9,000 poems and hymns never seen before, which will be published alongside the diary.
Prof Newport added: “Charles has always inspired me, and when I started to study his manuscripts at Manchester’s John Rylands Library, I kept coming across sections written in some sort of code.
“I was determined to unlock it and I’m delighted to have played a part in bringing the full range of his thoughts and views to light in modern times.”
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