James Hervey

Once again we rely on ODNB.

James Hervey (1714–1758), Church of England clergyman and writer, was born 26 February 1714 at Hardingstone (nr Northampton), son of William Hervey (1679/80–1752), rector of Collingtree and Weston Favell. Taught by his mother until he was 7, he was then sent to the free grammar school, Northampton, where he learnt Latin and Greek. In 1731 he went up to Lincoln College, Oxford, where his tutor was Richard Hutchins, later to become rector; the then rector, Dr Euseby Isham, appointed him shortly after he entered the college to a Creweian exhibition of £20 pa, which he held until September 1736. He was a student of civil law 4 years, but changed faculties after the college told him that to qualify for holy orders he must hold a BA. For the first two years he was idle, receiving little guidance from his tutor. In 1733 he joined the Oxford Methodists and came under Wesley's powerful influence. Wesley unofficially taught him Hebrew. Having been admitted April 1736 to the BA degree, he was ordained deacon 19 September by John Potter, Bishop of Oxford.

Accounts differ as to whether Hervey now returned home to serve for a short time as his father's curate. By the end of 1736 he was curate to Charles Kinchin at Dummer, near Basingstoke, Hampshire (a curacy briefly held before him by Whitefield). In June 1737 he refused the invitation of the Collingtree people to settle among them. In 1738 he moved for 2 years to Stoke Abbey, Devon, the estate of Paul Orchard, another Oxford friend; they signed a pact 28 November 1738 stating that they had been brought together by providence and agreeing to watch over each other's conduct. After Orchard's death Hervey provided a sketch of his character in the dedication of the second volume of Meditations and Contemplations (1747) to his godson, Orchard's son Paul. In December 1739 he was ordained priest at Exeter, and from 1740 was curate of Bideford for 30 months. During this period he firmly committed himself to the doctrines of free grace and justification by faith that he was to teach the rest of his life, and embarked on what was to be an extraordinarily successful literary career. His friends collected money to raise his small stipend to £60 pa. In 1743 the new rector of Bideford, who disliked his views, dismissed him. Though the parishioners offered to maintain him he returned to Weston Favell as his father's curate. His health, always precarious, became much worse, and in June 1750 his friends tricked him into staying in London to convalesce, partly with Whitefield and partly with his brother, William, in Miles's Lane. He did not return until May 1752, when on his father's death he succeeded to the Weston Favell and Collingtree livings. In order to hold both, jointly worth £160-£180 pa (out of which he paid curate Abraham Maddock), he had by a tortuous and expensive process to obtain a Cambridge MA and a dispensation from Canterbury before being instituted by the Bishop of Peterborough. He was thus able to support his mother and sister, with whom he lived at Weston the rest of his life.

As an evangelical clergyman Hervey thought differences between denominations over forms of prayer and manner of worship unimportant; what mattered was correct doctrine. He told Watts in an admiring letter 10 December 1747 that he had introduced his hymns into his church services. In a letter 18 August 1748 to an unidentified recipient he wrote, ‘Though I am steady in my Attachment to the established church, I would have a Right-hand of Fellowship, and a Heart of Love, ever ready, ever open, for all the upright evangelical Dissenters’. There seem to have been particularly open relationships between churchmen and dissenters in the Northampton area. His friends and correspondents in the established church were mostly Methodists or of evangelical persuasion: Wesley, Whitefield, James Stonhouse, Thomas Hartley, Moses Browne, the Countess of Huntingdon and Lady Frances Shirley. His chief friends among the dissenters were Doddridge (who dedicated Christ's Invitation to Thirsty Souls to him 1748), Risdon Darracott, John Collett Ryland, Richard Pearsall and William Cudworth. He sent many of these friends manuscript copies of his works in progress, asking for comments and corrections both theological and literary.

As a writer Hervey had two main aims: to propagate the Reformation theology that he believed, like other members of the evangelical movement, had been abandoned by the Church of England, and to draw on the intellectual and aesthetic interests of the wealthy and polite in order to draw them to Christ—‘to bait the Gospel-Hook, agreeably to the prevailing Taste’. With this end in view he combined his extensive interest in physico-theology (derived mainly from Keill's Anatomy, Derham's Physico-Theology and Astro-Theology, and Pluche's Spectacle de la nature) and classical and modern poetry (especially Homer, Virgil, Milton, Thomson and Edward Young) with a commitment to the Bible as the central text of literature as well as religion. His most popular work, Meditations and Contemplations (1746–7; rev ed 1748), consisted in its final form of 6 parts in two volumes. Volume 1 contained ‘Meditations among the tombs’, ‘Reflections on a flower-garden’ and ‘A descant upon creation’, and the second ‘Contemplations on the night’, ‘Contemplations on the starry heavens’ and ‘A winter-piece’. The first two parts, dedicated to the daughter of George Thomson, Vicar of St Gennys, Cornwall, were first printed as pamphlets by Samuel Richardson. Hervey's peculiar ecstatic style, which delighted many and disgusted others, was the result of his attempt to combine the language of puritan meditation with that of The Spectator and Shaftesbury's Moralists (though he never mentioned the latter). His ideal was what he called Christ's style: ‘Majestic, yet familiar; happily uniting Dignity with Condescension; it consists, in Teaching his Followers the sublimest Truths, by spiritualising on the most common Occurrences’. He reinterpreted for the 18th Century the ancient notion of God's two books of nature and Scripture, teaching his readers ‘the Christian's Natural Philosophy’ by encouraging them to view the world with an evangelical telescope and with an evangelical microscope.

His second substantial work, Theron and Aspasio (3 vols., 1755; two rev eds same year), which was intellectually far more demanding than the Meditations, was devoted to what he regarded as the key gospel doctrine, the imputation of Christ's righteousness to sinners. The narrative, in the form of 17 dialogues and 12 letters, portrays the slow conversion to Reformation Christianity of the polite and cultivated Theron by his friend Aspasio (who resembles Hervey in his earlier literary tastes and his preference for the Bible). Theron thinks this is not a religion for gentlemen. The process whereby he is brought to believe otherwise is a skillful combination of the Puritan conversion narrative with Shaftesburian dialogue. The argument is supported both by analysis of the precise meaning of biblical texts and by much quotation from Milton and Young. The polite reader is enticed by descriptions of landscape and works of art and by physico-theological illustrations, a process Hervey called setting apples of gold in pictures of silver. He intended to write a further volume on gospel holiness, for which he sketched a plan, but instead he felt obliged to defend his theological principles from Wesley's attack.

Though Hervey described himself as a moderate Calvinist, when Wesley read Theron and Aspasio in print (he had commented on the first 3 dialogues in manuscript) he decided that Hervey was ‘a deeply-rooted Antinomian’ whose views would dangerously undermine holiness. Hervey ignored Wesley's lengthy critical letter 15 October 1756, so Wesley included it in A Preservative Against Unsettled Notions in Religion (1758). With encouragement from Cudworth, whom Wesley intemperately described to Hervey as ‘an evil man’ (November 1758), Hervey spent his dying months preparing a clear and carefully argued defence of his theological principles, supported by much discussion of biblical texts in Hebrew and Greek. Shortly before his death he told his brother William not to publish it, as its transcription for the press was not complete, but after a surreptitious edition appeared William brought it out as Eleven Letters from the Late Rev Mr Hervey, to the Rev Mr John Wesley (1765) (later editions Aspasio Vindicated). The deeply wounded Wesley said that Hervey died ‘cursing his spiritual father’.

Hervey had mixed feelings about writing mainly for the polite. His aim was to be a polished shaft in God's quiver (Isa 49: 2), an image he often referred to in correspondence. He was reluctant to cut Theron and Aspasio but at the same time was anxious to reach a wide audience who would be discouraged by the size and cost of a 3-volume edition. These fears proved groundless. Both major books were printed in 2 sizes at different prices, octavo and duodecimo, and achieved enormous sales, usually in editions of 5-6000. He gave away the proceeds to the poor; the Meditations brought c£700. An extempore preacher who rarely used notes, he published only a few sermons in his lifetime, The Cross of Christ the Christian's Glory, preached at the visitation of the archdeacon of Northampton (1753), and three fast sermons (1757). These were evangelical in content and deliberately plain in style. He wrote critical Remarks on Lord Bolingbroke's Letters on the Study and Use of History (1752) at Lady Frances Shirley's request, originally as private letters. He was passionately interested in 17th Century Puritan and Calvinist writing, his favourites being Walter Marshall, Benjamin Jenks and Dutch theologian Witsius. As a result of his recommendation in the third edition of Theron and Aspasio of Marshall's Gospel-Mystery of Sanctification as his desert-island choice besides the Bible, it was republished with a statement dated 5 November 1756 that until he resumed his own account of holiness it was to be regarded as the fourth volume of his own work. He also provided recommendations for Richard Burnham's Pious Memorials and Jenks's Meditations.

Hervey died Christmas day 1758 in Weston Favell and was buried three days later in the parish church. William Romaine, in a funeral sermon preached at St Dunstan-in-the-West, London, 4 January 1759, gave a full account of his activities as a clergyman but left his writings to speak for themselves. Their popularity held until the middle of the 19th Century — Meditations had reached 26 eds by 1800 — then evaporated. Critical reaction was mixed. Evangelical dissenters such as Ryland and Thomas Gibbons saw him as an exponent of the true sublime. The Gentleman's Magazine (1760) described his manner and writings, particularly his published letters, as conceited and effeminate. Cowper thought him ‘one of the most Spiritual & truly Scriptural Writers in the World’, but later laughed at an acquaintance who formed his style on Theron and Aspasio. Newton warned ministerial students not to imitate him. Not popular today he was one of the most widely read writers of the evangelical revival.

(George Ella produced a biography some years ago).