Melville Horne

Melville Horne (1761-1841) was an Anglican clergyman who played a prominent role in the beginnings of the missionary movement in England in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. He joined the Methodists in 1784 and the next year began preaching in Chester, where John Fletcher, vicar of Madeley, was superintendent.  Horne was ordained in 1786 and became curate at Madeley after Fletcher’s death; the next year Wesley appointed Horne superintendent for the new Wolverhampton circuit, which he maintained until 1791. In 1792 he became the second chaplain to the new colony in Sierra Leone; he did not stay long, however, returning to England in 1793. He quickly published Letters on Missions (1794), a work that advocated direct involvement by evangelicals in overseas missions. From 1796 to 1799 he was the vicar at Olney (where Newton had been), after which he served at Macclesfield, 1799-1811. In 1809, Horne, who had not preached in a Methodist meeting since 1792, came into conflict with Jabez Bunting, a future leader of the Methodists, which resulted in a controversial pamphlet by Horne, An Investigation of the Definition of Justifying Faith (1809). His career demonstrated the difficulties many individuals faced after 1800 in attempting to be both Anglican and Methodist. His later curacies were in Essex, Cornwall, and Salford.