To his Father Date: LINCOLN COLLEGE, December 11, 1730. DEAR SIR, - We all return you our sincere thanks for your timely and necessary advice, and should be exceeding glad if it were as easy to follow it, as 'tis impossible not to approve it. That doubtless is the very point we have to gain before any other can be managed successfully: to have an habitual lively sense of our being only instruments in His hand, who, can do all things either with or without any instrument. But how to affix this sense in us is the great question. Since to man this is impossible, we hope you and all our friends will continue to intercede for us to Him with whom all things are possible, To-morrow night I expect to be in company with the gentleman The young gentleman of Christ Church who said, 'Here is a new sect of Methodists sprung up.' who did us the honor to take the first notice of our little Society. I have terrible reasons to think he is as slenderly provided with humanity as with sense and learning. However, I must not slip this opportunity, because he is at present in some distress, occasioned by his being obliged to dispute in the schools on Monday, though he is not furnished with such arguments as he wants. I intend, if he has not procured them before, to help him to some arguments, that I may at least get that prejudice away from him that ' we are friends-to none but what are as queer as ourselves.'

A week or two ago I pleased myself mightily with the hopes of sending you a full and satisfactory solution of your great question; having at last procured the celebrated treatise of Archbishop King, De Origine Mali. William King (1650-1729), Archbishop of Dublin 1703. De Origine Mali was published in 1702. It was translated by Dr. Edmund Law. See Journal, viii. 119n; and letters of Dec. 19, 1729, and Jan.1731. But on looking farther into it, I was strangely disappointed; finding it the least satisfactory account of any given by any author whom I ever read in my life. He contradicts almost every man that ever writ on the subject, and builds an hypothesis on the ruins of theirs which he takes to be entirely new, though, if I do not much mistake, part of it is at least two thousand years old. The purport of this is, ' That natural evils flow naturally and necessarily from the essence of matter, so that God Himself could not have prevented them, unless by not creating matter at all.' Now this new supposition seems extremely like the old one of the Stoics, who I fancy always affirmed, totidem verbis, that ' All natural evils were owing not to God's want of will, but to His want of power to redress them as necessarily flowing from the nature of matter.' I breakfasted to-day with a great admirer of the Septuagint, who was much surprised to hear that any one should charge them with want of integrity, and seemed to think that charge could not be made out. Nay, he went so far as even to assert that he took this Greek to be more faultless than our present Hebrew copies. I wished I had had one or two of the places you mention at hand, and I would have given him them to chew upon. One pretty large dissertation I have by me still; I propose to read and transcribe it against I go up to London to the Westminster Great Day, The Westminster Feast and Play on Jan. 28. See letter of Jan. 27, 1731, to Mrs. Pendarves. which I am afraid will be as soon as my brother will want it.

I am glad the Rector Dr. Morley, who was a warm friend to Wesley. See letters of April 4, 1726, and April 14, 1731, n. is in so fair a way of recovery; I showed Mr. Robinson Michael Robinson, Fellow of Lincoln, was Chaplain of All Saints', Oxford, and Rector of Great Leighs. what related to him this morning, who I found had received from Mrs. Morley a fuller account of the Doctor's illness. Before she writ he had got over all remains of his distemper, except a weakness in the fingers of his left hand. We can't compass Thomas Burgess's One of the prisoners whom the Methodists were caring for. liberty yet, though it seems to have a fairer show than formerly. On Sunday they had prayers, and a sermon at the Castle; on Christmas Day we hope they will have a dinner; and the Sunday after, a communion, as many of them as are desirous of it, and appear prepared for it. I had almost forgot to tell you that on Tuesday se'nnight Mr. Morgan opened the way for us into Bocardo. The debtors' jail above the north gate of the city. The previous August William Morgan had led them. to visit the jail at the Castle. See Telford's Wesley, p. 60. I am Your dutiful and affectionate Son. p class="Section1"Near Stony Stratford./p div align="center" style="text-align:center" span class="MsoPlainText"ispan style="font-size:12.0pt; MS Mincho""