Wesley Corpus

“I leave others to judge whether an answer to that letter be quite needless or no; and whether there be any thing sub stantial in it; but certainly there is something argumentative. The very queries relating to Jacob's Philosophy are argu ments, though not in form; and perhaps most of them will be thought conclusive arguments, by impartial readers. Let these likewise judge if there are not arguments in it (whether conclusive or no) relating to that entirely new system of divinity which he has revealed to the world. “It is true, that Mr. Law, whom I love and reverence now, was once ‘a kind of oracle’ to me. He thinks I am still “under the power of my ‘own spirit, as opposed to the Spirit of God. If I am, yet my censure of the Mystics is not at all owing to this, but to my reverence for the Oracles of God, which, while I was fond of them, I regarded less and less; till, at length, finding I could not follow both, I exchanged the Mystic writers for the scriptural. “It is sure, in exposing the Philosophy of Behme, I use ridicule as well as argument; and yet, I trust I have, by the grace of God, been in some measure ‘serious in religion,” not ‘half a month’ only, but ever since I was six years old, which is now about half a century. I do not know that the Pope has condemned him at all, or that he has any reason so to do. My reason is this, and no other: I think he contra dicts Scripture, reason, and himself; and that he has seduced many unwary souls from the Bible-way of salvation. A strong conviction of this, and a desire to guard others against that dangerous seduction, laid me under a necessity of writing that letter. I was under no other necessity; though I doubt not but Mr. Law heard I was, and very seriously believed it. I very rarely mention his books in public; nor are they in the way of one in an hundred of those whom he terms my people; meaning, I suppose, the people called Methodists. I had therefore no temptation, any more than power, to forbid the use of them to the Methodists in general. Whosoever informed Mr. Law of this, wanted either sense or honesty.