Wesley Corpus

“Very Dear Srr,--When I have deeply mused on ages past, and on the revival cf primitive Christianity in the present age, I have often queried, whether ever before our time there arose in any one place, and in the same instant, a visible Christian society, and a visible Antichristian one. No doubt God had wise ends in permitting the Unitas Fratrum to appear, just as the people of God began to unite together. But we cannot fathom his designs. Yet we know all shall work together for his people’s ood. be Perhaps it required more grace to withstand this contagion, than would have enabled us to die for Christ; and very probably we should have been now a very different people from what we are, had we only had our own countrymen to cope with: we should then have only set the plain Gospel of Christ against what was palpably another Gospel, and the mind and life of Christ in opposition to that of those who are vulgarly »termed Christians. And I verily beliéve, we should have been far higher in Christianity than most of us are at this day. “ But this subtle poison has more or less infected almost all, from the highest to the lowest, among us. We would put Gospel heads on bodies ready to indulge every unholy temper. Although, (glory be to God,) as a society, we stand at least as clear of joining with the Beast as any other; yet we have not purged out all his leaven; the Antinomian spirit is not yet cast out. “ All our preaching at first was pointed at the heart, and almost all our private conversation. ‘Do you feel the love of God in your heart? Does his Spirit reign there? Do you walk in the Spirit? Is that mind in you which was in Christ?’ were frequent questions among us. But while these preachers to the heart were going on gloriously in the work of Christ, the false aposties stepped in, laughed at all heart work, and laughed many of us out of our spiritual senses: for, according to them, we were neither to see, hear, feel, nor taste the powers of the world to come; but to rest contented with what was done for us seventeen hundred years ago. ‘The dear Lamb,’ said they, ‘has done all for us: we have nothing to do, but