Wesley Corpus

7. However, with regard to the fruits of our teaching, you say, ‘It is to be feared the numbers of serious men who have been perplexed and deluded are much greater than the numbers of notorious sinners who have been brought to repentance and good life’ ( page 113). ‘Indeed, if you could prove that the Methodists were in general very wicked people before they followed you, and that all you have been teaching them is the love of God and their neighbor, and a care to keep His commandments, which accordingly they have done since, you would stop the mouths of all adversaries at once. But we have great reason to believe that the generality of the Methodists, before they became so, were serious, regular, and well-disposed people.’ (Page 103.) If the question were proposed, ‘Which are greater, the numbers of serious men who have been perplexed and deluded, or of notorious sinners who have been brought to repentance and good life, by these preachers throughout England within seven years’ it might be difficult for you to fix the conclusion. For England is a place of wide dimensions; nor is it easy to make a satisfactory computation, unless you confine yourself within a smaller compass. Suppose, then, we were to contract the question, in order to make it a little less unwieldy. We will bound our inquiry for the present within a square of three or four miles. It may be certainly known by candid men, both what has been and what is now done within this distance; and from hence they may judge of those fruits elsewhere, which they cannot be so particularly informed of.