Wesley Corpus

I will fairly own which of these belong to me. The indirect practices which your Lordship charges upon me may then be considered, together with the consequences of these doctrines and your Lordship's instructions to the clergy. 5. ‘The first that I shall take notice of,’ says your Lordship, ‘is the Antinomian doctrine’ (page 8). The second, ‘that Christ has done all, and left nothing for us to do but to believe’ (page 9). These belong not to me. I am unconcerned therein. I have earnestly opposed, but did never teach or embrace them. ‘There is another notion,’ your Lordship says, ‘which we find propagated throughout the writings of those people, and that is the making inward, secret, and sudden impulses the guides of their actions, resolutions, and designs’ (page 14). Mr. Church urged the same objection before: ‘Instead of making the Word of God the rule of his actions, he follows only his secret impulse.’ I beg leave to return the same answer: ‘In the whole compass of language there is not a proposition which less belongs to me than this. I have declared again and again that I make the Word of God “the rule” of all my actions, and that I no more follow any “secret impulse” instead thereof than I follow Mahomet or Confucius.’ [See letter of Feb. 2, 1745, sect. iii 5.] 6. Before I proceed, suffer me to observe, here are three grievous errors charged on the Moravians, Mr. Whitefield, and me conjointly, in none of which I am any more concerned than in the doctrine of the Metempsychosis! But it was ‘not needful to charge particular tenets on particular persons.’ Just as needful, my Lord, as it is not to put a stumbling-block in the way of our brethren; not to lay them under an almost insuperable temptation of condemning the innocent with the guilty. I beseech your Lordship to answer in your own conscience before God whether you did not foresee how many of your hearers would charge these tenets upon me -- nay, whether you did not design they should. If so, my Lord, is this Christianity Is it humanity Let me speak plain. Is it honest heathenism