Wesley Corpus

Would to God this rule had been followed at Cork I But how little has it been thought of there! The opposition was begun with lies of all kinds, frequently delivered in the name of God; so that never was anything so ill-judged as for you to ask, ‘Does Christianity encourage its professors to make use of lies, invectives, or low, mean abuse, and scurrility, to carry on its interest’ No, sir, it does not. I disclaim and abhor every weapon of this kind. But with these have the Methodist preachers been opposed in Cork above any other place. In England, in all Ireland, have I neither heard nor read any like those gross, palpable lies, those low, Billingsgate invectives, and that inexpressibly mean abuse and base scurrility which the opposers of Methodism (so called) have continually made use of, and which has been the strength of their cause from the beginning. 13. If it be not so, let the Right Rev. the Lord Bishop of Cork (for he too has openly entered the lists against the Methodists), the Rev. Dr. Tisdale, or any other whom his lordship shall appoint, meet me on even ground, writing as a gentleman to a gentleman, a scholar to a scholar, a clergyman to a clergyman. Let him thus show me wherein I have preached or written amiss, and I will stand reproved before all the world. 14. But let not his lordship or any other continue to put persecution in the place of reason; either private persecution stirring up husbands to threaten or beat their wives, parents their children, masters their servants; gentlemen to ruin their tenants, laborers, or tradesmen, by turning them out of their farms or cottages, employing or buying of them no more because they worship God according to their own conscience; or open, barefaced, noonday, Cork persecution, breaking open the houses of His Majesty's Protestant subjects, destroying their goods, spoiling or tearing the very clothes from their backs; striking, bruising, wounding, murdering them in the streets; dragging them through the mire, without any regard to age or sex; not sparing even those of tender years--no, nor women, though great with child; but, with more than Pagan or Mahometan barbarity, destroying infants that were yet unborn.