Wesley Corpus

3. You next undertake to prove 'the most insufferable pride and vanity of the Methodists’ (sect. iii. p. 12, &c.). For this end you quote five passages from my Journals and one from the third Appeal. The first was wrote in the anguish of my heart, to which I gave vent (between God and my own soul) by breaking out, not into ‘confidence or boasting,’ as you term it, but into those expressions of bitter sorrow, ‘I went to America to convert the Indians; but oh, who shall convert me’ (Journal, i. 418). Some of the words which follow you have picked out, and very honestly laid before your reader, without either the beginning or end, or one word of the occasion or manner wherein they were spoken. Your next quotation is equally fair and generous: ‘Are they read in philosophy So was I, &c.’ (i. 422, &c.). This whole ‘string of self-commendation,’ as you call it, being there brought, ex professo, to prove that, notwithstanding all this, which I once piqued myself upon, I was at that hour in a state of damnation! The third is a plain narrative of the manner wherein many of Bristol expressed their joy on my coming unexpectedly into the room after I had been some time at London (ii. 457). And this, I conceive, will prove the charge of high treason as well as that of ‘insufferable pride and vanity.’ You say, fourthly: ‘A dying woman, who had earnestly desired to see me, cried out as I entered the room, “Art thou come, thou blessed of the Lord”’ (ii. 483). She did so. And what does this prove The fifth passage is this: ‘In applying which, my soul was so enlarged, that methought I could have cried out (in another sense than poor, vain Archimedes), “Give me where to stand, and I will shake the earth.”’ [See letters of June 11, 1747, sect. 20 (to Bishop Gibson), and Nov. 26, 1762.] My meaning is, I found such freedom of thought and speech (jargon, stuff, enthusiasm to you) that me-thought, could I have then spoken to all the world, they would all have shared in the blessing.