Wesley Corpus

To Dr. Robertson Date: BRISTOL, September 24 1753. Source: The Letters of John Wesley (1753) Author: John Wesley --- DEAR SIR, -- I have lately had the pleasure of reading Mr. Ramsay's Principles of Religion, with the notes you have annexed to them. Doubtless he was a person of a bright and strong understanding, but I think not of a very clear apprehension. Perhaps it might be owing to this that, not distinctly perceiving the strength of some of the objections to his hypothesis he is very peremptory in his assertions and apt to treat his opponent with an air of contempt and disdain. This seems to have been a blemish even in his moral character. I am afraid the using guile is another: for surely it is a mere artifice to impute to the Schoolmen the rise of almost every opinion which he censures; seeing he must have known that most if not all of those opinions preceded the Schoolmen several hundred years. The treatise itself gave me a stronger conviction than ever I had before both of the rapaciousness and unsatisfactoriness of the mathematical method of reasoning on religious subjects. Extremely rapacious it is; for ff we slip but in one line, an whole train of errors may follow: and utterly unsatisfactory, at least to me, because I can never be sufficiently assured that this is not the case. The first two books, although doubtless they are a fine chain of reasoning, yet gave me the less satisfaction, because I am clearly of Mr. Hutchinson's [John Hutchinson. See letter of Nov. 26 1756.] judgment, that all this is beginning at the wrong end; that we can have no idea of God, nor any sufficient proof of His very being, but from the creatures; and that the meanest plant is a far stronger proof hereof than all Dr. Clarke’s [Samuel Clarke (1675-1729). He delivered the Boyle Lectures, on The Being and Attributes of God, in 1704-5. See letter of Dec, 6 1726.] or the Chevalier’s demonstrations.