Wesley Corpus

To his Brother Charles Date: LONDON, July 16, 1755. Source: The Letters of John Wesley (1755) Author: John Wesley --- DEAR BROTHER, -- Are there not more of the same kind who are not dissevered How will you know It deserves all diligence. I wish you had mentioned only his drunkenness in the Society. It was pity to add anything more. Keep to that, and we are agreed. Some time you may spend in recommending outward modes of worship; ‘but not all, not the most, not much of it.’ There are many greater things and more immediately necessary for our people. Holiness of heart and life they want most, and they want it just now. I have often heard that word ‘Babel’ [See letter of June 28.] used, and I do not understand it yet. What does it mean I cannot see one jot of it Of I guess at its meaning) in the Rules either of our Society or bands. I do not myself, and dare not, give that under my hand, to you or any man living. And I should count any one either a fool or a knave that would give it under his hand to me. You are by no means free from temptation. You are acting as if you had never seen either Stillingfleet, Baxter, or Howson. [John Howson (1556-1631); educated at St. Paul’s School and Christ Church; Chaplin to Elizabeth and James I; Bishop of Oxford 1619, Durham 1628; distinguished writer and preacher against Popery. His four polemical discourses against the Supremacy of St. Peter were published by order of James I in 1622.] I am very calm and cool, determining nothing but to do nothing rashly. Now, which is more in the temptation To my thought you are in it over head and ears. Whoever is convinced or not convinced, ordination and separation are not the same thing. If so we have separated already. Herein I am the fifteenth. Your gross bigotry lies here -- in putting a man on a level with an adulterer because he differs from you as to Church government. Ne scutica dignum horribili sectere flagello! [Horace’s Satires, I. iii. 119: ‘What merits but the rod punish not with the cat.’] What miserable confounding the degrees of good and evil is this!