Wesley Corpus

Permit me, sir, to speak exceeding plainly. Are you not an orthodox man Perhaps there is none more so in the diocese. Yet possibly you may have no religion at all. If it be true that you frequently drink to execs, you may have orthodoxy, but you can have no religion. If, when you are in a passion, you call your brother ‘Thou fool,’ you have no religion at all. If you then even curse and swear by taking God's name in vain, you can have no other religion but orthodoxy; a religion of which the devil and his angels have as much as you. [Clark replied that he could prove the reports to be false.] O sir, what an idle thing it is for you to dispute about lay preaches! Is not a lay preacher preferable to a drunken preacher, to a cursing, swearing preacher ‘To the ungody saith God, Why takest thou My covenant in thy mouth, whereas thou hatest to be reformed, and castest My words behind thee ‘In tender compassionI speak this. May God apply it to your heart! And then you will not receive this as an affront but as the truest instance of brotherly love from, reverend sir, Yours, &c.