Wesley Corpus

To Micaiah Towgood Date: BRISTOL, January 10, 1758. Source: The Letters of John Wesley (1758) Author: John Wesley --- SIR,--If you fairly represent Mr. White’s arguments, they are liable to much exception. But whether they are or no, your answers to them are far from unexceptionable. To the manner of the whole I object, you are not serious; you do not write as did those excellent men, Mr. Baxter, Mr. Howe, Dr. Calamy, who seem always to speak, not laughing, but weeping. To the matter I object, that if your argument hold as it is proposed in your very title-page, if ‘a dissent from our Church be the genuine consequence of the allegiance due to Christ,’ then all who do not dissent have renounced that allegiance and are in a state of damnation! I have not leisure to consider all that you advance in proof of this severe sentence. I can only at present examine your main argument, which indeed contains the strength of your cause. ‘My separation from the Church of England,’ you say, ‘is a debt I owe to God, and an act of allegiance due to Christ, the only Lawgiver in the Church’ (page 2). Again: ‘The controversy turns upon one single point -- Has the Church power to decree rites and ceremonies If it has this power, then all the objections of the Dissenters about kneeling at the Lord's Supper and the like are impertinent; if it has no power at all of this kind -- yea, if Christ, the great Lawgiver and King of the Church, hath expressly commanded that no power of this kind shall ever be claimed or ever be yielded by any of His followers, then the Dissenters will have honor before God for protesting against such usurpation.’ (Page 3.) I join issue on this single point: ‘If Christ hath expressly commanded that no power of this kind shall ever be claimed or ever yielded by any of His followers,’ then are all who yield it, all Churchmen, in a state of damnation, as much as those who ‘deny the Lord that bought them.’ But if Christ hath not expressly commanded this, we may go to church and yet not go to hell.