Wesley Corpus

The pamphlet you sent is worse than no advice at all; but infinitely beyond Mr. Wesley's Babylonish Address to the Clergy, almost all of which is empty babble, fitter for an old grammarian that was grown blear-eyed in mending dictionaries than for one who had tasted of the powers of the world to come (page 198). I leave others to judge whether an answer to that letter be quite needless or no, and whether there be anything substantial in it; but certainly there is something argumentative. The very queries relating to Jacob's Philosophy are arguments, though not in form; and perhaps most of them will be thought conclusive arguments by impartial readers. Let these likewise judge if there are not arguments in it (whether conclusive or no) relating to that entirely new system of divinity which he has revealed to the world. It is true that Mr. Law, whom I love and reverence now, was once 'a kind of oracle' to me. He thinks I am still 'under the power of' my 'own spirit,' as opposed to the Spirit of God. If I am, yet my censure of the Mystics is not at all owing to this, but to my reverence for the oracles of God, which, while I was fond of them, I regarded less and less; till at length, finding I could not follow both, I exchanged the Mystic writers for the scriptural.