Wesley Corpus

To Mrs. Parker Date: NEAR LONDON, January 21, 1784. Source: The Letters of John Wesley (1784) Author: John Wesley --- MY DEAR SISTER, - I have taken time to consider your letter calmly; and now I will speak freely to you concerning it. You assign three reasons for discarding the Methodist preachers: one, because several who had left your chapel promised to join you again, on condition that you would suffer the Methodists to preach there no more; a second, that these preached perfection; and a third, that while one of them was preaching several persons were suddenly and violently affected. But are these reasons valid Let us coolly and impartially consider them before God. I. 'Several who had left you promised to join you again, provided you would suffer the Methodists to preach in your chapel no more.' I cannot but think you ought never to have joined with or received persons of such a spirit. What a narrow popish spirit was this! What vile bigotry I The exact spirit of Calvinism! Such as surely none that is not a Calvinist ought to encourage either by word or deed. Every one that does I call the maintainer of a bad cause, as bad as bad can be. For whom has God owned in Great Britain, Ireland, and America like them Whom does He now own like them in Yorkshire, in Cheshire, in Lancashire, in Cornwall Truly these are the tokens of our mission, the proof that God hath sent us. Threescore thousand persons setting their faces heavenward, and many of them rejoicing in God their Savior. A specimen of this you yourself saw at Leeds. Come again, and see if the work be not of God. O consider the weight of that word, 'He that rejecteth you rejecteth Me and Him that sent Me.' 2. 'But they preach perfection.' And do not you Who does not that speaks as the oracles of God Meaning by that scriptural word neither more nor less than 'loving God with all our heart,' or having the mind that was in Christ and walking as Christ walked.