Wesley Corpus

1739 To a Roman Catholic Priest [1] [1739.] SIR, -- I return you thanks both for the favor of your letter and for your recommending my father's Proposals to the Sorbonne. I have neither time nor inclination for controversy with any, but least of all with the Romanists. And that, both because I cannot trust any of their quotations without consulting every sentence they quote in the originals, and because the originals themselves can very hardly be trusted in any of the points controverted between them and us. I am no stranger to their skill in mending those authors who did not at first speak home to their purpose, as also in purging them from those passages which contradicted their emendations. And as they have not wanted opportunity to do this, so doubtless they have carefully used it with regard to a point that so nearly concerned them as the Supremacy of the Bishop of Rome. I am not therefore surprised if the Works of St. Cyprian (as they are called) do strenuously maintain it; but I am that they have not been better corrected, for they still contain passages that absolutely overthrow it. What gross negligence was it to leave his seventy-fourth Epistle (to Pompeianus) out of the Index Expurgatorius, wherein Pope Cyprian so flatly charges Pope Stephen with pride and obstinacy, and with being a defender of the cause of heretics, and that against Christians and the very Church of God! He that can reconcile this with his believing Stephen the infallible Head of the Church may reconcile the Gospel with the Koran. Yet I can by no means approve the scurrility and contempt with which the Romanists have often been treated. I dare not rail at or despise any man, much less those who profess to believe in the same Master. But I pity them much; having the same assurance that Jesus is the Christ, and that no Romanist can expect to be saved according to the terms of His covenant. For thus saith our Lord, ‘Whosoever shall break one of the least of these commandments, and shall teach men so, he shall be called the least in the kingdom of heaven.’ And, ‘If any man shall add unto these things, God shall add unto him the plagues that are written in this book.’ But all Romanists as such do both. Ergo.