Wesley Corpus

I expect you will answer: ‘Nay, they are the most plain, simple preachers of any in the whole world. Simplicity is their peculiar excellence.’ I grant one sort of simplicity is; a single specimen whereof may suffice. One of their eminent preachers, describing at Fetter Lane ‘the childhood of the Lamb,’ observed that ‘His mother might send Him out one morning for a halfpenny-worth of milk; that, making haste back, He might fall and break the porringer; and that He might work a miracle to make it whole again, and gather up the milk into it.’ Now, can you really admire this kind of Simplicity or think it does honor to ‘God manifest in the flesh’ 2. Their preaching has destroyed the love of God in many souls; which was the natural effect of destroying their faith, as well as of teaching them to grieve the Holy Spirit of God by ascribing His gift to imagination and animal spirits; and of perplexing them with senseless, unscriptural cautions against the selfish love of God; in which it is not easy to say whether nonsense or blasphemy is the chief ingredient.