Wesley Corpus

I think it has likewise done great harm to their hearers, diffusing among them their own prejudice against the other preachers; against their ministers, me in particular (of which you have been an undeniable instance); against the scriptural Methodist manner of preaching Christ, so that they could no longer bear sound doctrine -- they could no longer hear the plain old truth with profit or pleasure, nay hardly with patience. After hearing such preachers for a time, you yourself (need we father witnesses) could find in my preaching ‘no food for your soul,’ nothing to ‘strengthen you in the way,’ no ‘inward experience of a believer’; ‘it was all barren and dry’: that is, you had no taste for mine or John Nelson’s preaching; it nether refreshed nor nourished you. Why, this is the very thing I assert: that the ‘gospel preachers’ so called corrupt their hearers; they vitiate their taste, so that they cannot relish sound doctrine; and spoil their appetite, so that they cannot turn it into nourishment; they, as it were, feed them with sweetmeats, till the genuine wine of the kingdom seems quite insipid to them. They give them cordial upon cordial, which make them all life and spirit for the present; but meantime their appetite is destroyed, so that they can neither retain nor digest the pure milk of the Word. Hence it is that (according to the constant observation I have made in all parts both of England and Ireland) preachers of this kind (though quite the contrary appears at firs) spread death, not life, among their hearers. As soon as that flow of spirits goes off, they are without life, without power, without any strength or rigor of soul; and it is extremely difficult to recover them, because they still cry out, ‘Cordials, cordials!’ of which they have had too much already, and have no taste for the food which is convenient for them. Nay, they have an utter aversion to it, and that confirmed by principle, having been taught to call it husks, if not poison. How much more to those bitters which are previously needful to restore their decayed appetite!