Wesley Corpus

2. In your first section, in order to prove the ‘vain boasting of the Methodists,’ you quote a part of the following sentence: ‘When hath religion, I will not say since the Reformation, but since the time of Constantine the Great, made so large a progress in any nation within so short a space’ (I beg any impartial person to read the whole passage, from the eighty-fourth to the ninetieth page of the third Appeal. [A Farther Appeal to Men of Reason and Religion, Part III. See Works, viii. 205-9.]) I repeat the question, giving the glory to God; and, I trust, without either boasting or enthusiasm. In your second you cite (and murder) four or five lines from one of my Journals 'as instances of the persuasive eloquence of the Methodist preachers' (pages 1, 9). But it unfortunately happens that neither of the sentences you quote were spoke by any preacher at all. You know full well the one was used only in a private letter, the other by a woman on a bed of sickness. 3. You next undertake to prove 'the most insufferable pride and vanity of the Methodists’ (sect. iii. p. 12, &c.). For this end you quote five passages from my Journals and one from the third Appeal. The first was wrote in the anguish of my heart, to which I gave vent (between God and my own soul) by breaking out, not into ‘confidence or boasting,’ as you term it, but into those expressions of bitter sorrow, ‘I went to America to convert the Indians; but oh, who shall convert me’ (Journal, i. 418). Some of the words which follow you have picked out, and very honestly laid before your reader, without either the beginning or end, or one word of the occasion or manner wherein they were spoken. Your next quotation is equally fair and generous: ‘Are they read in philosophy So was I, &c.’ (i. 422, &c.). This whole ‘string of self-commendation,’ as you call it, being there brought, ex professo, to prove that, notwithstanding all this, which I once piqued myself upon, I was at that hour in a state of damnation!