Wesley Corpus

The next words which you cite, ‘thrown into great perplexities,’ I cannot find in the page you refer to; neither those that follow. The sum of them is that ‘at that time I did not feel the love of God, but found deadness and wanderings in public prayer, and coldness even at the Holy Communion.’ Well, sir, and have you never found in yourself any such coldness, deadness, and wanderings I am persuaded you have. And yet surely your brain is always cool and temperate! never ‘intoxicated with the heated fumes of spirituous particles’! 13. If you quote not incoherent scraps (by which you may make anything out of anything), but entire connected sentences, it will appear that the rest of your quotations make no more for your purpose than the foregoing. Thus -- although I allow that on May 24 ‘I was much buffeted with temptations; but I cried to God, and they fled away; that they returned again and again; I as often lifted up my eyes, and He sent me help from His holy place’ (Journal, i. 476-7) -- it will only prove the very observation I make myself: ‘I was fighting both under the law and under grace. But then I was sometimes, if not often, conquered; now I was always conqueror.’ That some time after, I ‘was strongly assaulted again, and after recovering peace and joy was thrown into perplexity afresh by a letter, asserting that no doubt or fear could consist with true faith, that my weak mind could not then bear to be thus sawn asunder,’ will not appear strange to any who are not utter novices in experimental religion. No more than that, one night the next year, ‘I had no life or spirit in me, and was much in doubt whether God would not lay me aside and send other laborers into His harvest.’ 14. You add: ‘He owns his frequent relapses into sin for near twice ten years. Such is the case of a person who tells us that he carefully considered every step he took, one of intimate communication with the Deity!’ Sir, I did not tell you that; though, according to custom, you mark the words as mine. It is well for you that forging quotations is not felony.