Wesley Corpus

Here end your labored attempts to show the ‘uncharitable spirit’ of the Methodists, who (for anything you have shown to the contrary) may be the most charitable people under the sun. 30. You charge the Methodists next with ‘violation and contempt of order and authority’ (sect. xviii. p. 124) -- namely, the authority of the governors of the Church. I have answered every article of this charge in the Second and Third Parts of the Farther Appeal and the letter to Mr. Church. When you have been so good as to reply to what is there advanced, I may possibly say something more. What you offer of your own upon this head I shall consider without delay. ‘Women and boys are actually employed in this ministry of public preaching.’ Please to tell me where. I know them not, nor ever heard of them before. You add, what is more marvelous still: ‘I speak from personal knowledge that sometimes, a little before delivering of the elements at the Communion, three or four Methodists together will take it into their heads to go away; that sometimes, while the sentences of the Offertory were reading, they have called out to the minister who carried the basin, reproaching him for asking alms of them; that sometimes, when the minister has delivered the bread into their hands, instead of eating it, they would slip it into their pockets.’ Sir, you must show your face before these stories will find credit on your bare asseveration. ‘Yet they are surprised,’ you say, ‘that every man in his senses does not without the least hesitation join them.’ Sir, I am surprised (unless you are not in your senses) at your advancing such a barefaced falsehood. 31. You go on: ‘Under this head may not improperly be considered their undutiful behavior to the civil powers.’ What proof have you of this Why, a single sentence, on which I laid so little stress myself that it is only inserted by way of parenthesis in the body of another sentence: ‘Ye learned in the law, what becomes of Magna Charta and of English liberty and property Are not these mere sounds while on any pretence there is such a thing as a press-gang suffered in the land’