Wesley Corpus

50. These things being so, what must all unprejudiced men think of you and your whole performance You have advanced a charge, not against one or two persons only, but indiscriminately against an whole body of people, of His Majesty's subjects, Englishmen, Protestants, members, I suppose, of your own Church; a charge containing abundance of articles, and most of them of the highest and blackest nature. You have prosecuted this with unparalleled bitterness of spirit and acrimony of language; using sometimes the most coarse, rude, scurrilous terms, sometimes the keenest sarcasms you could devise. The point you have steadily pursued in thus prosecuting this charge is first to expose the whole people to the hatred and scorn of all mankind, and next to stir up the civil powers against them. And when this charge comes to be fairly weighed, there is not a single article of it true I The passages you cite to make it good are one and all such as prove nothing less than the points in question; most of them such as you have palpably maimed, corrupted, and strained to a sense never thought of by the writer; many of them such as are flat against you, and overthrow the very point they are brought to support. What can they think, but that this is the most shocking violation of the Christian rule 'Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself,' the most open affront to all justice and even common humanity, the most glaring insult upon the common sense and reason of mankind, which has lately appeared in the world If you say, ‘But I have proved the charge upon Mr. Whitefield’: admit you have (which I do not allow), Mr. Whitefield is not the Methodists; -- no, nor the Societies under his care; they are not a third, perhaps not a tenth, part of the Methodists. What, then, can excuse your ascribing their faults, were they proved, to the whole body You indict ten men. Suppose you prove the indictment upon one, will you therefore condemn the other nine Nay, let every man bear his own burthen, since every man must give an account of himself to God.