Wesley Corpus

In your eighth you throw out an hard word, which somebody has helped you to, Thaumaturg --what is it --about lay preachers. When you have answered the arguments in the Farther Appeal to Men of Reason and Religion, I will say something more upon that head. In the ninth you say something, no way material, about the houses at Bristol, Kingswood, and Newcastle; and in the last you give me a fair challenge to a 'personal dispute.' Not so; you have fallen upon me in public, and to the public I appeal. Let all men, not any single umpire, judge whether I have not refuted your charge, and cleared the people called Methodists from the foul aspersions which, without why or wherefore, you had thrown upon them. Let all my countrymen judge which of us have spoken the words of truth and soberness, which has reason on his side, and which has treated the other with a temper suitable to the gospel. If the general voice of mankind gives it against you, I hope you will be henceforth less flippant with your pen. I assure you, as little as you think of it, the Methodists are not such fools as you suppose. But their desire is to live peaceably with all men; and none desires this more than JOHN WESLEY.