Wesley Corpus

I. 'Several who had left you promised to join you again, provided you would suffer the Methodists to preach in your chapel no more.' I cannot but think you ought never to have joined with or received persons of such a spirit. What a narrow popish spirit was this! What vile bigotry I The exact spirit of Calvinism! Such as surely none that is not a Calvinist ought to encourage either by word or deed. Every one that does I call the maintainer of a bad cause, as bad as bad can be. For whom has God owned in Great Britain, Ireland, and America like them Whom does He now own like them in Yorkshire, in Cheshire, in Lancashire, in Cornwall Truly these are the tokens of our mission, the proof that God hath sent us. Threescore thousand persons setting their faces heavenward, and many of them rejoicing in God their Savior. A specimen of this you yourself saw at Leeds. Come again, and see if the work be not of God. O consider the weight of that word, 'He that rejecteth you rejecteth Me and Him that sent Me.' 2. 'But they preach perfection.' And do not you Who does not that speaks as the oracles of God Meaning by that scriptural word neither more nor less than 'loving God with all our heart,' or having the mind that was in Christ and walking as Christ walked. 3. 'But, while one of them was preaching, several persons fell down, cried out, and were violently affected.' Have you never read my Journals or Dr. Edwards' Narrative or Dr. Gillies's Historical Collections [A Faithful Narrative of the Conversion of many hundred Souls in Northampton, by Jonathan Edwards, 1736; and John Gillies's Historical Collections relating to Remarkable Periods of the Success of the Gospel, 1754.] Do not you see, then, that it has pleased the all-wise God for near these fifty years, wherever He has wrought most powerfully, that these outward signs (whether natural or not) should attend the inward work And who can call Him to account for this Let Him do as seemeth Him good. I must therefore still think that neither these nor any other reasons can justify the discarding the messengers of God, and consequently that all who do, or abet this, are maintaining a bad cause. Yet I am Your affectionate friend and brother.