Wesley Corpus

12. Cicero is the author of the phrase "minute philosophers." He speaks in de Senect.= 23 of "Quidam minuti philosophi," meaning trifling, insignificant. In English use it rather means meticulous, over-precise, speculators. All this discussion as to quantity of fire is absurd: fire is not a thing , but a state of violent chemical combination; a match is quite enough to kindle a conflagration if there be fuel enough. Wesley was keenly interested in electrical phenomena, and was the first man in England to make use of it as a curative agent. His pamphlet called The Desideratum; or, Electricity made Plain, and Useful, published in 1760, details many of Franklin's experiments, such as drawing sparks out of the human body or from the fur of a cat. This is what he is thinking of when he says that our bodies are full of fire. "Freethinker" was a name claimed by the Deists and other rejecters of the Christian revelation at the beginning of the eighteenth century. Here Wesley uses it of Ovid, the Roman poet, with a kind of suggestion that the modern freethinkers were akin to him in their religious views. The quotation is from the Metamorphoses, 1.256, where Jupiter, preparing to hurl his thunderbolts, hesitates to do so lest he should set the ether aflame, "for he remembers that it is amongst the decrees of the Fates that a time will come when the sea, the earth, and the palace of heaven shall catch fire and blaze, and the mass of the world, so laboriously constructed, shall be imperilled." 13. "Your in conscience;" so the author of the old Kentish Poema Morale says: "Elch man sceal him then biclupien and ecach sceal him demen; His aye weorc and his ithanc to witnesse he sceal temen", which is, being interpreted. Every man shall accuse himself there, and every man shall judge himself; His own work and his conscience he shall bring to witness. "See! See! He cometh!" One of Wesley's finest and most impassioned perorations.