Wesley Corpus

Very few, I grant, are the instru ments now employed; yet a great work is wrought already. And the fewer they are by whom this large harvest hath hitherto been gathered in, the more evident must it appear to unprejudiced minds that the work is not of man, but of God. 8. “But they are not only few, but unlearned also.” This is a grievous offence, and is by many csteemed a sufficient excuse for not acknowledging the work to be of God. The ground of this offence is partly true. Some of those who now preach are unlearned. They neither understand the ancient languages, nor any of the branches of philosophy. And yet this objection might have been spared by many of those who have frequently made it; because they are un learned too, though accounted otherwise. They have not themselves the very thing they require in others. Men in general are under a great mistake with regard to what is called the learned world. They do not know, they cannot easily imagine, how little learning there is among them. I do not speak of abstruse learning; but of what all Divines, at least, of any note, are supposed to have, namely, the knowledge of the tongues, at least, Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, and of the common arts and sciences. How few men of learning, so called, understand Hebrew ; cven so far as to read a plain chapter in Genesis ! Nay, how few understand Greek! Make an easy experiment. Desire that grave man, who is urging this objection, only to tell you the English of the first paragraph that occurs in one of Plato's Dialogues. I am afraid we may go farther still. How few understand Latin Give one of them an Epistle of Tully, and see how readily he will explain it without his dictionary. If he can hobble through that, it is odds but a Georgic in Virgil, or a Satire of Persius, sets him fast.