Wesley Corpus

By this preaching it pleased God to work those mighty effects in London, Bristol, Kingswood, Yorkshire, and New castle. By means of this, twenty-nine persons received remission of sins in one day at Bristol only; most of them, while I was opening and enforcing, in this manner, our Lord’s Sermon upon the Mount. In this manner John Downes, John Bennet, John Haughton, and all the other Methodists, preached, till James Wheatly came among them, who never was clear, perhaps not sound, in the faith. According to his under standing was his preaching; an unconnected rhapsody of unmeaning words, like Sir John Suckling's-- Verses, smooth and scft as cream, In which was neither depth nor stream. Yet (to the utter reproach of the Methodist congregations) this man became a most popular Preacher. He was admired more and more wherever he went, till he went over the second time into Ireland, and conversed more intimately than before with some of the Moravian Preachers. The consequence was, that he leaned more and more both to their doctrine and manner of preaching. At first, several of our Preachers complained of this; but, in the space of a few months, (so incredible is the force of soft words,) he, by slow and imperceptible degrees, brought almost all the Preachers then in the kingdom to think and speak like himself. These, returning to England, spread the contagion to some others of their brethren. But still the far greater part of the Methodist Preachers thought and spoke as they had done from the beginning. This is the plain fact. As to the fruit of this new manner of preaching, (entirely new to the Methodists) speaking much of the promises, little of the commands; (even to unbelievers, and still less to believers;) you think it has done great good; I think it has done great harm.