Wesley Corpus

For how hard is it to be just to them we hate? to render them their due, either in thought, word, or action? Indeed, we vio late justice by this very thing, by not loving them as ourselves, For we do not render unto all their due; seeing love is due to all mankind. If we “ owe no man anything” beside, do we not owe this, “to love one another?” And where love is totally wanting, what other justice can be expected? Will not a whole train of injurious tempers and passions, of wrong words and actions, naturally follow P So plain, so undeniably plain it is, that this doctrine of the Church of Rome, (to instance at present in no more,) that “all but those of their own Church are accursed,” has a natural tendency to hinder, yea, utterly to destroy, justice. Fourthly. Its natural tendency to destroy mercy is equally glaring and undeniable. We need not use any reasoning to prove this: Only cast your eyes upon matter of fact! What terrible proofs of it do we see in the execrable crusades against the Albigenses! in those horrible wars in the Holy Land, where so many rivers of blood were poured out! in the many millions that have been butchered in Europe, since the begin ning of the Reformation; not only in the open field, but in prisons, on the scaffold, on the gibbet, at the stake I For how many thousand lives, barbarously taken away, has Philip the Second to give an account to God! For how many thousand, that infamous, perfidious butcher, Charles the Ninth of France 1 to say nothing of our own bloody Queen Mary, not much inferior to them I See, in Europe, in America, in the uttermost parts of Asia, the dungeons, the racks, the various tortures of the Inquisition, so unhappily styled, the House of Mercy! Yea, such mercy as is in the fiends in hell ! such mercy as the natives of Ireland, in the last century, showed to myriads of their Protestant countrymen | Such is the mercy which the doctrine of the Church of Rome very naturally inspires! Lastly. The doctrine of the Church of Rome has a natural tendency to destroy truth from off the earth.