Wesley Corpus

I am, with great sincerity, Dear Sir, Your affectionate brother and servant, 3. After waiting near two years, and receiving no answer to the second any more than the first Letter, in 1758 I printed “A Preservative against Unsettled Notions in Religion.” I designed this at first only for the Preachers who were in connexion with me. But I was afterwards induced to think it might be of use to others that were under my care. I designed it for these, and these alone, though I could not help its falling into other hands. Accordingly, I said, “My design in publishing the following Tracts, is not to reclaim, but to preserve.” To preserve those to whom I had frequently and strongly recommended Mr. Hervey’s Dialogues, from what I disapproved of therein, I inserted the above Letter; and that without any addition, as intending it only “for those who already knew the truth,” whom I wished to preserve from everything wrong, while they profited by what was admirably right, in his Dialogues. No wonder there fore that those notes (as Mr. Hervey remarks in the same page) “have rather the air of a caveat than a confutation.” I never intended them for a confutation; and even when I sent them to the press, I designed them merely as a caveat to my friends against imbibing truth and error together. 4. A considerable time after, I was much surprised by an information, that Mr. Hervey “was going to publish against me.” I immediately wrote a short letter to him, which his friends may easily find among his papers. It was to this effect, and, so far as I can recollect, nearly in these words: “After waiting above a year for an answer to my last letter, I printed it in the close of a larger treatise. If you have anything to object to me, I expect that, as a gentleman and a Christian, you will behave to me as I did to you. Send me the letter first. And if I do not give you a satisfactory answer in a year, then publish it to all the world.” I am inclined to believe, this prevented the publication of these papers during his life. And with his dying breath, (I have it under his brother’s hand,) he desired they might not be published at all. How comes it then to be done now?