Wesley Corpus

Which prin ciples, if added to his former tenets,” (nay, they need not be added to them, for they are the very same,) “will give the whole a new vein of inconsistency, and make the contradic tions more gross and glaring than before.” 15. It will be necessary to speak more largely on this head, than on either of the preceding. And in order to speak as distinctly as I can, I propose taking the paragraphs one by one, as they lie before me. 16. (1.) It is “asserted that Mr. Law’s system was the creed of the Methodists.” But it is not proved. I had been eight years at Oxford before I read any of Mr. Law’s writings; and when I did, I was so far from making them my creed, that I had objections to almost every page. But all this time my manner was, to spend several hours a day in reading the Scripture in the original tongues. And hence my system, so termed, was wholly drawn, according to the light I then had. 17. It was in my passage to Georgia, I met with those Teach ers who would have taught me the way of God more perfectly. But I understood them not. Neither, on my arrival there, did they infuse any particularities into me, either about justifica tion or anything else. For I came back with the same motions I went. And this I have explicitly acknowledged in my second Journal, where some of my words are these: “When Peter Böhler, as soon as I came to London, affirmed of true faith in Christ, (which is but one,) that it had these two fruits insepa rably attending it, “dominion over sin, and constant peace from a sense of forgiveness, I was quite amazed, and looked upon it as a new gospel. If this was so, it was clear I had no faith. But I was not willing to be convinced of this. Therefore I disputed with all my might, and laboured to prove that faith might be where these were not; especially, where that sense of forgiveness was not; for, all the scriptures relating to this I had been long since taught to construe away, and to call all Pres byterians who spoke otherwise.