Wesley Corpus

The justness of some of your remarks, if I mistake not, has been pretty fully disproved. As to what you speak of my art, sub tlety, and so on, in this and many other places, I look upon it as neither better nor worse than a civil way of calling names. “‘To this multitude of crimes I am also an utter stranger.’ Then you have charged them wrongfully. What do you account guile?” &c. (Second Letter, p. 84.) I account guile, despising self-denial even in the smallest points, and teaching that those who have not the assurance of faith may not use the ordinances of God, the Lord's Supper in particular, (this is the real, un aggravated charge,) to be faults which cannot be excused. But I do not account them all together “a multitude of crimes.” I conceive this is a vehement hyperbole. “The honour of religion,” said you, “and virtue trampled apon:” I answered, “By whom ? Not by the Moravians.” You reply, “And yet you have accused some of these as decry ing all the means of grace.” No. What I accused them of, was, teaching that an unbeliever (in their sense) ought to abstain from them. “Neither did I know, or think, or say, they were desperately wicked people.’ Your Journal is before the world; to whom I appeal whether this has not so repre sented them.” But how do you here represent your remark, and my answer? My paragraph runs thus:-- “You go on, “How could you so long, and so intimately, converse with such desperately wicked people as the Moravians, according to your own account, were known by you to be?” O Sir, what another assertion is this ! “The Moravians, ac cording to your own account, were known by you to be desperately wicked people, while you intimately conversed with them !’ Utterly false and injurious! I never gave any such account. I conversed with them intimately both at Savannah and Hernhuth. But neither then, nor at any other time, did I know, or think, or say, they were desperately wicked people: I think and say just the reverse; viz., that though I soon ‘found among them a few things which I could not ap prove, yet I believe they are, in the main, some of the best Chris tians in the world.