Treatise Second Letter On Enthusiasm Of Methodists And Papists
| Author | John Wesley |
|---|---|
| Type | treatise |
| Year | None |
| Passage ID | jw-treatise-second-letter-on-enthusiasm-of-methodists-and-papists-002 |
| Words | 382 |
5. Yet I was sorry to see your Lordship's authority cited on
such an occasion; inasmuch as many of his readers, not con
sidering the man, may think your Lordship did really counte
nance such a writer; one that turns the most serious, the most
awful, the most venerable things into mere farce; that makes
the most essential parts of real, experimental religion matter
of low buffoonery; that, beginning at the very rise of it in
the soul, namely, “repentance towards God, a broken and a
contrite heart,” goes on to “faith in our Lord Jesus Christ,”
whereby “he that believeth is born of God,” to “the love of
God shed abroad in the heart,” attended with “peace and
joy in the Holy Ghost,”--to our subsequent “wrestling not”
only “with flesh and blood, but with principalities and powers
and wicked spirits in high places,”-and thence to “perfect
love,” the “loving the Lord our God with all our heart,
mind, soul, and strength; ” and treats on every one of these
sacred topics with the spirit and air of a Merry Andrew. What advantage the common enemies of Christianity may
reap from this, your Lordship cannot be insensible. 6. Your Lordship cannot but discern how the whole tenor of
his book tends to destroy the Holy Scriptures, to render them
vile in the eyes of the people, to make them stink in the nostrils
of infidels. For instance: After reading his laboured ridicule
of the sorrow and fear which usually attend the first repent
ance, (called by St. Chrysostom, as well as a thousand other
writers, “the pangs or throes of the new birth,”) what can an
infidel think of those and the like expressions in Scripture: “I
have roared for the very disquietness of my heart: Fearfulness
and trembling are come upon me, and an horrible dread hath
overwhelmed me?” After his flood of satire on all kind of con
flicts with Satan, what judgment can a Deist form of what St. Paul speaks concerning the various wrestlings of a Christian
with the wicked one? Above all, how will his bringing the
lewd heathem poets to expose the pure and spiritual love of
God, naturally cause them to look with the same eyes on the
most elevated passages of the inspired writings?