Wesley Corpus

6;) or to His Majesty; and, indeed, how can you avoid it? “For it would be using him,” you think, “extremely ill, not to give him proper information, that there” are now a set of people offering such indignity to his crown and government. However, we are not to think your opposing the Methodists was “owing to self-interest” alone. Though, what if it was? “Was I to depart from my duty, because it happened to be my interest ? Did these saints ever forbear to preach to the mob in the fields, for fear lest they should get the pence of the mob? Or do not” the pence and the preaching “go hand in hand together?” No, they do not; for many years neither I, nor any connected with me, have got any “pence,” as you phrase it, “in the fields.” Indeed, properly speaking, they never did. For the collections which Mr. Whitefield made, it is well known, were not for his own use, either in whole or part. And he has long ago given an account, in print, of the manner wherein all that was received was expended. But it is not my design to examine at large, either your dedi cation preface, or Sermon. I have only leisure to make a few cursory remarks on your “definition” of the Methodists, (so called,) and on the account you give of their first rise, of their principles and practice; just premising, that I speak of those alone who began, as you observe, at Oxford. If a thousand other sets of men “pass under that denomination,” yet they are nothing to me. As they have no connexion with me, so I am in no way concerned to answer either for their principles or practice, any more than you are to answer for all who “pass under the denomination of Church-of-England men.” The account you give of their rise, is this: The Methodists began at Oxford. “The name was first given to a few persons, who were so uncommonly methodical, as to keep a diary of the most trivial actions of their lives, as how many slices of bread and butter they ate, how many country dances they danced at their dancing club, or after a fast how many pounds of mutton they devoured.