Wesley Corpus

A Word to a Protestant Source: The Works of John Wesley, Volume 11 (Zondervan) Author: John Wesley --- 1. Do not you call yourself a Protestant? Why so? Do you know what the word means? What is a Protestant? I suppose you mean one that is not a Papist. But what is a Papist? If you do not know, say so; acknowledge you cannot tell. Is not this the case? You call yourself a Protestant; but you do not know what a Protestant is. You talk against Papists; and yet neither do you know what a Papist is. Why do you pretend, then, to the knowledge which you have not? Why do you use words which you do not understand? 2. Are you desirous to know what these words, Papist and Protestant, mean? A Papist is one who holds the Pope or Bishop of Rome (the name papa, that is, father, was formerly given to all Bishops) to be head of the whole Christian Church; and the Church of Rome, or that which owns the Pope as their head, to be the only Christian Church. 3. In a course of years, many errors crept into this Church, of which good men complained from time to time. At last, about two hundred years ago, the Pope appointed many Bishops and others to meet at a town in Germany, called Trent. But these, instead of amending those errors, established them all by a law, and so delivered them down to all succeeding generations. 4. Among these errors may be numbered, their doctrine of seven sacraments; of transubstantiation; of communion in one kind only; of purgatory, and praying for the dead therein; of veneration of relics; and of indulgences, or pardons granted by the Pope, and to be bought for money. It is thought by some, that these errors, great as they are, do only defile the purity of Christianity; but it is sure, the following strike at its very root, and tend to banish true religion out of the world:-- 5. First. The doctrine of merit. The very foundation of Christianity is, that a man can merit nothing of God; that we are “justified freely by his grace, through the redemption that is in Jesus Christ;” not for any of our works or of our deservings, but by faith in the blood of the covenant.