Wesley Corpus

To You here overthrow, not only your immediately preceding observation, (as usual,) but likewise what you have observed elsewhere,--that the exorcists began to be ordained “about the middle of the third century.” (Page 86.) If so, what need of decreeing it now, above an hundred years after? Again: If the exorcists were ordained an hundred years before this Council sat, what change was made by the decree of the Council? Or how came the power of casting out devils to cease upon it? You say, The Bishops still favoured and desired to support it. Why, then, did they not support it? It must have been they (not the poor exorcists, who were but a degree above sextons) who had hitherto kept such numbers of them in pay. What was become of them now? Were all the groaners and howlers dead, and no more to be procured for money? Or rather, did not the Bishops, think you, grow covetous as they grew rich, and so kept fewer and fewer of them in pay, till at length the whole business dropped? 13. These are your laboured objections against the great promise of our Lord, “In my name shall they cast out devils;” whereby (to make sure work) you strike at him and his Apostles, just as much as at the primitive Fathers. But, by a strange jumble of ideas in your head, you would prove so much, that you prove nothing. By attempting to show all who claimed this power to be at once both fools and knaves, you have spoiled your whole cause, and, in the event, neither shown them to be one nor the other; as the one half of your argument all along just serves to overthrow the other. So that, after all, the ancient testimonies, touching this gift, remain firm and unshaken. Section IV. l. You told us above, that “the fourth miraculous gift was that of prophesying; the fifth, of seeing visions; the sixth, of discovering the secrets of men.” (Page 72.) But here you jumble them all together, telling us, “The next miraculous gift is that of prophetic visions, and ecstatic trances,” (ecstatic ecstasies, you might have said,) “and the discovery of men's hearts.” (Page 96.) But why do you thrust all three into one?