Wesley Corpus

I have since found abundant reason to praise God for giving me this honest art. By this, when men have hedged me in by what they called demonstrations, I have been many times able to dash them in pieces; in spite of all its covers, to touch the very point where the fallacy lay; and it flew open in a moment. This is the art which I have used with Bishop Warburton, as well as in the preceding pages. When Dr. E. twisted truth and falsehood together, in many of his proposi tions, it was by this art I untwisted the one from the other, and showed just how far each was true. At doing this, I bless God, I am expert; as those will find who attack me without rhyme or reason. But “shifting, subtlety, and dis guise,” I despise and abhor, fully as much as Dr. E. And if he cannot see that I have answered Bishop Warburton plainly and directly, and so untwisted his arguments that no man living will be able to piece them together, I believe all unprejudiced men can, and are thoroughly convinced of it. Let any candid man review the last article, and he will see another instance of this. Dr. E. had given us a long paragraph about “forming a Church within a Church.” It is to the same effect with the objection which the warm Churchmen have often urged against the Dissenters in England. It sounds extremely plausible, and the parts of it are carefully knit together. But it is not a gordian knot: A man moderately expert in arguing may untie it. And when the threads are separate, it plainly appears to have been fine, but not strong. As to the Second point, I cannot at all complain of Dr. E.’s want of openness. He speaks plain and downright: “Seeming strictness of behaviour will not justify those who forget, ‘There is a way which seemeth right unto a man; but the end thereof is the way of death.” (Page 46.) Again: “What claim can he have to genuine Christianity, whose professed experience gives God the lie?