Wesley Corpus

Sir, I understand you. You was obliged to call it seeming, lest you should yourself confute the allegation brought in your title-page. But if it be only seeming, whatever it prove besides, it cannot prove that I am an enthusiast. 12. Hitherto you have succeeded extremely ill. You have brought five accusations against me; and have not been able to make one good. However, you are resolved to throw dirt enough, that some may stick. So you are next to prove upon me, “a restless impatience and insatiable thirst of tra velling, and undertaking dangerous voyages, for the con version of infidels; together with a declared contempt of all dangera, pains, and sufferings; and the designing, loving, and praying for ill usage, persecution, martyrdom, death, and hell.” (Page 27.) In order to prove this uncommon charge, you produce four BiSHOP LAVINGTON. 5 scraps of sentences, (page 31) which you mark as my words, though, as they stand in your book, they are neither sense nor £rammar. But you do not refer to the page, or even the treatise, where any one of them may be found. Sir, it is well you hide your name, or you would be obliged to hide your face from every man of candour or even common humanity. 13. “Sometimes indeed,” you say, “Mr. Wesley complains of the scoffs both of the great vulgar and the small;” (page 32;) to prove which, you disjoint and murder (as your manner is) another of my sentences. “But at other times the note is changed, and ‘till he is despised, no man is in a state of salva tion.’” The note is changed 1 How so? When did I say otherwise than I do at this day, viz., “that none are children of God but those who are hated or despised by the children of the devil?” I must beg you,Sir, in your Third Part to inform your reader, that, whenever any solecism or mangled sentences appear in the quotations from my writings, they are not chargeable upon me; that if the sense be mine, (which is not always; sometimes you do me too much honour, even in this,) yet I lay no claim fo the manner of expression; the English is all your own. 14. “Corporal severities or mortification by tormenting the flesh,” (page 31,) is the next thing you charge upon me.