Wesley Corpus

And did not he offer rudeness to your maid?' I told him, ‘No, my Lord; he never said any such thing to me, nor to my husband that I know of He never offered any rudeness to any maid of mine. I never saw or knew any harm of him: But a man told me once (who I was told was a Methodist Preacher) that I should be damned if I did not know my sins were forgiven.’” 4. This is her own account given to me. And an account it is, irreconcilably different (notwithstanding some small resemblance in the last circumstance) from that she is affirmed to have given your Lordship. Whether she did give that account to your Lordship or no, your Lordship knows best. That the Comparer affirms it, is no proof at all; since he will affirm any thing that suits his purpose. 5. Yet I was sorry to see your Lordship's authority cited on such an occasion; inasmuch as many of his readers, not con sidering the man, may think your Lordship did really counte nance such a writer; one that turns the most serious, the most awful, the most venerable things into mere farce; that makes the most essential parts of real, experimental religion matter of low buffoonery; that, beginning at the very rise of it in the soul, namely, “repentance towards God, a broken and a contrite heart,” goes on to “faith in our Lord Jesus Christ,” whereby “he that believeth is born of God,” to “the love of God shed abroad in the heart,” attended with “peace and joy in the Holy Ghost,”--to our subsequent “wrestling not” only “with flesh and blood, but with principalities and powers and wicked spirits in high places,”-and thence to “perfect love,” the “loving the Lord our God with all our heart, mind, soul, and strength; ” and treats on every one of these sacred topics with the spirit and air of a Merry Andrew. What advantage the common enemies of Christianity may reap from this, your Lordship cannot be insensible. 6. Your Lordship cannot but discern how the whole tenor of his book tends to destroy the Holy Scriptures, to render them vile in the eyes of the people, to make them stink in the nostrils of infidels.