Wesley Corpus

To prove my art, cunning, and evasion, you instance next in the case of impulses and impressions. You begin, “With what pertinacious confidence have impulses, impres sions, feelings, &c., been advanced into certain rules of con duct Their followers have been taught to depend upon them as sure guides and infallible proofs.” To support this weighty charge, you bring one single scrap, about a line and a quarter, from one of my Journals. The words are these: “By the most infallible of proofs, inward feeling, I am convinced.” Convinced of what? It immedi ately follows, “Of unbelief, having no such faith as will pre vent my heart from being troubled.” I here assert, that inward feeling or consciousness is the most infallible of proofs of unbelief,-of the want of such a faith as will prevent the heart's being troubled. But do I here “advance impressions, impulses, feelings, &c., into cer tain rules of conduct?” or anywhere else? You may just as well say, I advance them into certain proofs of transub stantiation. Neither in writing, in preaching, nor in private conversa tion, have I ever “taught any of my followers to depend upon them as sure guides or infallible proofs" of anything. Nay, you yourself own, I have taught quite the reverse; and that at my very first setting out. Then, as well as ever since, I have told the societies, “they were not to judge by their own inward feelings. I warned them, all these were in themselves of a doubtful, disputable nature. They might be from God, or they might not, and were therefore to be tried by a further rule, to be brought to the only certain test, the law and the testimony.” (Vol. I. p. 206.) This is what I have taught from first to last. And now, Sir, what becomes of your heavy charge? On which side lies the “pertinacious confidence” now? How clearly have you made out my inconsistency and self-contradiction and that I “occasionally either defend or give up my favourite notions and principal points ” 22. “Inspiration, and the extraordinary calls and guidances of the Holy Ghost, are ” what you next affirm to be “given up.” (Section xiii. p. 106, &c.) Not by me. I do not “give up” one tittle on this head, which I ever maintained.