Wesley Corpus

If not, how can you infer what my state of mind is now, from what it was above eleven years ago? Sir, I do not tell you, or any man else, that “I cannot now find the love of God in myself; ” or that now, in the year 1751, I rarely feel more than a cold attention in the holy communion : So that your whole argument, built on this supposition, falls to the ground at once. 26. Sensible, I presume, of the weakness of this reason, you immediately apply to the passions, by that artful remark: “Observe, reader, this is the man who charges our religion as no better than the Turkish pilgrimages to Mecca, or the Popish worship of our Lady of Loretto !” Our religion 1 How naturally will the reader suppose, that I fix the charge either on the Protestant religion in general, or on that of the Church of England in particular ! But how far is this from the truth ! My words concerning those who are commonly called reli gious are, “Wherein does their religion consist? in right eousness and true holiness; in love stronger than death; fervent gratitude to God, and tender affection to all his creatures? Is their religion the religion of the heart; a renewal of the soul in the image of God? Do they resemble Him they worship? Are they free from pride, from vanity, from malice, from envy; from ambition and avarice, from passion and lust, from every uneasy and unlovely temper? Alas! I fear neither they (the greater part at least) nor you have any more notion of this religion, than the peasant that holds the plough, of the religion of a Gymnosophist. “It is well if the genuine religion of Christ has any more alliance with what you call religion, than with the Turkish pilgrimages to Mecca, or the Popish worship of our Lady of Loretto. Have not you substituted, in the place of the reli gion of the heart, something, I do not say, equally sinful, but equally vain and foreign to the worshipping of God in spirit and in truth? What else can be said even of prayer, public or private, in the manner wherein you generally perform it?