Wesley Corpus

I think this is all you have said which is any way material concerning the doctrines of the Methodists. The charges you bring concerning their spirit or practice may be dispatched in fewer words. And, First, you charge them with pride and uncharitable ness: “They talk as proudly as the Domatists, of their being 106 LETTER. To the only true Preachers of the gospel, and esteem themselves, in contra-distinction to others, as the regenerate, the children of God, and as having arrived at sinless perfection.” (Page 15.) All of a piece. We neither talk nor think so. We doubt not but there are many true Preachers of the gospel, both in England and elsewhere, who have no connexion with, no knowledge of, us. Neither can we doubt but that there are many thousand children of God who never heard our voice or saw our face. And this may suffice for an answer to all the assertions of the same kind which are scattered up and down your work. Of sinless perfection, here brought in by head and shoulders, I have nothing to say at present. 17. You charge them, Secondly, “with boldness and blas phemy, who, triumphing in their train of credulous and crazy followers, the spurious” (should it not be rather the genu ine *) “offspring of their insidious craft, ascribe the glorious event to divine grace, and, in almost every page of their paltry harangues, invoke the blessed Spirit to go along with them in their soul-awakening work; that is, to continue to assist them in seducing the simple and unwary.” (Page 41.) What we ascribe to divine grace is this: The convincing sinners of the errors of their ways, and the “turning them from darkness to light, from the power of Satan to God.” Do not you yourself ascribe this to grace? And do not you too invoke the blessed Spirit, to go along with you in every part of your work? If you do not, you lose all your labour. Whether we “seduce men into sin,” or by his grace save them from it, is another question. 18. You charge us, Thirdly, with “requiring a blind and implicit trust from our disciples; ” (p.