Wesley Corpus

Sale, the most gross and impious absurdities. To cite particulars is not now my business: It may suffice to observe, in general, that human understanding must be debased, to an inconceivable degree, in those who can swallow such absurdities as divinely revealed. And yet we know the Mahometans not only condemn all who cannot swallow them to everlasting fire, -not only appropriate to themselves the title of Mussulmen, or True Believers, - but even anathematize, with the utmost bitterness, and adjudge to eternal destruction, all their brethren of the sect of Hali, all who contend for a figurative interpretation of them. That these men, then, have no knowledge or love of God is undeniably manifest, not only from their gross horrible notions of him, but from their not loving their brethren. But they have not always so weighty a cause to hate and murder one another as difference of opinion. Mahometans will butcher each other by thousands, without so plausible a plea as this. Why is it that such numbers of Turks and Persians have stabbed one another in cool blood? Truly, because they differ in the manner of dressing their head. The Ottoman vehemently maintains, (for he has unquestionable tradition on his side,) that a Mussulman should wear a round turban; whereas the Persian insists upon his liberty of conscience, and will wear it picked before. So, for this won derful reason, when a more plausible one is wanting, they beat out each other's brains from generation to generation | It is not therefore strange that, ever since the religion of Mahomet appeared in the world, the espousers of it, particularly those under the Turkish Emperor, have been as wolves and tigers to all other nations, rending and tearing all that fell into their merciless paws, and grinding them with their iron teeth; that numberless cities are rased from the foundation, and only their name remaining; that many countries, which were once as the garden of God, are now a desolate wilderness; and that so many once numerous and powerful nations are vanished away from the earth | Such was, and is at this day, the rage, the fury, the revenge, of these destroyers of human kind. 7. Proceed we now to the Christian world.