In other hymns he employs the most biting, taunting sarcasm. It is difficult to suppose that these were ever sung even in the thickest of the fight; but they were sown broadcast (price fourpence), and were, no doubt, read with ecstatic delight by those who were on the Wesleys’ side in the great controversy. It is easy at this distance of time and circumstance to condemn the vehemence of the language used on both sides, especially in the later and more acrimonious stages of the controversy. But this was one of ‘freedom’s battles.’ It was magnificent, and it was war. To the Wesleys the doctrine that by the arbitrary decree of God—the God of love!—children were born to a doom which they could neither escape nor deserve was hateful, blasphemous, impossible. If _this_ were indeed the truth of God, what gospel was there to preach? Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die and meet the inevitable doom. Nor could they tolerate what seemed to them the smug satisfaction of ‘the elect,’ to whose certainty of salvation the equal certainty of the damnation of the reprobate added a pleasing flavour. They would not accept salvation on such terms. ‘Take back,’ Charles Wesley cries indignantly, Take back my interest in Thy blood, Unless it streamed for all the race. With a true controversial instinct, the Wesleys fastened upon Calvin’s phrase ‘_decretum horribile_,’ and, preferring to transliterate rather than to translate, turned again and again to rend it. A poem describing the possibilities of evil in the human heart and mind comes to a climax thus— I could the devil’s law receive, Unless restrained by Thee; I could (good God!) I could believe The Horrible Decree. I could believe that God is hate— The God of love and grace Did damn, pass by, and reprobate The most of human race. Farther than this I cannot go, Till Tophet take me in. But, O, forbid that I should know This mystery of sin.[133] Such were the amenities of religious controversy in the eighteenth century! Again, in a lighter but still intensely earnest vein, he caricatures his adversaries’ teaching— The righteous God consigned Them over to their doom, And sent the Saviour of mankind To damn them from the womb: To damn for falling short Of what they could not do, For not believing the report Of that which was not true. He did not do the deed— (Some have more mildly raved), He did not damn them, but decreed They never should be saved. This effusion ends in a higher strain, with a dedication of his own life to the proclamation of universal redemption— My life I here present, My heart’s last drop of blood; O let it all be freely spent In proof that Thou art good: Art good to all that breathe, Who all may pardon have: Thou willest not the sinner’s death, But all the world _wouldst_ save.