The life and times of the Rev. John Wesley, M.A., founder of the Methodists. Vol. 1 (of 3)Tyerman, L. (Luke)
History
The life and times of the Rev. John Wesley, M.A., founder of the Methodists. Vol. 1 (of 3)
Tyerman, L. (Luke)
Methodism; Wesley, John, 1703-1791
Wesley, in Georgia, was accepted of God through Christ; but, to cite
his own words at the conclusion of his own condemnatory document, he
wanted “a sure trust and confidence in God, that, through the merits of
Christ, his sins were forgiven.” “I want,” says he, “that faith which
none can have without knowing that he hath it.”
Wesley, according to his own explanation, had long been in a _saved_
state (though he knew it not); but he was far from being perfect,
either in spirit or behaviour. No man could be more sincere or earnest;
but it is hoped that few ministers of equal learning, wisdom, and
sanctity make greater blunders than were made by him at Savannah. There
can be little doubt that he had ecclesiastical authority for most,
if not all, his priestly practices; and so have the half papistical
priests and ritualists of the present day. But as England now is right
in resisting the introduction of rites and ceremonies, fasts and
feasts, confessions and penances, absolutions and interdicts, savouring
more of the man of sin than of the word of God,—so Savannah then was
right in resisting similar innovations attempted to be introduced by
the extremely high church priest, fresh from the society of the Oxford
Methodists. If we are right in denouncing _ritualism_ now, Savannah
was right in denouncing _ritualism_ then. If the thing is offensive
and obnoxious here, it was equally offensive and obnoxious there;
and if no other end had been answered by Wesley’s mission to America
than knocking out of him his high church nonsense, the good effected
would have been an ample compensation for two dangerous voyages of six
thousand miles, and for all the discomforts of living two-and-twenty
months, in a log-built hut, among almost homeless emigrants, who had
taken with them to the swamps and woods of Georgia more covetousness
than courtesy, more rudeness than rank, more quarrelsomeness than
quietude, and more conceit than common sense.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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