“What think you of our new set of fanatics, called the Methodists? There is one Wesley, who told a friend of mine, that he had lived most deliciously last summer in Georgia, sleeping under trees, and feeding on boiled maize, sauced with the ashes of oak leaves; and that he will return thither, and then will cast off his English dress, and wear a dried skin, like the savages, the better to ingratiate himself with them. It would be well for virtue and religion if this humour would lay hold generally of our overheated bigots, and send them to cool themselves in the Indian marshes.” In another letter, written in the same year to Dr. Birch, he says:— “A couple of these Methodists, of whom Wesley was one, travelling into this neighbourhood on foot, took up their lodging with a clergyman of their acquaintance. The master of the house going into their chamber in the morning to salute them, perceived a certain vessel full of blood, and, on asking the occasion, was told it was _their method_, when the blood grew rebellious, to draw it off by breathing a vein; that they had been heated with travel, and thought it proper to cool themselves.”[267] Such are specimens of the foul falsehoods which malignant men already circulated concerning Wesley and his companions. But, besides this, the Methodist movement began to be noticed by the pulpit. The Rev. Tipping Silvester, M.A., Fellow of Pembroke College, Oxford, and Lecturer of St. Bartholomew the Great, London, preached a sermon on regeneration before the university of Oxford, at St. Mary’s, on February 26, which, without mentioning the names of the Methodist leaders, was evidently meant to be an antidote to one of their distinguished doctrines. The sermon was published, 8vo, twenty-eight pages, and on the title page was “recommended to the religious societies.” The chief point in the sermon is that infants are born again in baptism. Another sermon, on “The Doctrine of Assurance,” was delivered on August 13, in the church of St. Lawrence Jewry, by the Rev. Arthur Bedford, M.A., chaplain to his royal highness Frederick Prince of Wales. This also, with an appendix, was published, 8vo, thirty-nine pages, and had an extensive circulation. It was avowedly intended to refute the doctrine of “those who had of late asserted that they who are not assured of their salvation, by a revelation from the Holy Ghost, are in a state of damnation.” The preacher argues that this assurance “is given to very few, and perhaps only to such whom God calls either to extraordinary services, or to extraordinary sufferings.” He further argues that to profess to have received such an assurance savours of spiritual pride, and cannot but produce bad results. These were the first sermons published against the doctrines of Methodism, and both of them were extremely temperate when compared with others following.