The _Scots Magazine_, for 1739, remarks that “Whitefield and the two Wesleys offend against the rules of the Christian church, by preaching in opposition to the opinions and instructions of the bishops.” “The Wesleys,” continues this Scottish censor, “are more guilty than Whitefield, because they are men of more learning, better judgment, and cooler heads. Let them go over to their proper companies, their favourites, the Dissenters, and utter their extemporary effusions in a conventicle; but not be suffered in our churches hypocritically to use our forms, which they despise. Let them carry their spirit of delusion among their brethren, the Quakers. Let them preach up their election and reprobation doctrines among the Calvinists; and their solifidian tenets among the Antinomians. Let not such bold movers of sedition, and ringleaders of the rabble, to the disgrace of their order, be regularly admitted into those pulpits which they have taken with multitude and with tumult, or, as ignominiously, by stealth.” The clergy also began to bestir themselves. On Trinity Sunday, a sermon on regeneration was preached in the parish churches of Greenwich, and of St. Peter the Poor, London, by the Rev. Ralph Skerret, D.D., chaplain to the Earl of Grantham. The sermon, in 8vo, thirty-six pages, was published; but is scarcely worth noticing. The Methodists, however, are spoken of as “restless deceivers of the people, who make it their daily business to fill the heads of the ignorant and unwary with wild, perplexive notions.” Another sermon, preached before the university of Oxford, on August 5, by the Rev. John Wilder, M.A., rector of St. Aldate’s, on “The Trial of the Spirits,” brands the Methodists as “deceivers,” “babblers,” “insolent pretenders,” “men of capricious humours, spiritual sleight, and canting craftiness,” “novices in divinity,” casting “indecent, false, and unchristian reflections on the clergy,” “newfangled teachers, setting up their own fantastic conceits, in opposition to the authority of God, and so bigoted to their wild opinions, and so puffed up with pride and vanity at the success of their enthusiastic labours, that they all appear fully disposed to maintain and defend their cause by more than spiritual weapons, or to die martyrs for it.”