All this breathes fury; but the following taken from the _Weekly Miscellany_ of July 21, 1739, surpasses it. The Methodist preacher stands on an eminence with admiring and subscribing crowds about him. He is young, which is good; looks innocent, which is better; and has no human learning, which is best of all. He spreads his hands and opens his lips as wide as possible. He talks of a sensible new birth; good women around him come to his assistance; he dilates himself; cries out; the hill swells into a mountain; and _parturiunt montes, nascitur ridiculus mus_. Then there is a chorus of ten thousand sighs and groans, deepened with the blowing of bassoons and horns. The Methodists are mad enthusiasts who teach, for dictates of the Holy Spirit, seditions, heresies, and contempt of the ordinances of God and man. They are buffoons in religion, and mountebanks in theology; creatures who disclaim sense and are below argument; visionary antics in gowns and cassocks; so buffeted by the devil as to be qualified to be confessors to the whole island; composing sermons as fast as they can write, and speaking faster than they think; and forming societies of females, who are to confess their love affairs one to another, and to take care that there shall be a supply of new Methodists for future generations. In the same year, appeared a pamphlet, of twenty-eight pages, entitled “The Methodists; an Humorous, Burlesque Poem, addressed to the Rev. Mr. Whitefield and his followers.” The frontispiece represents the great preacher addressing an immense crowd on Kennington Common, while, on the outskirts of the congregation, are coaches of all descriptions, and a gibbet on which three condemned felons are hanging. Describing the Methodists, the poem says:— “By rule they eat, by rule they drink, Do all things else by rule, but think— Accuse their priests of loose behaviour, To get more in the laymen’s favour; Method alone must guide ‘em all, Whence Methodists themselves they call.” After this, the devil is represented as making a tour from Rome to Oxford, in the course of which he stole the bigoted madness of a Turk, and the wit of a modern atheist, both of which he drenched, dull and deep, in a literary Dutchman’s brain, and then, making them his own, and pulling off his horns, and shoeing his cloven foot, dressing himself in a student’s gown, and using for the nonce a distorted face, and, because of the piety of its nasal tones, a Noncon parson’s nose, he introduced himself to the Oxford Methodists, and gave them instructions how to act, so as to effect their purposes,—instructions too lascivious to be reprinted. As a _very mild_ specimen of this foul-mouthed poem, we give another description of the Methodists:—