Whitefield was not a match for an episcopal buffoon like Lavington; and hence he hands him over to his trenchant friend Wesley. The preface, of more than thirty pages, addressed to Whitefield, was full of banter; and in Part II., following it, he is treated with the same coarse rudeness. He and Wesley and the Methodist preachers in general are accused of assuming “the ostentation of sanctified looks,” “fantastical oddities,” “affectation of godly and Scripture phrases,” “and high pretensions to inspiration.” “Their great swelling words of vanity, and proud boastings, had been carried to a most immoderate and insufferable degree.” “They were either innocent madmen, or infamous cheats.” As for Whitefield, “no man ever so bedaubed himself with his own spittle. His first Account of God’s Dealings with him was such a boyish, ludicrous, filthy, nasty, and shameless relation of himself, as quite defiles paper, and is shocking to decency and modesty. It is a perfect jakes of uncleanness.” Wesley had “so fanaticised his own followers, and given them so many strong doses of the enthusiastic tincture, as to turn their brains and deprive them of their senses.” “The mountebank’s infallible prescriptions must be swallowed, whatever be the consequence, though they die for it.” The Methodists are charged with “the black art of calumny, with excessive pride and vanity, with scepticisms and disbeliefs of God and Christ, with disorderly practices, and inveterate broils among themselves, and with a coolness for good works, and an uncommon warmth for some that are very bad.” “In their several Answers and Defences, a strain of jesuitical sophistry, artifice and craft, evasion, reserve, equivocation, and prevarication, is of constant use.” Lavington’s Part III., a volume in itself, is addressed “to the Reverend Mr. Wesley”; who is made the almost exclusive object of its virulent attack. He is told, that he is “an arrant joker, a perfect droll.” “Go on,” says the ribald bishop, “and build chapels. One may be dedicated to the god Proteus, famous for being a juggling wonder-monger, and turning himself into all shapes; another to the god called Catius, because he made men sly and cunning as cats. The people with whom you have to do, you know, will adore you; for the same reason that the Egyptians did their bull Apis; because renowned for miracles, and every hour changing its colour.” He adds: “your Letter to the author of Enthusiasm is a medley of chicanery, sophistry, prevarication, evasion, pertness, conceitedness, scurrility, sauciness, and effrontery. Paper and time should not be wasted on such stuff.” And this was all the answer his lordship furnished. We are afraid to make our pages, what Lavington has made his book, “a perfect jakes of uncleanness,” by further quotations. Suffice it to say, that the whole of this scurrility was anonymous.