The Calvinistic controversy was now in its last agonies; but, on the part of the elect, was as acrimonious as ever. Some one published a twopenny pamphlet, entitled, “A necessary Alarm and most earnest Caveto against Tabernacle Principles and Tabernacle Connections; containing the substance of an extraordinary Harangue and Exhortation, delivered at Penzance, in August, 1774; on an extraordinary occasion. By J. W., Master of very extraordinary Arts.” In this infamous burlesque, Wesley is treated with as much ridicule as the anonymous author could command; and Toplady, in reviewing it, in his _Gospel Magazine_, of course commends it, as “a delicate satire on Wesley,” and hopes that “the cream of tartar, so ably administered by the anonymous physician, will prove a sweetener of the patient’s crudities, and conduce to carry off some portion of his self sufficiency.” Wesley, however, had been so “severely peppered and salted of late years,” that the considerate editor of the _Gospel Magazine_ benevolently intimates that he shall, on that account, refrain from adding to the pepper and salt seasonings, which “must often have made Wesley smart and wince like an eel dispossessed of its skin.”[279] This was bad enough; but there were other things even worse. Wesley’s wife, (originally a not too respectable servant girl,) stole a number of Wesley’s letters, and interpolated words, and misinterpreted spiritual expressions, so as to make the letters bear a bad construction. She read them to an elect party of Calvinists, and agreed to send them to the _Morning Post_ for publication. Two masked assassins, who assumed the not inappropriate names of _Scorpion_ and _Snapdragon_, furiously assailed him, in the London newspaper, professing to ground their charges against him upon his own private papers, which the woman, who was legally his wife, had put into their hands. A more infamous episode does not occur in Wesley’s history. The charges were cruel insinuations, founded upon interpolated letters, stolen by a faithless woman, who, in order to defame a husband of whom she was utterly unworthy, not only committed theft but forgery, and then put herself into the hands of a set of holy Calvinists, who employed her perfidy and meanness in injuring the man whom, at the altar of the Most High God, she had sworn to love, honour, and obey. This is strong language; but the writer, knowing more than he chooses to make public, uses it with deliberate design. Charles Wesley, finding the use that was being made of his brother’s papers, was in the utmost consternation, and went off in haste, wishing him to postpone a journey, and to stay in town to defend himself against his enemies. Wesley was as calm as his loving and faithful brother was excited. “I shall never forget,” said Miss Wesley, “the manner in which my father accosted my mother on his return home. ‘My brother,’ said he, ‘is indeed an extraordinary man. I placed before him the importance of