This was the whole of Wesley’s offending. His tract, we again affirm, was an honest, faithful abridgment of Toplady’s pretended translation; but the truth is, by divesting the work of Toplady of its cloudy verbiage, the Calvinistic theory was presented in a form enough to horrify every man of reason and religion. What was the result? Wesley’s Abridgment was issued in the month of March, 1770. Poor Toplady seems to have become insane with anger; and, before the same month expired, had completed his answer, which was published forthwith, under the title of “A Letter to the Rev. Mr. John Wesley: relative to his pretended Abridgment of Zanchius on Predestination.” 8vo, 30 pages. The most charitable excuse for this angry writer is, that he had, in a paroxysm of mortified vanity, lost his balance, and was now _non compos mentis_. Wesley had honestly abridged his work; and had written the two brief paragraphs already quoted. That was all: and, for this, the irate young man of thirty, who in former years had written to Wesley in terms of the most filial respect, now tells him that, “for more than thirty years past he has been endeavouring to palm on his credulous followers his pernicious doctrines, with all the sophistry of a jesuit, and the dictatorial authority of a pope.” Wesley is charged with acting “the ignoble part of a lurking, sly assassin.” He is exhorted to “renounce the low, serpentine cunning, which puts him on falsifying what he finds himself unable to refute; to dismiss those dirty subterfuges (the last resources of mean, malicious impotence), which degrade the man of parts into a lying sophister, and sink a divine into the level of an oyster woman.” Wesley is told, “that it once depended on the toss of a shilling whether he should be a Calvinist or an Arminian. Tails fell uppermost, and he resolved to be an universalist.” The elect Toplady continues: “possessed of more than serpentine elability, _you_ cast _your_ slough, not once a year, but, almost, once an hour. Hence, your innumerable _inconsistencies_, and flagrant _self contradictions_; the _jarring_ of your principles, and the _incoherence_ of your religious system. Somewhat like the necromantic soup in the tragedy of ‘Macbeth,’ your doctrines may be stirred into a chaotic jumble, but witchcraft itself would strive in vain to bring them into coalition.” The gentlemanly polemic then informs Wesley, that he shall not hold himself obliged to again enter the lists with him, if he “descends to his customary recourse of false quotations, despicable invective, and unsupported dogmatisms. An opponent,” continues this model of polite behaviour, “an opponent, who thinks to add weight to his arguments by scurrility and abuse, resembles the insane person who rolled himself in the mud, in order to make himself fine. I would no more enter into a formal controversy with such a scribbler, than I would contend, for the wall, with a chimney sweeper.”