“Both Quakers and Papists are so bad that they can hardly be called Christian. In many things they are near akin. The Quakers, ever since their rise, have been looked upon as the Jesuit by-blows. The Quakers deny the plenary satisfaction of Christ, and rest on their own merits; so do the Papists. They rail at our ministers, and deny their legal call or ordination; so do the Papists. They pretend to a greater strictness and singularity of life than other people; so do several orders among the Papists. Then, for fanaticism and enthusiasm, they are most admirably matched. But, to consider them asunder—The Papist holds more than he ought to do, and therefore all the articles of the Christian faith: but the Quaker much less, for the Quakers all deny the Christian sacraments, and we wonder how they have a face to pretend to what they never had, Christianity, when they were never christened. They are indeed a compendium of almost all sorts of heresies: for they not only deny the merits of Christ, with the Papists, but even His satisfaction and divinity, being at best no better than mere Arians. Nay, there have been some of them who, as far as we can understand them, deny our Saviour’s manhood, and turn angels, spirits, heaven, and hell into mean and jejune allegories. All of them, to a man, whom we ever met with, deny the Scriptures to be the _Word of God_, and most of them deny any resurrection of the body. For these reasons, we think, as a bad Christian is better than none, so a Papist is better than a Quaker.”[93] ----- Footnote 93: In the fourth volume of the _Athenian Oracle_ Wesley vindicates his charges against the Quakers by quotations from their writings, and sums up the matter thus:—“Quakerism is a compendium of all heresies, some of which we shall name—Pharisees, Sadducees, Ebionites, Gnostics, Eucratites, Marcionites, Cainites, Manichees, Jacobites, Acephalae, Tritheites, Adamites, Helcecaites, Marcocites, Colorbalites, Sabellians, Samosatenians, Macedonians, Arians, Donatists, Priscillians—cum multis aliis,” (p. 366.) ----- This may seem a caricatured description of the Quakers’ religion, but it must be borne in mind that in 1690 that religion was not the systematised and inoffensive thing that it is in 1865.