We have thus fully stated all the hard things which Mr Wesley’s enemies have thought fit to say against him, and, in this summary way, have replied to them. Those who wish for further refutations must refer again to the pages they have already read. Defoe’s accusation is calumnious slander of the worst description. Chadwick is a man whose vulgar ravings are hardly worthy of being noticed. The life of a man like Dr Watts is blurred and blotted by such utterly false, if not malignant, charges as those which the writer has brought against Mr Wesley. We have no quarrel with Mr Milner on account of his attempt to show that the Calves-head Club was an infamous association, which the Dissenting body, as a whole, condemned; but he had no right to impeach the veracity of Mr Wesley, and, by a mean insinuation, to try to cast upon him the disgrace of the possibility that he himself was a member of this godless gang. That is an ungenerous reproach, which none but an irritated man would have ventured to employ. The barbarous Calves-head Club was a disgraceful association, of which the great bulk of the Dissenters totally disapproved; for it is cheerfully acknowledged that some classes of the Dissenters were deeply averse to the murder of King Charles I., and were among the first to welcome his son Charles II., to the English monarchy; but while all this is most readily allowed, we submit that this is no refutation of the statement that the members of that abominable club declared themselves to be Dissenters; nor is it any excuse for Mr Milner’s attack on Mr Wesley’s veracity, and especially for his unworthy suggestion that Mr Wesley himself might be an associate of the profligate fellows of which the Calves-head Club consisted. Believing Mr Wesley to be unimpeachable in the painful business that has been here discussed, and feeling that his character and rank in society make it of some importance to keep his fair fame without a blot, we offer no apology for this lengthened, and, perhaps, tedious chapter in his history. Dr Adam Clarke sums up the whole in terms to which we find it impossible to assent. He writes: “In the heat of his zeal for the Church, after his conversion from dissenting principles, Mr Samuel Wesley, in his controversial writings, often overstepped the bounds of Christian moderation.” Did he? We have read the whole of his controversial writings; and, finding no proof of this, we respectfully doubt it. CHAPTER XV. THE IMPRISONED FATHER.—1705–1709.