Wesley says Palmer accuses him of bowing and cringing to the Dissenters since he had joined the Church. He replies:—“I own this to be true, for I have often asked my father-in-law’s, and my mother’s blessing, and I did once bow down in the house of Rimmon; but for the rest nobody ever accused me that my knees were _suppled_,” (p. 99.) Wesley relates a story to the effect that on January 31st, 1698, which happened to be Sunday, a clergyman near London was preaching a sermon, from 1 Peter, ii. 13, in reference to the martyrdom of King Charles, and that nine pupils from a neighbouring Dissenting Academy came to hear him. After the service, a deputation of two of them waited upon him and invited him to a noble entertainment to be given the same evening. The clergyman refused. They then began to quarrel with his sermon, and said Charles I. was “a cursed tyrant, and that his death was the just execution of a damned malefactor.” The next day, the same clergyman received a letter signed Timothy Greybeard, stating, that, if he had gone as invited to the supper on the night previous, they would have given him, as “the principal dish, the best calf’s-head they could have procured for love or money; and that, if he had been inclined to drink a health to the sanctified head, there would have been good humming liquor to have washed his conscience in a few gulps,” (p. 100.) Wesley acknowledges that, when he was a pupil in the Dissenting Academy, three arch lasses made a fool of him by clothing him in a cloak, and sending him through St Paul’s Churchyard to ask for Rochester’s “Divine Poems;” but he indignantly denies that he ever kept any lewd company, though he says it was “one of the happiest providences of his life that he did not, and that he had a narrow escape from debauchery and ruin.” He adds, “Though I kept no such company, I know too many Dissenters that did, and know where they have made assignations with them, in your very meetings, though it is possible that, in twenty years, those ladies may be advanced to a more venerable character than they then possessed,” (pp. 139 and 140.) He further states that the majority of the Dissenters, with whom he had been acquainted, preferred a commonwealth to a monarchy, abhorred the memory of Charles I., and the name and race of the Stuarts; and that they could not deny that lewdness and debauchery were not uncommon in their academies as well as in other places, (p. 143.) In closing the controversy, Mr Wesley says, that when he was last in London, in January and February 1705, he was often ruffled by being urged to retract, or at least palliate his charges against the Dissenters; and that, as he was about to receive the sacrament, he wrote the following protestation, and sent it to the clergyman who was to officiate:—