“If I recollect the many instances of the great want of _simplicity_, _sincerity_, and regard to _truth_, which some other _teachers_ among the Methodists have discovered, I should naturally _suspect_ that Mr. Ingham may not have given a fair account of his case. Or, if I judge of his probity in _this_ instance by his conduct in _others_, the presumption of insincerity must lie against him. Nay, I think, there are some grounds of suspicion in his _defence_. But what I insist upon is this,—that his _public conduct is insincere and dishonest_. While he owns that he communicates with the Church of England, and by communicating with her, he _subjects_ himself to her _authority_, he sets up separate meetings in _opposition to it_, in _defiance_ of it, nay, in _defiance_ of _all_ authority, both _civil and ecclesiastical_. By this _illegal_, _disobedient_ behaviour to the laws of that _Church_ and of that _civil society_, of which he is a member, he has given just and great scandal to all good _Christians_. In cases of _public scandal_, the laws of _Christianity_ and of _common charity_ require the person who gives it to ask _public pardon_, to _alter his public conduct_, or _publicly to vindicate it_.” This was hard measure. Poor Ingham had been most unjustly accused of being the author of the Yorkshire riot, and had defended himself; and now the editor of the _Weekly Miscellany_ charges him with insincerity, dishonesty, and causing public scandal; and officiously prescribes that he should ask public pardon. Hooker was too much of a partisan to discharge his editorial duties with even-handed justice. Ingham made no reply to the Editor’s unwarrantable attack; but the latter printed two other letters, in which the same hostility was rampant. The first was dated, “Wakefield, July 16, 1740,” and fills an entire folio page, and nearly one third of another. In reply to Ingham’s statement, that he was not in the parish of Dewsbury when the riot commenced, nor for several days afterwards, the anonymous letter-writer calls this “an equivocating way of talking,” for three men of veracity had declared that he was all the while at Osset, a township in the parish. Can this be true? We cannot but disbelieve it. Ingham was incapable of such equivocation. The following extracts also are too manifestly malignant to be altogether truthful:—