[723] And also his strong feeling that the doctrine of reprobation was inconsistent with the love of God. 'I could sooner,' he wrote, 'be a Turk, a Deist—yea, an atheist—than I could believe this. It is less absurd to deny the very existence of a God than to make Him an almighty tyrant.'
[724] In March 1741 Mr. Whitefield, being returned to England, entirely separated from Mr. Wesley and his friends, because he did not hold the decrees. Here was the first breach which warm men persuaded Mr. Whitefield to make merely for a difference of opinion. Those who believed universal redemption had no desire to separate, &c.—Wesley's Works, vol. viii. p. 335.
[725] 'If there be a law,' he wrote in 1761, 'that a minister of Christ who is not suffered to preach the Gospel in church should not preach it elsewhere, or a law that forbids Christian people to hear the Gospel of Christ out of their parish church when they cannot hear it therein, I judge that law to be absolutely sinful, and that it is sinful to obey it.'
[726] See Tyerman's Life of Wesley, ii. 545.
[727] See Tyerman's Life of Wesley, ii. 334.
[728] Southey, ii. 71. In 1780 Wesley wrote, 'You seem not to have well considered the rules of a helper or the rise of Methodism. It pleased God by me to awaken first my brother, then a few others, who severally desired of me as a favour to direct them in all things. I drew up a few plain rules (observe there was no Conference in being) and permitted them to join me on these conditions. Whoever, therefore, violates these conditions does ipso facto disjoin himself from me. This Brother Macnab has done, but he cannot see that he has done amiss. The Conference has no power at all but what I exercise through them' (the preachers).
[729] Letter of Mr. J. Hampson, jun., quoted by Rev. L. Tyerman, Life of Wesley, vol. iii. p. 423.
[730] Robert Southey, passim.
[731] In a letter to Mr. Walker, of Truro, 1756.
[732] To the same effect in his Short History of Methodism Wesley wrote, 'Those who remain with Mr. Wesley are mostly Church of England men. They love her articles, her homilies, her liturgy, her discipline, and unwillingly vary from it in any instance.'