Not only Churchmen, but Dissenters, mustered to the battle. A shilling pamphlet was published, with the title, “The Causes and Reasons of the present Declension among the Congregational Churches in London and the Country; interspersed with reflections on Methodism and Sandemanianism.” Methodism was growing; congregationalism was declining. Why? The writer attributes the declension to “the encroachments of the Methodists and the Sandemanians”; and strongly censures the congregationalists for their “departure from the Bible, for the sake of following the inventions of men, the cant of fanatics, and the nostrums of systematic divines.”
Poetry likes to live among flowers, and in scenes of sublimity and beauty; in 1766, it found a fresh well of inspiration, and made the old Foundery its Helicon. The newspapers were enriched with poetical effusions, like “A Modern Summer’s Evening,” in which
“Methodists to church repair,
Porters, tinkers, crowds, in shoals,
Pious cobblers mend, with prayer,
More their own than neighbours’ souls.”[684]
Besides these, the public were amused by the publication of “The Methodist and Mimic,” a tale in Hudibrastic verse; by Peter Paragraph; inscribed to Samuel Foote, Esq., who doubtless nursed the bantling with natural affection.
There was also “The New Bath Guide; or, Memoirs of the B—r—d Family, in a series of poetical Epistles;” the whole of which are rakish, vile productions, and that on Methodism so pollutingly obscene, that it would be criminal to quote it.
And then, to crown the whole, there was “The Methodist. A poem. By the author of the ‘Powers of the Pen,’ and the ‘Curate.’” Two extracts may be given as fair specimens of the whole. After portraying Whitefield, the illustrious poet describes Wesley thus.
“A second agent, like the first,