His publications, during 1750, were as follows.—
1. “Desiderii Erasmi Colloquia Selecta. In Usum Juventutis Christianæ. Edidit Ecclesiæ Anglicanæ Presbyter.” 12mo, 85 pages.
2. “Phædri Fabulæ Selectæ. In Usum Juventutis Christianæ. Edidit Ecclesiæ Anglicanæ Presbyter.” 12mo, 35 pages.
3. “A Compendium of Logic.” 12mo, 33 pages. This was a translation of Dr. Henry Aldrich’s “Artis Logicæ Compendium. Oxon: 1691” [8vo]. “Logic,” says Wesley, “is the art of apprehending things clearly, judging truly, and reasoning conclusively. What is it, viewed in another light, but the art of learning and teaching; whether by convincing or persuading? What is there, then, in the whole compass of science, to be desired in comparison of it? It is good for this, at least (wherever it is understood), to make people talk less; by showing them both what is, and what is not, to the point; and how extremely hard it is to prove anything.”[105] It is well known, that Wesley himself was an adept in the art of logic. “For several years,” says he, “I was moderator in the disputations which were held six times a week at Lincoln College, in Oxford. I could not avoid acquiring hereby some degree of expertness in arguing; and especially in discerning and pointing out well covered and plausible fallacies. I have since found abundant reason to praise God for giving me this honest art. By this, when men have hedged me in by what they called demonstrations, I have been many times able to dash them in pieces; in spite of all its covers, to touch the very point where the fallacy lay; and it flew open in a moment.”[106]
All the works, already mentioned, were chiefly designed for the use of Kingswood school. Those that follow were of a different kind.
4. “Letter to the Rev. Mr. Bailey, of Cork, in answer to a letter to the Rev. John Wesley.” 12mo, 36 pages. Wesley handles Bailey with deserved severity, telling him, that many of his accusations are no more likely to be credited than that of a wise friend of his, who said “the Methodists were a people who placed all their religion in wearing long whiskers.” Bailey’s slanderous charges were of the coarsest kind. The Methodist preachers were “a parcel of vagabond, illiterate babblers, who amused the populace with nonsense, ribaldry, and blasphemy, and were not capable of writing orthography or good sense.” Wesley is called a “hairbrained enthusiast,” and is accused “of frontless assurance, and a well dissembled hypocrisy”; of “promoting the cause of arbitrary popish power”; of “robbing and plundering the poor, so as to leave them neither bread to eat, nor raiment to put on”; and of “being the cause of all that Butler had done.” Such a slanderer had no claim to mercy. “Never,” says Wesley, “was anything so ill judged as for you to ask, ‘Does Christianity encourage its professors to make use of lies, invectives, or low, mean abuse, and scurrility, to carry on its interests?’ No, sir, it does not. I disclaim and abhor every weapon of this kind. But with these have the Methodist preachers been opposed in Cork above any other place. In England, in all Ireland, have I neither heard nor read any like those gross, palpable lies, those low Billingsgate invectives, and that inexpressibly mean abuse, and base scurrility, which the opposers of Methodism have continually made use of, and which has been the strength of their cause from the beginning.”
5. “A Short Address to the Inhabitants of Ireland. Occasioned by some late occurrences. Dublin: 1750.” 12mo, eight pages. Wesley, in this small tract, answers three questions concerning the Methodists, or, as the Irish called them, Swaddlers—1. What are the Methodists? 2. What do they teach? 3. What are the effects of their teaching?
6. “A Letter to the Author of the ‘Enthusiasm of the Methodists and Papists compared.’” 12mo, 44 pages.
Lavington, bishop of Exeter, was the author here addressed. Early in 1749 he published the first part of his work, and it is this only which Wesley answers. In his preface, the bishop tells his readers, that the Methodists are “a set of pretended reformers,—a dangerous and presumptuous sect, animated with an enthusiastical and fanatical spirit;” and that his object is “to draw a comparison between the wild and pernicious enthusiasms of some of the most eminent saints of the popish communion, and those of the Methodists in our own country.” He further alleges, that the Methodists are a people of “sanctified singularities, low fooleries, and high pretensions; they are doing the papists’ work for them, and agree with them in some of their principles; their heads are filled with much the same grand projects, and they are driven on in the same wild manner,—not perhaps from compact and design, but from a similar configuration and texture of the brain, or the fumes of imagination producing similar effects.” The preachers were “strolling predicants, of affected phrases, fantastical and unintelligible notions, whimsical strictnesses, and loud exclamations. The windmill indeed was in all their heads. Every flash of zeal and devotion,—every wild pretension, scheme, tenet, and overbearing dictate,—impulses, impressions, feelings, impetuous transports and raptures,—intoxicating vapours and fumes of imagination,—phantoms of a crazy brain, and uncouth effects of a distempered mind or body,—their sleeping or waking dreams,—their actions and passions,—all were ascribed, with an amazing presumption, to the extraordinary interposition of heaven, setting its seal to their mission.”
In illustration of all this, Whitefield and Wesley are treated with the grossest ridicule.