Wesley declares that the Dissenters were now “choosing lads of the most pregnant parts, and were educating them at the public schools of the Church, as St Paul’s and others, with the intention to transplant them thence to Dissenting academies, and from thence into a martial phalanx to attack the Church with greater success than their predecessors”[predecessors”] (p. 7.)
In the 15th page, Wesley strangely enough “thanks God that the Act of Uniformity is not repealed, and that all the strength of the Dissenters cannot prevail to repeal it!” Remembering what his father and his grandfather were made to suffer by that Act, one cannot help but think that there is hardly good taste in this.
Wesley says he can give the name of a famed Dissenting minister who was active in taking away all our legal securities, and caballed with those who were favourites at Court. He and his proselytes met at a house not far from the Poultry Church, whither many of the Dissenting ministers usually resorted. When Wesley had just returned to London from the university, those caballers used all the arguments they could think of to persuade him to join them; but he writes:—“I thank God I abhorred their proposals, and never saw them more, unless I accidentally met them,” (pp. 62 and 63.)
Palmer, in his “Vindication,” had alleged that Benjamin Bridgewater, the Calves-head poet, learned to sing “To Puss, Boys” in Trinity College, Cambridge, thereby intending to cast a slur upon the reputation of the Church. Wesley replies:—“I am sorry they won’t suffer poor Ben (my successor in the favours of the party) to be quiet in his grave.” He then proceeds to show that poor Ben, for bad behaviour, was forced to leave Cambridge University some years before the song “To Puss, Boys” was published, and that when he came to London he took sanctuary among Dissenters, and wrote the anthems of the Calves-head Club, by which he became the darling of the party, and was entertained and caressed at their houses,[houses,](p. 65.)
Wesley declares that up to the time that his “letter” was published by Clavel, and he published his “Defence,” his best friends were all Dissenters, but that now he had lost their favour, because he could not comply with their proposals to retract the truths that he had written concerning Dissenting matters. He writes:—“You cannot say but that my behaviour towards you has been inoffensive during the many years which have elapsed since I left you. I have received common civilities from some of your persuasion, and have, in my turn, obliged them as occasion offered. I never desired your destruction, but your reformation. I showed no great fondness to engage against you. It was a mere accident that occasioned it, and I sent you fair warning long before I began to write my defence. I am of no party that I know of, unless you reckon those to be such who desire you should neither distress nor overtop the Establishment,” (p. 73.)
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:—
“I take this opportunity solemnly to declare, that what I have written in relation to the Dissenters, in my letter, and the defence of it, is strictly true, and that I have not wilfully charged them with anything that is otherwise.”