“My Dear Sir,—You have always the goodness to encourage me, and your encouragements are not unseasonable; for discouragements follow one after another with very little intermission. Those which are of an inward nature are sufficiently known to you; but some others are peculiar to myself, especially those I have had for eight days past, during Madeley wake.
“Seeing that I could not suppress these bacchanals, I did all in my power to moderate their madness; but my endeavours have had little or no effect. You cannot well imagine how much the animosity of my parishioners is heightened, and with what boldness it discovers itself against me, because I preached against drunkenness, shows, and bull-baiting. The publicans and maltmen will not forgive me. They think that to preach against drunkenness, and to cut their purse, is the same thing.
“My church begins not to be so well filled as it has been, and I account for it thus: the curiosity of some of my hearers is satisfied, and others are offended by the word; the roads are worse; and if it shall ever please the Lord to pour His Spirit upon us, the time is not yet come. The people, instead of saying, ‘Let us go up to the house of the Lord,’ exclaim, ‘Why should we go and hear a Methodist?’
“I should lose all patience with my flock if I had not more reason to be satisfied with them than with myself. My own barrenness furnishes me with excuses for theirs; and I wait the time when God shall give seed to the sower and increase to the seed sown. In waiting that time, I learn the meaning of this prayer, ‘Thy will be done.’
“Believe me your sincere, though unworthy, friend,
“J. Fletcher.”[[76]]
Fletcher’s faithful preaching offended the publicans, and, judging of his sermons in general by the following specimens, it is not surprising that his preaching offended others. The extracts are taken from a sermon delivered in the month of December 1761, and first published in the Dublin edition of the Methodist Magazine for 1821 (pp. 249–258).[[77]] The text was, “Thou shalt speak My words to them, whether they will hear or whether they will forbear, for they are most rebellious” (Ezek. ii. 7). After challenging his congregation to assert their innocence, Fletcher proceeded:—
“Supposing you never allowed yourself to dishonour the name of God by customary swearing, or grossly to violate His Sabbaths, or commonly to neglect the solemnities of His public worship; supposing, again, that you have not injured your neighbours in their lives, their chastity, their character, or their property, either by violence or by fraud; or that you never scandalously debased your rational nature by that vile intemperance which sinks a man below the worst kind of brutes; supposing all this, can you pretend that you have not in smaller instances violated the rules of piety, of temperance, and of chastity? Does not your own heart prove you guilty of pride, of passion, of sensuality, of an excessive fondness for the world and its enjoyments; of murmuring, or at least secretly repining, against God under the strokes of an afflictive Providence; of misspending a great deal of your time; of abusing the gifts of God’s bounty to vain, and, in some instances, to pernicious purposes; of mocking Him when you have pretended to engage in His worship, drawing near to Him with your lips while your heart has been far from Him? Does not your conscience condemn you of some one breach of the law at least? and by one breach of it, does not the Holy Ghost bear witness (James ii. 10) that you are become guilty of all, and are as incapable of being justified before God by any obedience of your own, as if you had committed ten thousand offences? But, in reality, there are ten thousand and more to be charged to your account. When you come to reflect on all your sins of negligence, as well as on your voluntary transgressions; on all the instances in which you have failed to do good when it was in your power to do it; on all the instances in which acts of devotion have been omitted, especially in secret; and on all those cases in which you have shown a stupid disregard to the honour of God, and to the temporal and eternal happiness of your fellow-creatures; when all these, I say, are reviewed, the number will swell beyond all possibility of account, and force you to cry out, ‘I am rebellious, most rebellious; mine iniquities are more than the hairs of my head!’ They will appear in such a light before you that your own heart will charge you with countless multitudes; and how much more then that God, ‘who is greater than your heart, and knoweth all things’?”
This was plain speaking, but very characteristic of the preaching of the Church of England Methodists. Space will permit only one other extract from this sermon.
“And now, sinner, think seriously with yourself what defence you will make to all this? Will you fly in the face of God and that of your conscience so openly as to deny one of the charges of rebellion, yea, of aggravated rebellion, I have advanced against you? Have you not lifted yourself up against the Lord of heaven? Have you not sided with His sworn enemies—the world and the flesh? What part of your body, what faculty of your soul, have you not employed as an instrument of unrighteousness? When did you live one day before God with the dependence of a creature, the gratitude of a redeemed creature, the heavenly frame of a sanctified creature? Nay, when did you live one hour without violating God’s known law, either in word, or thought, or action? Have not you done it almost continually by the vanity of your mind and the hardness of your heart, if not by the open immorality of your life? And, what infinitely aggravates your guilt, have you not despised and abused God’s numberless mercies? Have you not affronted conscience, His deputy in your breast? Have you not resisted and grieved His Spirit? Yea, have you not trifled with Him in all your pretended submissions or solemn engagements? Thousands are, no doubt, already in hell whose guilt never equalled yours; and yet God has spared you to see almost the end of another year, and to hear now this plain representation of your case. And will you not yet consider? Shall nothing move you to shake off that amazing carelessness and stupid disregard of your salvation? Will you never begin to ‘work it out with fear and trembling’? Will you slumber in impenitency till eternal woes crush you into destruction? Is death, is judgment, is the bottomless pit so distant that you dare put off from week to week the day of your conversion? You have read in God’s Word that there is mercy with Him that He may be feared; but where did you read that there is mercy with Him for those who fear Him not? Show me such a place; I shall not say anywhere in the Bible, but in any book written by a moral heathen. And yet you hope you can be saved in this way.