you hereof again
and again, and besought you to turn back to the law and to the
testimony.']

[Footnote 721: 'Do you not neglect joint fasting? Is not the Count all
in all? Are not the rest mere shadows?... Do you not magnify your Church
too much?' &c., &c.]

[Footnote 722: 'I labour everywhere to speak consistently with that deep
sense which is settled in my heart that you are (though I cannot call
you, Rabbi, infallible, yet) far, far, better and wiser than me.']

[Footnote 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.']

[Footnote 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.]

[Footnote 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.']

[Footnote 726: See Tyerman's _Life of Wesley_, ii. 545.]

[Footnote 727: See Tyerman's _Life of Wesley_, ii. 334.]

[Footnote 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).]

[Footnote 729: Letter of Mr. J. Hampson, jun., quoted by Rev. L.
Tyerman, _Life of Wesley_, vol. iii. p. 423.]

[Footnote 730: Robert Southey, _passim_.]