As with
Zinzendorf and his united brethren, so with Wesley and his co-workers
and disciples. Their aims were exalted, their labours noble, the results
which they achieved were immense. But intermingled with it all there was
so much weakness and credulity, so much weight given to the workings of
a heated and over-wrought imagination, so many openings to a blind
fanaticism, such morbid extravagances, so much from which sober reason
and cultivated intellect shrank with instinctive repulsion, that even an
exaggerated distrust of the good effected was natural and pardonable.
Wesley's mind, though not by any means of the highest order of capacity,
was refined, well trained, and practical; Whitefield was gifted with
extraordinary powers of stirring the emotions by his fervid eloquence.
But they often worked with very rude instruments; and defects, which
were prominent enough even in the leaders, were sometimes in the
followers magnified into glaring faults. Wesley himself was a true
preacher of righteousness, and had the utmost horror of all
Antinomianism, all teaching that insisted slightly on moral duties, or
which disparaged any outward means of grace. But there was a section of
the Methodists, especially in the earlier years of the movement, who
seemed much disposed to raise the cry so well known among some of the
fanatics of the Commonwealth of 'No works, no law, no Commandments.'
There were many more who, in direct opposition to Wesley's sounder
judgment, but not uncountenanced by what he said or wrote in his more
excited moments, trusted in impressions, impulse, and feelings as
principal guides of conduct. Wesley himself was never wont to speak of
the Church of England or of its clergy in violent or abusive terms.[386]
Whitefield, however, and, still more so, many of the lesser preachers,
not unfrequently indulged in an undiscriminating bitterness of invective
which could not fail to alienate Churchmen, and to place the utmost
obstacles in the way of united action. Seward was a special offender in
this respect. How was it possible for them to hold out a right hand of
fellowship to one who would say, for example, that 'the scarlet whore of
Babylon is not more corrupt either in principle or practice than the
Church of England;'[387] and that Archbishop Tillotson, of whom, though
they might differ from him, they were all justly proud, was 'a traitor
who had sold his Lord for a better price than Judas had done.'[388] Such
l