s intimate friendship with Gambold, who afterwards
completely threw in his lot with the United Brethren and became one of
their bishops,[594]--all these incidents betoken a deep and cordial
sympathy. It is true that all this fellow-feeling came at last to a
somewhat abrupt termination. Passing, at first, almost to the bitter
extreme, he even said in his 'Second Journal' that 'he believed the
mystic writers to be one great Anti-Christ.'[595] Some years afterwards
he retracted this expression, as being far too strong. He had, he said,
'at one time held the mystic writers in great veneration as the best
explainers of the Gospel of Christ;'[596] but added, that though he
admired them, he was never of their way; he distrusted their tendency to
disparage outward means. 'Their divinity was never the Methodist
doctrine. We cannot swallow either John Tauler or Jacob Behmen.'[597]
His friendly correspondence with Law ceased after a few years. He
continued to 'admire and love' his personal character, but attacked his
opinions[598] with a vehemence contrasting somewhat unfavourably with
the patience and humility of Law's reply.[599] As for the Moravians, not
Warburton, nor Lavington, nor Stinstra, nor Duncombe, ever used stronger
words against 'these most dangerous of the Antinomians--these cunning
hunters.'[600] Count Zinzendorf, on the other hand, published a notice
that his people had no connection with the Wesleys.

Like many other men who have been distinguished in divinity and
religion,[601] John Wesley, as he grew older, became far more
charitable and large-hearted in what he said or thought of opinions
different from his own. Methodism also had become, by that time, well
established upon a secure basis of its own. Wesley had no longer cause
to be disturbed by its features of relationship with a school of
theology which he had learnt greatly to distrust. The fanciful and
obscure philosophy of Dionysius, of Behmen, or of Law had been repugnant
to him from the first. He had beheld with the greatest alarm Law's
departures from commonly received doctrine on points connected with
justification, regeneration, the atonement, the future state. Above all,
he had become acquainted with that most degenerate form of mysticism,
when its phraseology becomes a pretext to fanatics and Antinomians. Much
in the same way as in the Germany of the fourteenth century the lawless
Brethren of the Free Spirit[602] had justified their excesses in
lan