The idea that God looks on any
persons as having lived like Christ when they have not done so; or that
He supposes any persons to be righteous, or treats them as righteous,
when they are not so, is foolish and anti-scriptural in the extreme. And
it is unmethodistical too. Yet here is a Methodist preacher so-called,
dealing out this mischievous and miserable folly. And alas he is not
alone. And these are the men who abuse others as heretics.
--The good done where preachers preach theology is not done by the
preaching, I fancy, but by stray truth from the Gospels, and by the
Christian lives and Christian labors of simple-minded, Bible-loving,
non-theological members of the church. God bless them!
--Wesley has thirty definitions of religion, and they all mean, in
substance, loving God and loving man, and living to do good. Wesley was
always sensible in proportion as he got away from under the influence of
the prevailing Theology.
--Some talk as if a religious education can never be the means of a
child's conversion,--that, do for your children what you will, they will
still, like others, require a distinct and full conversion when they
come of age. I cannot see why a good Christian mother talking to her
child from her old arm-chair, and praying with it as it kneels by her
side, or the good example and godly training of a pious father, may not
be made as effectual to the gradual conversion of a child as the
preaching of a pastor from the pulpit.
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