WESLEY, John, Sylvester Hassell The inconsistencies of Mr. Wesley’s system are well illustrated by the inconsistencies of his life. While first genuinely converted, as he himself says, by the writings of Martin Luther, the most predestinarian of predestinarians, he came to be the most bitter enemy of predestinarianism, denouncing it as a horrible and detestable doctrine that represented God as worse than the devil, more false, more cruel, and more unjust. And yet Mr. Wesley’s funeral sermon on George Whitefield, the extraordinary predestinarian preacher, commends the latter in the highest terms as “an eminent servant of God, who, in the business of salvation, put Christ as high as possible and man as low as possible, and who brought a larger number of sinners from darkness to light than any other man.”
In the application of human wisdom to the organization of a religious society, John Wesley was, as commonly remarked, more like Ignatius Loyola than any other man; he conformed the organization of Methodism more to that of Romanism than that of any other Protestant body; and, accordingly, in nominal numerical success, he had made his society the most powerful rival of Rome.
By his famous “Deed of Declaration to the Legal Hundred,” “the Magna Charta of Methodism” (Made in 1784, when he was eighty-one years of age), bequeathing the property and government of all his chapels in the United Kingdom to a hundred of his traveling preachers and their successors, on condition that they should accept as their basis of doctrine his Notes on the New Testament and the four volumes of his sermons published in or before A.D. 1771, he surpassed even the worldly wisdom of Catholicism, and made himself not only the infallible but the eternal pope of his society.
So his twenty-five Articles of Religion are declared, in the Metho-dist Book of Discipline, to be unalterable. This makes Wesley the last and greatest teacher of the human race, and places him above Christ and his Apostles, as we are required to look through the medium of Wesley at all the Divine teaching, and to accept forever his interpretation of the doctrine and precepts of the Bible.