book ii

., chap. 6.

[798] Drew’s Life of Coke, chap. 5.

[799] Unless the Moravians are to be considered an exception.

[800] Jackson’s Charles Wesley, chap. 26.

[801] “To administer the sacraments of baptism and the Lord’s Supper according to the usages of the Church of England,” says the certificate of ordination (see it in Life of Henry Moore, p. 134, Am. ed.); and yet a living Churchman (Dr. Pusey’s Letter to the Bishop of Oxford, p. 151) says that “Wesley reluctantly took the step of ordaining at all;” and that “to the last _he refused, in the strongest terms, his consent that those thus ordained should take upon them to administer the sacraments_. He felt that it exceeded his powers, and so inhibited it, however it might diminish the numbers of the society he had formed.” The biographers of Wilberforce (vol. i., p. 248) also say: “Nor were any of his preachers _suffered during his lifetime to attempt to administer the sacraments of his Church_.” It is high time that such fictions should cease among English Churchmen. It seems that they have yet to learn how thorough and noble a heretic Wesley really was.

[802] Minutes of 1785, in Minutes of the Annual Conference of the M. E. Church, vol. i., p. 22. New York, 1840.

[803] Drew’s Life of Coke, chap. 6. His assailant is supposed to have been Charles Wesley. Etheredge’s Coke,