unfortunate marriage, Wesley knew things which men happily married
never know.

John Wesley did not blame anybody for anything. Once when he saw a
drunken man reeling through the street, he turned to a friend and
said, "But for the grace of God, there goes John Wesley!" All his
biographies agree that after his fiftieth year his power as a preacher
increased constantly until he was seventy-five. He grew more gentle,
more tender, and there was about him an aura of love and veneration,
so that even his enemies removed their hats and stood silent in his
presence. And we might here paraphrase his own words and truly say of
him, as he said of Josiah Wedgwood, "He loved flowers and horses and
children--and his soul was near to God!"

The actual reason for breaking away or "coming out" is a personal
antipathy for the leader. Like children playing a game, theologians
reach a point where they say, "I'll not play in your back yard." And
not liking a man, we dislike his music, his art, his creed. So they
divide on free grace, foreordination, baptism, regeneration, freedom
of the will, endless punishment, endless consequences, conversion,
transubstantiation, sanctification, infant baptism, or any one of a
dozen reasons which do not represent truth, but are all merely a point
of view, and can honestly be believed before breakfast and rejected
afterward.

However, the protest of Wesley had a basic reason, for at his time the
State Religion was a galvanized and gilded thing, possessing
everything but the breath of life.

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