Wesley Corpus

"Freethinker" was a name claimed by the Deists and other rejecters of the Christian revelation at the beginning of the eighteenth century. Here Wesley uses it of Ovid, the Roman poet, with a kind of suggestion that the modern freethinkers were akin to him in their religious views. The quotation is from the Metamorphoses, 1.256, where Jupiter, preparing to hurl his thunderbolts, hesitates to do so lest he should set the ether aflame, "for he remembers that it is amongst the decrees of the Fates that a time will come when the sea, the earth, and the palace of heaven shall catch fire and blaze, and the mass of the world, so laboriously constructed, shall be imperilled." 13. "Your in conscience;" so the author of the old Kentish Poema Morale says: Elch man sceal him then biclupien and ecach sceal him demen; His aye weorc and his ithanc to witnesse he sceal temen, which is, being interpreted. Every man shall accuse himself there, and every man shall judge himself; His own work and his conscience he shall bring to witness. "See! See! He cometh!" One of Wesley's finest and most impassioned perorations.