But they often worked with very rude instruments; and defects, which were prominent enough even in the leaders, were sometimes in the followers magnified into glaring faults.  Wesley himself was a true preacher of righteousness, and had the utmost horror of all Antinomianism, all teaching that insisted slightly on moral duties, or which disparaged any outward means of grace.  But there was a section of the Methodists, especially in the earlier years of the movement, who seemed much disposed to raise the cry so well known among some of the fanatics of the Commonwealth of ‘No works, no law, no Commandments.’  There were many more who, in direct opposition to Wesley’s sounder judgment, but not uncountenanced by what he said or wrote in his more excited moments, trusted in impressions, impulse, and feelings as principal guides of conduct.  Wesley himself was never wont to speak of the Church of England or of its clergy in violent or abusive terms.[386] Whitefield, however, and, still more so, many of the lesser preachers, not unfrequently indulged in an undiscriminating bitterness of invective which could not fail to alienate Churchmen, and to place the utmost obstacles in the way of united action.  Seward was a special offender in this respect.  How was it possible for them to hold out a right hand of fellowship to one who would say, for example, that ’the scarlet whore of Babylon is not more corrupt either in principle or practice than the Church of England;’[387] and that Archbishop Tillotson, of whom, though they might differ from him, they were all justly proud, was ’a traitor who had sold his Lord for a better price than Judas had done.’[388] Such language inevitably widened the ever-increasing gap.  It might have been provoked, although not justified, by tirades no less furious and unreasoning on the part of some of the assailants of the Methodist cause.  In any case, it could not fail to estrange many who might otherwise have gladly taken a friendly interest in the movement; it could not fail to dull their perception of its merits and of its spiritual exploits, and to incline them to point out with the quick discernment of hostile critics the evident blots and errors which frequently defaced it.

At the beginning of the eighteenth century, when projects of Church Comprehension had come to an end, a great deal of angry controversy in Parliament, in Convocation, and throughout the country at large was excited by the practice of occasional conformity.  Never was a question more debased by considerations with which it ought not to have had anything to do.  In itself it seemed a very simple one.  The failure of the schemes for Comprehension had left in the ranks of Nonconformity a great number of moderate Dissenters—­Presbyterians and others—­who were separated from the Low Churchmen of the day by an exceedingly narrow interval.  Many of them were thoroughly well affected to the National Church, and were only restrained by a few scruples from being regular members of it.