threw in his lot with the United Brethren and became one of their bishops,[594]—­all these incidents betoken a deep and cordial sympathy.  It is true that all this fellow-feeling came at last to a somewhat abrupt termination.  Passing, at first, almost to the bitter extreme, he even said in his ‘Second Journal’ that ’he believed the mystic writers to be one great Anti-Christ.’[595] Some years afterwards he retracted this expression, as being far too strong.  He had, he said, ’at one time held the mystic writers in great veneration as the best explainers of the Gospel of Christ;’[596] but added, that though he admired them, he was never of their way; he distrusted their tendency to disparage outward means.  ’Their divinity was never the Methodist doctrine.  We cannot swallow either John Tauler or Jacob Behmen.’[597] His friendly correspondence with Law ceased after a few years.  He continued to ‘admire and love’ his personal character, but attacked his opinions[598] with a vehemence contrasting somewhat unfavourably with the patience and humility of Law’s reply.[599] As for the Moravians, not Warburton, nor Lavington, nor Stinstra, nor Duncombe, ever used stronger words against ’these most dangerous of the Antinomians—­these cunning hunters.’[600] Count Zinzendorf, on the other hand, published a notice that his people had no connection with the Wesleys.

Like many other men who have been distinguished in divinity and religion,[601] John Wesley, as he grew older, became far more charitable and large-hearted in what he said or thought of opinions different from his own.  Methodism also had become, by that time, well established upon a secure basis of its own.  Wesley had no longer cause to be disturbed by its features of relationship with a school of theology which he had learnt greatly to distrust.  The fanciful and obscure philosophy of Dionysius, of Behmen, or of Law had been repugnant to him from the first.  He had beheld with the greatest alarm Law’s departures from commonly received doctrine on points connected with justification, regeneration, the atonement, the future state.  Above all, he had become acquainted with that most degenerate form of mysticism, when its phraseology becomes a pretext to fanatics and Antinomians.  Much in the same way as in the Germany of the fourteenth century the lawless Brethren of the Free Spirit[602] had justified their excesses in language which they borrowed from men of such noble and holy life as Eckhart[603] and Tauler, and Nicolas of Basle, so the flagitious conduct, at Bedford and elsewhere, of some who called themselves Moravians threw scandal and odium on the tenets of the pure and simple-minded community of Herrnhut.  This was a danger to which Wesley was, without doubt, all the more sensitive, because he lived among hostile critics who were only too ready to discredit his teaching by similar imputations on its tendencies.  The truth is that Methodism, in its different aspects, had so many points of contact with the essential characteristics of mysticism, both in its highest and more spiritualised, and in its grosser and more fanatical forms, that Wesley was exceedingly anxious his system should not be confused with any such ‘enthusiasm,’ and dwelt with jealous care upon its more distinctive features.