The answer to these questions is to be found in the fact which, it may be remembered, led to these remarks.  There is but one clue to the right understanding of Wesley’s career.  It is this:  that his one great object was to promote the love of God and the love of man for God’s sake.  Everything must give way to this object of paramount importance.  His tastes led him in one direction, but it was a direction in which very few could follow him.  Not only was there absolutely nothing congenial to this taste either inside or outside the Church in the eighteenth century, but it would have been simply unintelligible.  If he had followed out this taste, he would have been isolated.

Moreover, it is fully admitted that Wesley was essentially a many-sided man.  Look at him from another point of view, and he stands in precisely the same attitude in which his contemporaries and successors of the Evangelical school stood—­as the homo unius libri, referring everything to Scripture, and to Scripture alone.  There would be in his mind no inconsistency whatever between the one position and the other; but he felt he could do more practical good by simply standing upon Scriptural ground, and therefore he was quite content to rest there.

It was precisely the same motive which led Wesley to the various separations which, to his sorrow, he was obliged to make from those who had been his fellow-workers.  He has been accused of being a quarrelsome man, a man with whom it was not easy to be on good terms.  The accusation is unjust.  Never was a man more ready to forgive injuries, more ready to own his failings, more firm to his friends, and more patient with his foes.

Nevertheless it is an undoubted fact that he was frequently brought into collision with men whom he would have been the first to own as God’s faithful servants—­with William Law, with the Moravians, with Whitefield and the Calvinists, and with several of the Evangelical parish clergymen.  It also cannot be denied that he showed some abruptness—­nay, rudeness—­in his communications with some of these.

But in each and all of these cases the clue to his conduct is still the same; his one desire was to do all the good he could to the souls of men, and to that great object friends, united action, and even common politeness must give way.  To come to details.  In 1738 he wrote an angry letter, and in 1756 an angry pamphlet, to William Law.  Both these effusions were hasty and indiscreet; but, in spite of his indiscretion and discourtesy, it is easy to trace both in the letter and the pamphlet the one motive which actuated him.  Law was far more than a match for Wesley in any purely intellectual dispute.  But Wesley’s fault, whatever it may have been, was a fault of the head, not of the heart.  It is thoroughly characteristic of the generous and forgiving nature of the man that, in spite of their differences, Wesley constantly alluded to Law in his sermons, and always in terms of the warmest commendation.