It should also be remembered (for it serves to explain this, as well as many other apparent inconsistencies in his career) that Wesley attached very little value to the mere holding of right opinions.  Orthodoxy, he thought, constituted but a very small part, if a part at all, of true religion.  ‘What,’ he asks, ’is faith?  Not an opinion nor any number of opinions, be they ever so true.  A string of opinions is no more Christian faith than a string of beads is Christian holiness.’  Opinions were ‘feathers light as air, trifles not worth naming.’  Controversy was his abhorrence; he thought ’God made practical divinity necessary, but the Devil controversial.’  When he entered into controversy with Tucker in 1742, ’I now, he wrote, ’tread an untried path with fear and trembling—­fear not of my adversary, but of myself.’  Just twenty years later he records with evident satisfaction that he has entirely lost his taste for controversy and his readiness in disputing, and this he takes to be a providential discharge from it.  ‘I am sick,’ he writes on another occasion, ’of opinions; I am weary to bear them:  my soul loathes this frothy food.  Give me solid, substantial religion.  Give me an humble, gentle lover of God and man.  Whosoever thus doeth the will of my Father which is in Heaven, the same is brother, and sister, and mother.’  He was anxious to promote a union between all the Evangelical clergy, but it must be on the condition that the points of difference between them should not be discussed.  He was quite ready to hand over his opponents to Fletcher, or Sellon, or Olivers, or anyone whom he judged strong enough to take them in hand.  He prided himself on the fact that Methodism required no agreement on disputed points of doctrine among its members.  ‘Are you in earnest about your soul?’ That was the one question that must be answered in the affirmative.  ’Is thine heart right as my heart is with thy heart?  If so, then give me thine hand.’  Or, as he elsewhere expresses it, ’The sum is, One thing I know:  whereas I was blind, now I see—­an argument of which a peasant, a woman, a child, may feel all the force.’[733]

This almost supercilious disregard of mere orthodoxy was all very well in Wesley’s days, but it would never have done in the earlier part of the century; for it tacitly assumed that the main truths of Christianity had been firmly established; and the assumption was justifiable.  The work of the apologists had prepared the way for the work of the practical reformer.  If the former had not done their work, the latter could not have afforded to think so lightly as he did of sound doctrine.