Excerpt from The British Critic, 1835, Vol. 17: Quarterly Theological Review, and Ecclesiastical Record We have before expressed our earnest wish that all sorts and conditions of men should speak out, relative to the preservation or demolition of the Church, purely in order that the Church may know who are her friends, and who are her adversaries. Above all, we have called upon the Wesleyans to be open and free spoken. At the time when we did so, we were little aware that any class or section of that body had spoken out with the free dom, and, we must add, with the acrimony, betrayed in the pas sage we have here extracted. Of course we have no fault to find with the mere freedom of the above manifesto. And as for its acrimony, we contemplate it rather in sorrow than in anger. We were in hopes that the vulgar trash about sleek Churchmen had been well nigh banished from the thoughts and speeches of men who make profession of Christianity in all its purity and meek ness, and that rhetoric of this poor and despicable cast had been turned over to the service of the infidel and destructive faction. Alas! We find that we have egregiously deceived ourselves; for here we have the biographer of Adam Clarke degrading himself by writing about the clergy, much in the spirit of the caricature shops. The caricature-shops, indeed, only labour in their voca tion, when they represent the functionaries of the Church as a tribe of gorbellied knaves. But what would John Wesley say to wretched calumny like this, in the mouth of one of his own followers? What would Adam Clarke say, could he now behold the memorial of his labours disgraced by this coarse and shallow nonsense? George Whitefield, it is true, in the earlier period of his career, was in the habit of being facetious upon the downy doctors of the Establishment; but, in process of time, Whitefield himself became as sleek and downy as any doctor of them all; and then, says he, I found that I must speak of downy doctors no more. With regard, therefore, to all such critics of the Establish ment as the author of this book, we have only to say, as Caesar said of Cassius, would they were fatter. Yet we fear them not. We wish them to be in as good case as George White field ia his sleekest days; and this purely for their own sakes: for then they could not, for very shame, expose themselves by talking, like low and hackneyed scribblers, about the sleekness of eccle stastlcs. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.