2. The issue of eleven volumes of his revised and collected works,
making a little more than 3900 printed 12mo pages.
3. Two political tracts: one entitled, “Thoughts upon Liberty”; the
other, “Thoughts concerning the Origin of Power.” The disturbed state
of the nation, at this period, has been already sketched. Junius and
John Wilkes were the arch agitators of the day, and well-nigh drove
the nation into rebellion. Hampson states that, when the Letters of
Junius appeared, Wesley offered his services to the government, and
proposed to answer them, saying, “I will show the difference between
rhetoric and logic.”[183] We have no means of either substantiating
or contradicting this; but Wesley’s “Thoughts upon Liberty” fully
show that Wilkes, the demagogue, was no favourite of his, and that
King George had no truer or more loyal subject than the leader of the
Methodists.
In his second tract, Wesley combats the theory, that the people of a
nation are the “origin of power.” He shows that, if this were true,
every man, woman, and child ought to possess the electoral franchise,
and to be allowed to take a part in constituting parliaments and
governmental cabinets. He taunts, with withering sarcasm, the advocates
of such a theory, on the ground, that they themselves resist the
facts their theory implies, because they allowed none to vote except
freeholders of forty shillings yearly value, and not even them unless
they had arrived at the age of twenty one. “Worse and worse,” he
writes: “after depriving half the human species of their natural rights
for want of a beard; after depriving myriads more for want of a stiff
beard, for not having lived one-and-twenty years; you rob others of
their birthright for want of money! Yet not altogether on this account
either; for here is an Englishman who has money enough to buy the
estates of fifty freeholders, and yet he must not be numbered among the
people because he has not two or three acres of land.”
Having shown the absurdities which, as he thinks, the theory involves,
he then concludes: “Common sense brings us back to the grand truth,
‘There is no power but of God.’”
Wesley’s tract is little known; but the radical politicians of the
present age would be none the worse for studying the principles to
which it summarily adverts.[184]