As in the religious controversy, so in the political dispute which arose
out of the American War of Independence, Mr. Fletcher came forth as the
champion of his friend Mr. Wesley, who having provoked his antagonists,
deputed the task of answering them to the Madeley vicar, and the friends
of both must now, we imagine, regret that either of them took up their
pens in such a cause. It is not too much to say that both entered the
lists, if not on the side of the oppressor, at any rate as against that
spirit of liberty for which a Washington and a Franklin fought, and which
had been implanted on New England soil by colonists to whom a Stuart king
had made the old country unsafe longer to live in. The mistake was
perhaps the result of that harsh-drawn line by which intensely devout
minds like those of Mr. Wesley and Mr. Fletcher are apt to separate
things religious and political, and which not unfrequently leads to an
insensibility to public injustice and crime, even, strangely
disproportioned to the zeal displayed in behalf of some dogmatic and
invisible subtleties of creed. Dr. Arnold and others since Mr.
Fletcher’s day have done much to correct the notion which removes
religion and God from politics, and which sets up in sharp opposition the
earthly and heavenly relations of men.