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    Now ,, the error of Wesley was not in appealing to the imagination and feelings of his followers , but in making such appeals as larger information and maturer reflection , or , in one word ^ truth s did not , and does not , warrant . The convert was allowed , or rather was encouraged , to consider as a divine , nay , as a miraculous , impulse , those strong emotions of the imagination and of

    the feelings , in which , as must be perfectly obvious to you , there was at least as much passion as reason . Wesley was , indeed , quite right in appealing to the imagination and feelings of those hearers whose minds were not in a state to have been moved by truths addressed directly to their reasons . But Wesley was quite wrong in mixing up anything false ( I do not call him actually insincere , though I suspect he was willing to be

    selfdeceived in this matter ) in his appeals to the imaginations and feelings of his hearers . I shall say less on this subject , because I have written on it largely in a work entitled' Essays on the Lives of Cowper , Newton , and Heber , ' which , if you will honour me by accepting the work , I shall have the pleasure of placing in your library . But there is another instance , far more important to us than

    even that of Wesley , of falsehood and truth having been blended together , namely , in one of the most striking appeals that ever was made to the imaginations and feelings of men . I am speaking of that Wesley of ancient times , Plato , that' Divine Philosopher , ' as he was called by his followers . This great man also , as did Wesley , appeared in the world at a time when the human mind

    was sinking rapidly into the apathy and the inertness of ancient orthodoxies and novel scepticisms ; when men did not know what to believe and what to disbelieve ; when a false mythology was wrestling in the public mind , with a , if possible , still falser atheism ;* when men were inclined to believe and to do much

    * The service to which Plato was called was , to devote his learning to explain the hidden meaning of the mystic fables of Homer , and to employ his philosophy in purifying and extending the primitive lessons of the great bard . Had Plato done this , the history of religion in Greece would not offer a series of broken and desecrated images , nor would so much of the philosophy of Plato have consisted in attempts to establish a new mystery at a time when Greece was rather requiring an explanation f old mysteries .

    The works of Plato possess the deepest interest , not because , as a writer , he fascinates by the animated fancy and idiomatic gracefulness of his style , nor because , as a philosopher , he raises the mind from material to spiritual being ; but because he is the brilliant historian of what ought to have been the transition period of Grecian Intellect and principles . For Plato ' s Dialogues are the inestimable records of a time , when nothing but p lain truth could have power to arrestthe daring impiety , reckless scepticism , degrading brutality , and fearful anarchy , which were rapidly forcing the mind back into barbarism . It was not the irresistible force of the northern hordes

    which overwhelmed the arts and sciences , the laws and language of classic times ; but it was the intellectual weakness , and therefore the moral weakness , and therefore the political weakness , of Greece and Rome , which could not resist that huge ruin . The primal cauae of this weakness was , that through the confusion of truth and falsehood , strong thinking , and therefore strong acting , were impossible to the great body of the people . Therefore it was that the pnyaical force of the North triumphed over the moral weakness of the South .

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    10 The Diffusion of Knowledge amongst the People .

• Citation
  • Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Jan. 2, 1834, page 10, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2629/page/10/