Walker, John. An Expostulatory Address to the Members of the Methodist Society in Ireland. New-York: Printed and sold by M'Farlane and Long, 1807. [6138]
Removed, 4 1/4 x 6 1/4 inches, old ink number stamp on front, old stains & soil, tp nearly detached. "Olive Sproat's Book, 1807" behind tp. 48 pp.
A pamphlet that attacks the theology of John Wesley and of the Methodist apologist John Fletcher. He does this by comparing their statements and writings to Bible verses and reasonings from the perspective of a Calvinist.
"Some of you will be ready to conclude me an enemy to spiritual and experimental religion, because I oppose the favourite current in which your experience runs. But indeed they mistake. I am persuaded that there is no real Christianity, but what is the work of the spirit of God; and that work is certainly a matter of experience, from first to last. But you appear to me to greatly mistake the nature of the work of the Spirit, as described in the scriptures. It is not a work by which any new revelation is now to be made to individuals; but a work by which they are made to discern, to believe, and to receive the revelation already made, and recorded in the word of God. Each of you is taught to look for a divine revelation to himself, of that which there is no where declared in scripture, - that his sins are pardoned, that his person is accepted; and to build his persuasion of the truth of this, not upon any thing declared in scripture, but upon the strength of the sudden feeling with which it has been impressed on his mind. This is enthusiasm indeed..."
Rev. John Walker (ca. 1767-1833), Irish minister of the established church until 1804, when a change of views led him to form his own Calvinistic sect, known as "Walkerites." He was known as an excellent classical scholar and was a fellow at Trinity College, Dublin, before his change of religious views.