Dear Editor,
I have enormous sympathy for Armorel Carlyon (Letter, en May) and I heartily agree with John Wesley’s robust assertion of his belief in the authority of the Bible which she quoted, but, sadly, the battle she is trying to fight was lost more than a century ago.
I left the Methodist Church in 1980; I should have left in 1970. I recall a brief conversation, in 1964, with a Pentecostal minister who told me that he had left the Methodist Church when its constituent denominations united in 1932 and I remember wondering whether I would have done the same had I been in his position. More recently I have learned that both the Wesleyan and Primitive Methodists, by their actions, if not by formal declarations, had totally rejected Wesley’s admirable view of the Bible, before the First World War.
