Churches and synagogues in the West -- their congregations dwindling because of loss of faith or loss of faithful in the neighborhood -- have been turned into mosques, from Brixton to Brooklyn, from Queenstown to Queens. Having just run across what John Wesley, founder of Methodism, wrote about Islam, I idly wondered if among those churches-transformed-into-mosques any had been Methodist.
For here is what I ran across as John Wesley's summing-up of the effect of Islam on the world. Try to imagine any Christian cleric today touching, with a ten-foot pole, a remark such as the one made, and made unremarkably, more than two centuries ago:
"Ever since the religion of Islam appeared in the world, the espousers of it...have been as wolves and tigers to all other nations, rending and tearing all that fell into their merciless paws, and grinding them with their iron teeth; that numberless cities are raised from the foundation, and only their name remaining; that many countries, which were once as the garden of God, are now a desolate wilderness; and that so many once numerous and powerful nations are vanished from the earth! Such was, and is at this day, the rage, the fury, the revenge, of these destroyers of human kind."
Judging by Wesley's demonstration of lucidity above, there was no madness in his Methodism.
Of course, he could be straightforward about his judgments. There was no steady drip-drip-drip of the BBC and the leftist press, no political and media elites, insistent that the truth be always trimmed, taken to task or Tyburn, out of fear of offending Muslims (and fear of offending Muslims took precedence over any attempt to tell the truth about Islam), a fear that naturally includes fear of a bodkin in the back, or bullet in the front, for an individual truth-telling Infidel, or fear of a bomb on a London bus, by way of revenge at all Infidels for daring to allow such truths to be told.
