In the second part, which is principally levelled against Whitefield, thirteen questions are asked, of which the following are specimens:――Question 4. Whether a due and regular attendance in the public offices of religion does not better answer the true ends of devotion, and is not better evidence of the co-operation of the Holy Spirit, than those sudden agonies, roarings, and screamings, tremblings, droppings-down, ravings, and madness into which the hearers of the Methodists had been cast? Question 9. Whether it does not savour of self-sufficiency and presumption, when a few young heads, without any colour of a Divine commission, set up their own schemes as the great standard of Christianity?
The third part is a severe critique on the _Christian History_, of which Whitefield was the chief promoter. Here, again, sundry questions were asked, as, for instance, “Whether the zealous endeavours to form Band-Societies, according to the Moravian way, and putting them under the instruction and ordering of particular _superintendents_, and _exhorters_; and the holding of _associations_ and _meetings_, at set times and places, with select moderators; together with the fixing of _visitations_ and their boundaries and limits,――whether these proceedings, not warranted by any law, are not a presumptuous attempt to erect a new church constitution, upon a foreign plan, in contempt of those wise rules of government, discipline, and worship, which were judged by our pious ancestors to be the best means for preserving and maintaining religion, together with public peace and order in Church and State?” Again, “Whether these itinerant preachers, and the setting up of separate places of public worship _at pleasure_, and those pretences to more immediate communications with God, and the visible endeavours to bring the parochial pastors and the public worship under a disesteem among the people,――whether these and the like practices are not of the same kind with those of the last century, that had so great a share in bringing on those religious confusions, which brought a reproach upon Christianity in general, and which, by degrees, worked the body of the people into a national madness and frenzy in matters of religion?”