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No Better Ways to Convert

When John Wesley arrived in Ireland, he discovered a situation similar to ours in the United States. Substitute “secular humanist” for “Roman Catholic,” and “evangelical” for “protestant,” and see if you don’t agree.

[Wesley] described his first contacts in Dublin as people who exceeded all he knew for their ‘sweetness of temper, courtesy and hospitality,’ but they were ‘English transplanted into another soil.’ They belonged to the Protestant establishment and it was from their number that the members of his first Society in Dublin came. Noticeably absent from the Society were the native Irish-speaking people, of whom Wesley said, ‘At least ninety-nine in a hundred remain in the religion of their forefathers.’ For this sullen majority he had genuine sympathy and regarded it as no surprise that they should live and die as Roman Catholics ‘when the protestants can find no better ways to convert them than penal laws and act of parliament’.