Calvinistic Baptist preacher Charles Spurgeon grew tired of the John-Wesley haters of his day:
To ultra-Calvinists his name is as abhorrent as the name of the Pope to a Protestant: you have only to speak of Wesley, and every imaginable evil is conjured up before their eyes, and no doom is thought to be sufficiently horrible for such an arch-heretic as he was. I verily believe that there are some who would be glad to rake up his bones from the tomb and burn them, as they did the bones of Wycliffe of old—men who go so high in doctrine, and withal add so much bitterness and uncharitableness to it, that they cannot imagine that a man can fear God at all unless he believes precisely as they do.
But he also had little patience for the Wesley fanboys:
Unless you can give him constant adulation, unless you are prepared to affirm that he had no faults, and that he had every virtue, even impossible virtues, you cannot possibly satisfy his admirers.
Spurgeon had a different posture toward Wesley: critical appreciation.
I am afraid that most of us are half asleep, and those that are a little awake have not begun to feel. It will be time for us to find fault with John and Charles Wesley, not when we discover their mistakes, but when we have cured our own. When we shall have more piety than they, more fire, more grace, more burning love, more intense unselfishness, then, and not till then, may we begin to find fault and criticize.
I think he would have liked and recommended Fred Sanders’s forthcoming Wesley on the Christian Life. We can learn from the truth that he saw and the mistakes that he made. I know I profited from the book, and I think the same will be true for many readers.
