The opening of Preface
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“Jean Guillaume de la Flechere,” wrote Robert Southey, “was a man of rare talents, and rarer virtue. No age or country has ever produced a man of more fervent piety, or more perfect charity; no Church has ever possessed a more apostolic minister. He was a man of whom Methodism may well be proud, as the most able of its defenders; and whom the Church of England may hold in remembrance, as one of the most pious and excellent of her sons.”
“Fletcher was a saint,” said Isaac Taylor, “as unearthly a being as could tread the earth at all.”
“Fletcher,” remarked Robert Hall, “is a seraph who burns with the ardour of divine love. Spurning the fetters of mortality, he almost habitually seems to have anticipated the rapture of the beatific vision.”