Wesley quotes

The varnishers and veneerers have been busily converting Abe into a plaster saint†to pump all his human weaknesses out of him, and so leave him a mere moral apparition, a sort of amalgam of John Wesley and the Holy Ghost.

- H(enry) L(ouis) Mencken
Of popular perceptions of  Abraham Lincoln. Quoted in Fred Hobson Mencken:  A Life (1994).