John Wesley

“ For when you see your misery and your redemption, both of them so exceeding great, you see something that must needs penetrate the depth of your soul, that leaves you no room to doubt about the nature of any virtue; no liberty to indulge one vain passion, or to think it any hardship that the gospel calls you to be perfect. For in this light every virtue of the gospel stands recommended to us, as health, purity and sight stand recommended to a sick, noisome, blind leper, who was shut up in a place that continually increased all his evils. ”

“ Nor could any taught adoration of the one eternal God enter any further into his heart, or be of more use to him, than so much religion taught to a parrot. For man being, or believing himself to be, as merely a creature of this world, as the parrot is, could no more regard any thing, but what his earthly nature has a fondness for, than the parrot doth. Let us eat and drink for to-morrow we die, would be the highest and truest philosophy, if there is no more of a divine life, or heavenly nature in man, than in the chattering sparrow. ”

“ Have I earnestly longed, and laboured after every kind and degree of inward and outward holiness, and purity of body, soul, and spirit, that my standing at the altar may be acceptable to God, and my prayers and intercessions for my flock avail much before him? Has my own self-denial, renunciation of the world, and love of the cross of Christ, enabled me to preach up those duties in their full extent? Has my own strictly pious use of the things of this world, my own readiness to assist every creature to the utmost of my ability fitted me to call others to these things with power and authority? ”

“ And how is such a state of temptation to be resisted, such a torrent of vice to be suppressed, but by the clergy’s shewing themselves visible and notorious examples of all the contrary virtues? When mankind are wallowing in debauchery, wantoning in pleasures, and given up to vanity and luxury in all shapes, it is then the duty of the faithful minister, by his being crucified to the world, to proclaim himself a messenger of a crucified Saviour, and to make his own self-denying, mortified, and heavenly life, a plain, open, and constant reproof of all vain indulgences. ”

“ What more favourable disposition could the adversary of mankind wish to see, either in young or old divines, than a wanting and desiring to have figure in the world, either by preferments or rich marriages? Would he find it difficult to enter into those hearts, where the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes and the pride of life has thus entered? Or would he look upon such as but half fitted for him, in comparison of those who entered into holy orders in a spirit of self-denial, and renunciation of the pomps and vanities of the world? ”

“ So that if any thing can be said of love, aversion, good nature, or ill nature, as common to mankind; the same may be said of reason, as common to mankind.
For the distinction of our reason from our passions, is only a distinction in language, made at pleasure; and is no more real than the desire and inclination are really different from the will. All therefore that is weak and foolish in our passions, is the weakness and folly of our reason; all the inconstancy and caprice of our humours and tempers, is the caprice and inconstancy of our reason. ”

“ And thus it is, that duration affects the practice of all divine virtue, it could have no possibility of existence, but in a nature incapable of dying.—Corruptibility, and divine goodness, are as impossible to be united, as life and death.—Death may as well exert the functions of life, as a mortal creature breathe heavenly tempers and affections. For though the duration of the creature is not the ground, or reason of any divine virtue, yet no creature can be capable of it, but that, which by the divinity of its birth, is born immortal. ”

“ According to the course of nature, you are likely to have the care of the church wholly upon your hands in a short time; and therefore it is chiefly from you that the restoration of true piety is to be expected in this nation. I beseech you, therefore for your own sakes, for the gospel’s sake, for the sake of mankind, to devote yourselves wholly to the love and service of God. As you are yet but beginners in this great office, you have in your power to make your lives the greatest happiness, both to yourselves and the whole nation. ”

“ How ought he to humble his body, and be steady in all kinds of self-denial, who would convince his flock, that they who sow to the flesh reap destruction? How heavenly minded, how devoted to God, how attentive to the one thing needful, how unspotted from the world ought he to be, who is to persuade others that they cannot possibly serve God and mammon? How empty ought he to be of all worldly policy, all arts and methods of ambition, who is to fix it deep in the hearts of his hearers that unless they become as little children, they cannot enter into the kingdom of God? ”

“ But alas! all the accomplishments of human learning are but the ornaments of the old man, which leave the soul in it slavery to sin, full of all the disorders and corruptions of the fallen nature. If it were not thus, how could the errors of all churches have the greatest scholars for their champions? All the learned Catholic world is amazed at the blindness, the perverseness, the weakness, the sophistry, the unfairness of Protestant critics. All the Protestant world is in the same degree of wonder at the same disorders in Catholic disputants. ”

“ And to talk of a light and strength of reason, natural to man, which fact and experience have never yet proved, is as egregious nonsense, as to talk of natural senses, or faculties of his body, which fact and experience have never yet discovered.
From the bare consideration of a rational soul in union with a body, and bodily passions, we can neither prove man to be strong nor weak, good nor bad, sickly nor sound, mortal nor immortal: all these qualities must discover themselves, as the eye discovers its degree of sight, the hand its degree of strength. ”

“ For bribes and interest are not active principles, nor have any power of deception; it is only our reason that gives them a false value, and prefers them to a greater good.
It is just so in what we call the deceit of our passions: they meddle with us no more than bribes meddle with us; but that pleasurable perception, which is to be found in certain enjoyments, is by our reason preferred to that better good, which we might expect from self-denial.
We say again, that our passions paint things in false colours, and present to our minds vain appearances of happiness. ”

“ What a mockery is here made of the whole Christian system, which supposes man to have fallen from such a high degree of heavenly union with God, that nothing less than the birth of the Son of God in fallen man, could restore him to that perfection which he had at first? What a folly to talk of the fall of man, if he came out of the hands of God in a forlorn condition of brutality? ”

“ To ask therefore, whether there is not something right and wrong, antecedent to the will of God, is as absurd, as to ask for some antecedent cause of his existence. And to ask, how God can be good if there is not something good independently of him, is asking how he can be infinite, if there be not something infinite independently of him. And to seek for any other source or reason of the divine goodness, besides the divine nature, is like seeking for some external cause and help of the divine omnipotence. ”

“ For there is no possibility of taking one step in Christianity, but as a sinner, for it has no errand but to the sinner, has no relief but for sin, and nothing can receive it, but the heart wounded, and wearied with the burden of its own sin. All the gospel is but a foreign tale, a dead letter to the most logically learned man in the world, who does not feel in the depth of his soul, that all the reasonableness, and excellency of gospel truth, lies in that fund of sin, impurity, and corrupt tempers, which are inseparable from him, till he is born again. ”

“ Every scholar, every disputer of this world, nay every man, has been where Eve was, and has done what she did, when she sought for wisdom that did not come from God. All libraries are a full proof of the remaining power of the first sinful thirst after it: they are full of a knowledge that comes not from God, but from the first foundation of subtlety that opened her eyes. For as there cannot be any goodness in man, but so far as the divine goodness works in him, so there cannot be any divine truth, or knowledge in man, but so far as God’s truth and knowledge works in him? ”

“ May not therefore one justly wonder, what it is that could lead any people into an imagination of the absolute perfection of human reason? There seems no more in the state of mankind, to betray a man into this fancy, than to persuade him, that the reason of infants is absolutely perfect. For sense and experience, are as full and strong a proof against one, as against the other. ”

“ To renounce the poor interests of a worldly life, to be content with a pilgrim’s fare in it, to live looking and longing after that which you have lost; to have no more of covetousness, of pride, of vanity and ambition, than John the Baptist had; to live unto God in your shops, your employments and estates, with such thoughts and desires of going to your heavenly Father, as the lost son had when he saw his poor condition, eating husks among swine, is only a proof that you are, like him, come to yourselves, that you begin to see what, and how, and where you are. ”

“ Imagine that you had lived with our blessed Lord upon earth, that you had learned the dignity and divinity of his person, that you had seen the love which he bore to mankind, that you had entered into the glorious designs of his kingdom, which was to convert the inhabitants of the earth, poor creatures of flesh and blood, into sons of God and heirs of eternal glory. ”

“ No power of reasoning, no art of criticism, can force one single text of the New Testament to speak, or so much as hint at any other life or immortality but this, as first made known to the world by the gospel.—The natural immortality of the soul, is no part of its redemption, but belongs to it as it belongs to all angels, whether in heaven or in hell, and is an immortality no more purchased by the incarnation of the Son of God, than the immortality which belongs to Lucifer and his angels.—Therefore this cannot be that immortality, which is the gift of God through Jesus Christ. ”

“ But he could have no foundation either to invent any particular manner of divine worship himself, or to reject any that was appointed by God, as unnecessary. It would have been ridiculous to have pleaded his innocence, as having no need of a divine worship. For who can have greater reason, or be fitter to worship God, than innocent beings? It would have been more absurd, to have objected the sufficiency of their reason; for why should men reject a revealed manner of divine worship, because God had given them reason of their own, sufficient for the duties of social and civil life? ”

“ And indeed what other end is there in religion, but to govern every motion, and desire of our hearts? To make all the actions of our common life pure and holy, by being done in strict conformity to the will of God, and under the light and guidance of his Holy Spirit? So that the very outward form of our lives, and the whole manner of our living in the world, whether in estate, shops, or farms, whether in eating, drinking, or dressing, may make it known to all the world, that we do every thing in the name of Jesus Christ, suitably to that high vocation wherewith we are called. ”

“ For the relation which God bears to mankind, as their all-perfect Creator and continual Preserver, is a relation that our reason conceives as imperfectly, and knows as little of, as it does of any of the divine attributes. When it compares it to that of a father and his children, a prince and his subjects, a proprietor and his property, it has explained it in the best manner it can, but still has left it as much a secret, as we do the divine nature when we only say, it is infinitely superior to every thing that is finite. ”

“ But supposing all this lawful, what comfort might we treasure up to ourselves, what honour might we bring to religion, what force might we give to the gospel, what benefit should we do to our neighbour, if we wholly abstained from all these lawful things? Not by working day and night with our own hands, as the great apostle did, but by limiting our wants and desires to the plain demands of nature, and a religious self-denial. ”

“ For if there is an infinitely wise and good Creator, in whom we live, move, and have our being, whose providence governs all things in all places, surely it must be the highest act of our understanding to conceive rightly of him; it must be the noblest instance of judgment, the most exalted temper of our nature, to worship and adore this universal providence, to conform to its laws, to study its wisdom, and to live and act every where, as in the presence of this infinitely good and wise Creator. ”