Wesley Corpus

Sometime Fellow of Lincoln College, Oxford Wesley’s Journal, Volume I. 1. Iv was in pursuance of an advice given by Bishop Taylor, in his * Rules for Holy Living and Dying,’ that, about fifteen years ago, J began to take a more exact account than I had done before, of the manner wherein I spent my time, writing down how I had employed every hour. This I continued to do, wherever I was, till the time of my leaving England. The variety of scenes which I then passed through, induced me to transcribe, from time to time, the more matetial parts of my diary, adding here and there such little reflections as occurred te my mind. Of this journal thus occasionally compiled, the following is a short extract: It not being my design to relate all those particulars, which I wrote for my own use only; and which would answer no valuable end to others, however important they were to me. 2. Indeed I had no design or desire to trouble the world with any of my little affairs: As cannot but appear to every impartial mind, from my having been so long “as one that heareth not;” notwithstanding the loud and frequent calls I have had to answer for myself. Neither should I have done it now, had not Captain Williams’s affidavit, published as soon as he had left England, laid an obligation upon me, to do what in me lies, in obedience to that command of God, “ Let not the good which is in you be evil spoken of.) With this view I do at length “ give an answer to every man that asketh me a reason of the hope which is in me,” that in all these things “I have a conscience void of offence toward God and toward men.” 3. I have prefixed hereto a letter, wrote several years since, containing a plain account of the rise of that little society in Oxford, which has been so variously represented. Part of this was published in 1733; but without my consent or knowledge. It now stands as it was wrote ; without any addition, diminution, or amendment; it being my only concern herein nakedly to “ declare the thing as it is.”