Wesley Corpus

To Mrs. Pendarves Source: The Letters of John Wesley (1731) Author: John Wesley --- April 5 [1731]. Aspasia will hardly imagine how often, since I had the pleasure of returning my thanks for her last favor, I have been angry at this ill-natured business which has so long kept me from repeating them. Many a time have I sighed and said to myself: ' No, nothing ought to keep me from it. I ought not on any account to lose the only way I now have of enjoying such conversation. This is the voice of reason, not prejudice. Is there a more improving (as well as pleasing) employment When thy heart burns within thee at her words, is it not the warmth of life, of virtue Do they not inspire some degree of the purity and softness of that heart from which they come' Yet one consideration there is that as often checks my complaints and bids my soul be still: 'Should I neglect the work to which Providence so plainly calls me, even in hope of such a good, by thus striving to be more like I should be still more unlike Aspasia.' The more I observe the dispositions of those poor creatures that make up the bulk of mankind, the more do I desire to shelter myself from them under the protection of Varanese and Aspasia and Selima. The stronger distaste I conceive at those, the more amiable light these appear in. And this doubtless is one of the uses which God makes even of the children of this generation. As they give us a stronger dislike to vice, which, though it appear hateful to abstracted reason, yet Thus speaking and thus acting grows tenfold More horrid and deform [Paradise Lost, ii. 705-6: ‘So speaking and so threatening, grew tenfold More dreadful and deform.’]; so they inspire us with a livelier approbation of virtue, which never appears more awful and glorious than when it appears, like the great Author of it, ' with clouds and darkness round about it.' Then it is, when I am tired with the melancholy prospect of them whose eyes the god of this world hath blinded, whose hearts he hath so bowed down to earth that their admiration soars not so high as The riches of heaven's pavement, [Mammon in Paradise Lost, i. 682.]