Wesley Corpus

In the account he gives of me and those friends who are as my own soul, and who watch over it that I may not be myself a castaway, are some things true: as, that we imagine it is our bounden duty to spend our whole lives in the service of Him that gave them, or, in other words, 'whether we eat or drink, or whatever we do, to do all to the glory of God'; that we endeavor, as we are able, to relieve the poor by buying books and other necessaries for them; that some of us read prayers at the prison once a day; that I administer the sacrament once a month, and preach there as often as I am not engaged elsewhere; that we sit together five evenings in a week; and that we observe, in such manner as our health permits, the fasts of the Church. Some things are false, but taken up upon trust, so that I hope Mr. Morgan believed them true: as, that we almost starve ourselves; that one of us had like lately to have lost his life by too great abstinence; that we endeavor to reform notorious whores and to lay spirits in haunted houses; that we all rise every day at five o'clock; and that I am President of the Society. And some things are not only false, but I fear were known so to be when he related them as true (inasmuch as he had then had the repeated demonstration of both his eyes and ears to the contrary): such as that the Society consists of seven members (I know no more than four of them); that from five to eight in the morning they sing psalms and read some piece of divinity; and that they are emaciated to such a degree that they are a frightful sight. As to the circumstance of the brasier's wife (no intimate of mine) I am in doubt; though she positively denies she ever said so.