Wesley Corpus

If your soul is now as much alive to God, if your thirst after pardon and holiness is as strong, if you are as dead to the desire of the eye and the pride of life as you was six or seven years ago, I rejoice; if not, I pray God you may. And then you will know how to value a real friend. With regard to myself, you do well to warn me against ‘popularity, a thirst of power and of applause, against envy producing a seeming contempt for the conveniences or grandeur of this life, against an affected humility, against sparing from myself to give to others from no other motive than ostentation.’ I am not conscious to myself that this is my case. However, the warning is always friendly, and it is always seasonable, considering how deceitful my heart is and how many the enemies that surround me. What follows I do not understand. ‘Your beholding me in the ditch wherein you helped (though involuntarily) to cast me, and with a Levitical pity passing by on the other side’; ‘He (who) and you, sir, have not any merit; though Providence should permit all these sufferings to work together for my good.’ I do not comprehend one fine of this, and therefore cannot plead either guilty or not guilty. I presume they are some that are dependent on me, who (you say) ‘keep not the commandments of God; who show a repugnance to serve and obey; who are as full of pride and arrogance as of filth and of nastiness; who do not pay lawful debts, nor comply with civil obligations; who make the waiting on the offices of religion a plea for sloth and idleness; who, after I had strongly recommended them, did not perform their moral duty, but increased the number of those encumbrances, which they forced on you against your will.’ To this I can only say (1) I know not whom you mean. I am not certain that I can so much as guess one of them. (2) Whoever they are, had they followed my instructions they would have acted in a quite different manner. (3) If you will tell me them by name who have acted thus, I will renounce all fellow-ship with them. [See letters of May 16 and 28 to him.]