Wesley Corpus

To Mary Bishop Date: LONDON, February 4, 1776. Source: The Letters of John Wesley (1776) Author: John Wesley --- MY DEAR SISTER,--If you never wrote, if you forgot me quite, I should still love you with a love of esteem. But I am not content with this. I want to come nearer. Meet me half-way, and I shall still love you with a love of friendship. Although I am thoroughly persuaded that those reasonings are in a great measure from a preternatural cause, and therefore chiefly to be resisted by continuing instant in prayer, yet I think Christian prudence not only permits but requires you to add other means to this. That which I would especially recommend is reading, particularly Pascal's Thoughts (in the Christian Library) and the first two tracts in the Preservative against Unsettled Notions in Religion. These temptations are permitted to give you a deep and lasting conviction of the littleness and weakness of your own understanding, and to show you the absolute need wherein you stand of continual light as well as power from on high. That ' the regulation of social life is the one end of religion' is a strange position indeed. I never imagined any but a Deist would affirm this. If that good man Mr. D---- did, I suppose it must be a slip of the pen; for he could not but know that the love, without which, St, Paul affirms, all we do profits us nothing, is that humble, meek, patient love of our neighbor, which supposes and flows from the love of God. A degree of reasoning you certainly may and ought to use, only joined with humility and prayer. But what you more immediately want is faith. Believe, and thou shalt be saved into perfect peace.--I am, my dear sister, Yours affectionately.