Wesley Corpus

To Alexander Mather Source: The Letters of John Wesley (1777) Author: John Wesley --- [BRISTOL, August 6,] 1777. No, Aleck, no! The danger of ruin to Methodism does not lie here. It springs from quite a different quarter. Our preachers, many of them, are fallen. They are not spiritual. They are not alive to God. They are soft, enervated, fearful of shame, toil, hardship. They have not the spirit which God gave to Thomas Lee at Pateley Bridge or to you at Boston. [In the autumn of 1757, where he suffered much from the mob (Wesley’s Veterans, ii 93-7). Lee was rolled in the common sewer and had his back nearly broken; for his sufferings at Pateley, see ibid iii, 204-6.] Give me one hundred preachers who fear nothing but sin and desire nothing but God, and I care not a straw whether they be clergymen or laymen, such alone will shake the gates of hell and set up the kingdom of heaven upon earth.