Wesley Corpus

The motion and sun together, in our last hundred-and-fifty miles' walk, so thoroughly carried off ail our superfluous humors, that we continue perfectly in health, though it is here a very sickly season. And Mr. Kirkham [When at Stanton on May 22.] assures us, on the word of a priest and a physician, that if we will but take the same medicine once or twice a year we shall never need any other to keep us from the gout. When we were with him, we touched two or three times upon a nice subject, but did not come to any full conclusion. The point debated was, What is the meaning of being ' righteous over much,' or by the more common phrase of being 'too strict in religion' and what danger there was of any of us falling into that extreme [See letter of July 19.] All the ways of being too righteous or too strict which we could think of were these: either the carrying some one particular virtue to so great an height as to make it clash with some others; or the laying too much stress on the instituted' means of grace, to the neglect of the weightier matters of the law; or the multiplying prudential means upon ourselves so far, and binding ourselves to the observance of them so strictly, as to obstruct the end we aimed at by them, either by hindering our advance in heavenly affections in general or by retarding our progress in some particular virtue. Our opponents seemed to think my brother and I in some danger of being too strict in this last sense of laying burdens on ourselves too heavy to be borne, and consequently too heavy to be of any use to us.