Wesley Corpus

I answer: (1) Those who were so uneasy about it plainly showed that you touched the apple of their eye. Consequently these, of all others, ought to leave it off; for they are evidently brought 'under the power of' it. (2) Those impertinent questions might have been cut short by a very little steadiness and common sense. You need only have taken the method mentioned above, and they would have dropped in the midst. (3) It is not strange you saw no good effects of leaving it off where it was not left off at all. But you saw very bad effects of not leaving it off--viz. the adding sin to sin; the joining much unedifying conversation to wasteful, unhealthy self-indulgence. (4) You need not go far to see many good effects of leaving it off. You may see them in me. I have recovered thereby that healthy state of the whole nervous system, which I had in a great degree, and I almost thought irrecoverably, lost for considerably more than twenty years. I have been enabled hereby to assist in one year above fifty poor with food or raiment, whom I must otherwise have left (for I had before begged for them all I could) as hungry and naked as I found them. You may see the good effects in above thirty poor people just now before you, who have been restored to health through the medicines bought by that money which a single person has saved in this article. And a thousand more good effects you will not fail to see, when her example is more generally followed. 27. Neither is there any need that conversation should be unedifying, even when it turns upon eating and drinking. Nay, from such a conversation, if duly improved, numberless good effects may flow. For how few understand, 'Whether ye eat or drink, or whatever ye do, do all to the glory of God'! And how glad ought you to be of a fair occasion to observe that, though the kingdom of God does not consist in 'meats and drinks,' yet, without exact temperance in these, we cannot have either 'righteousness or peace or joy in the Holy Ghost'! It may therefore have a very happy effect if, whenever people introduce the subject, you directly close in, and push it home, that they may understand a little more of this important truth.