Wesley Corpus

MY DEAR SISTER, - Little things contrary to our will may be great blessings. We have need to apply the general word, 'Take up thy cross, and follow Me,' to a thousand little particulars: a smoky room, a cold morning, a rainy day, the dullness or perverseness of those we are with-these and innumerable little crosses will help us onward to the kingdom. But the most profitable of all crosses to your own soul may be the unfaithfulness or unfruitfulness of your sisters, without one or other of which they never could have lost any blessing which God had given them. Nothing can exercise and therefore increase your faith and love like the seeming to spend all your strength for naught. Oh how this increases, my dear Hannah, my love to you! How much more does it increase His love for whom you labor! We do not thoroughly understand the meaning of that word, 'The times anti seasons God hath reserved in His own power.' Undoubtedly He has wise reasons for pouring out His Spirit at one time rather than another; but they lie abundantly too deep for human understanding to fathom. To us He says, 'What I do thou knowest not now, but thou shalt know hereafter!' - I am, my dear Hannah, Your affectionate brother. To Mrs. Crosby DOVER, December 9, 1778. MY DEAR SISTER, - It is no new thing for the temple to be built in troublous times. And in the end all the fierceness of man shall turn to His praise. Meantime we know the Lord sitteth above the water-floods and will give His people the blessing of peace. He is pleased to ghre lite just the same health and strength that I had forty years ago. Fire and water cannot well dwell together, nor warm Calvinists and Arminians. Let us love them and help them all we can. But the less intercourse our people have with them the better. It is well you spent a little time at pool Beverley. The little flock there stand in need of all the help we can give them. Hardly any Society in England has been as they have been from the very beginning. It is almost a miracle that two of them are left together.