Wesley Corpus

If not, this plea will not clear you from the charge; your eye was not single. (2.) If it was, you may put it beyond dispute; you may prove at once the purity of your intention:--Make that valuable man Rector of one of your parishes, and you are clear before God and man. But what can be pleaded for those who have two or more flocks, and take care of none of them? who just look at them now and then for a few days, and then remove to a convenient distance, and say, “Soul, thou hast much goods laid up for many years; take thine ease; eat, drink, and be merry?” Some years ago I was asking a plain man, “Ought not he who feeds the flock, to eat of the milk of the flock?” He answered: “Friend, I have no objection to that. But what is that to him who does not feed the flock? He stands on the far side of the hedge, and feeds himself. It is another who feeds the flock; and ought he to have the milk of the flock? What canst thou say for him?” Truly, nothing at all; and he will have nothing to say for himself, when the great Shepherd shall pronounce that just sentence, “Bind” the unprofitable servant “hand and foot, and cast him into outer darkness.” I have dwelt the longer on this head, because a right intention is the first point of all, and the most necessary of all; inasmuch as the want of this cannot be supplied by anything else whatsoever. It is the setting out wrong; a fault never to be amended, unless you return to the place whence you came, and set out right. It is impossible there fore to lay too great stress upon a single eye, a pure intention; without which, all our sacrifice, our prayers, sermons, and sacraments, are an abomination to the Lord. I cannot dismiss this important article, without touching upon one thing more. How many are directly concerned therein, I leave to the Searcher of hearts. You have been settled in a living or a curacy for some time. You are now going to exchange it for another. Why do you do this? For what reason do you prefer this before your former living or curacy?