Wesley Corpus

You were at first a poor, despised, afflicted people. Then what some of you had to spare was little enough to relieve the needy members of your own society. In a few years you increased in goods, and were able to relieve more than your own poor. But you did not bestow all that you had to spare from them on the poor belonging to other societies. It remained either to lay it up, or to expend it in superfluities. Some chose one way, and some the other. Lay this deeply to heart, ye who are now a poor, despised, afflicted people. Hitherto ye are not able to relieve your own poor. But if ever your substance increase, see that ye be not straitened in your own bowels, that ye fall not into the same snare of the devil. Before any of you either lay up treasures on earth, or indulge needless expense of any kind, I pray the Lord God to scatter you to the corners of the earth, and blot out your name from under heaven an exceeding common case? Are you not conscious abundance of your friends have done so? with whom the being “taught of God” and “led by his Spirit” are mere words of course, that mean just nothing. And their crude and indigested accounts of the things they did not understand have raised that deep prejudice against these great truths which we find in the gene rality of men. Do some of you ask, “But dost thou acknowledge the inward principle?” I do, my friends: And I would to God every one of you acknowledged it as much. I say, all religion is either empty show, or perfection by inspiration; in other words, the obedient love of God, by the supernatural knowledge of God; yea, all that which “is not of faith is sin;” all which does not spring from this loving knowledge of God; which knowledge cannot begin or subsist one moment without immediate inspi ration; not only all public worship, and all private prayer, but every thought in common life, and word, and work. What think you of this? Do you not stagger? Dare you carry the in ward principle so far? Do you acknowledge it to be the very truth? But, alas! what is the acknowledging it? Dost thou experience this principle in thyself? What saith thy heart?