Wesley Corpus

Black ingratitude is rooted in your inmost frame. You can no more love God, than you can see him; or than you can be happy without that love. Neither (how much soever you may pique yourself upon it) are you a lover of mankind. Can love and malice consist? benevolence and envy? O do not put out your own eyes! And are not these horrid tempers in you? Do not you envy one man, and bear malice or ill-will to another? I know you call these dispositions by softer names; but names change not the nature of things. You are pained that one should enjoy what you cannot enjoy yourself. Call this what you please, it is rank envy. You are grieved that a second enjoys even what you have yourself; you rejoice in seeing a third unhappy. Do not flatter yourself; this is malice, venomous malice, and nothing else. And how could you ever think of being happy, with malice and envy in your heart? Just as well might you expect to be at ease, while you held burning coals in your bosom. 17. I entreat you to reflect, whether there are not other inhabitants in your breast, which leave no room for happiness there. May you not discover, through a thousand disguises, pride? too high an opinion of yourself? vanity, thirst of praise, even (who would believe it?) of the applause of knaves and fools? unevenness or sourness of temper? proneness to anger or revenge? peevishness, fretfulness, or pining discontent? Nay, perhaps even covetousness.--And did you ever think happiness could dwell with these? Awake out of that senseless dream. Think not of reconciling things incompatible. All these tem pers are essential misery: So long as any of these are har boured in your breast, you must be a stranger to inward peace. What avails it you if there be no other hell? Whenever these fiends are let loose upon you, you will be constrained to own, Hell is where'er I am : Myself am hell. And can the Supreme Being love those tempers, which you yourself abhor in all but yourself? If not, they imply guilt as well as misery. Doubtless they do. Only inquire of your own heart. How often in the mid-career of your vice have you felt a secret reproof, which you knew not how to bear, and therefore stifled as soon as possible !