Wesley Corpus

This may steal upon you in a thousand forms, so that you cannot be too watchful against it. Take heed of everything, whether in principle or practice, which has any tendency thereto. Even that great truth, that “Christ is the end of the law, may betray us into it, if we do not consider that he has adopted every point of the moral law, and grafted it into the law of love. Beware of thinking, ‘Because I am filled with love, I need not have so much holiness. Because I pray always, therefore I need no set time for private prayer. Because I watch always, therefore I need no particular self-examination.’ Let us ‘magnify the law, the whole written word, ‘and make it honourable. Let this be our voice: “I prize thy com mandments above gold or precious stones. O what love have I unto thy law ! all the day long is my study in it. Beware of Antinomian books; particularly the works of Dr. Crisp and Mr. Saltmarsh. They contain many excellent things; and this makes them the more dangerous. O be warned in time : Do not play with fire. Do not put your hand on the hole of a cockatrice den. I entreat you, beware of bigotry. Let not your love or beneficence be confined to Methodists, so called, only; much less to that very small part of them who seem to be renewed in love; or to those who believe yours and their report. O make not this your Shibboleth ! Beware of stillness; ceasing in a wrong sense from your own works. To mention one instance out of many: “You have received,” says one, ‘a great blessing. But you began to talk of it, and to do this and that; so you lost it. You should have been still.” “Beware of self-indulgence; yea, and making a virtue of it, laughing at self-denial, and taking up the cross daily, at fasting or abstinence. Beware of censoriousness; thinking or calling them that anyways oppose you, whether in judgment or prac tice, blind, dead, fallen, or ‘enemies to the work. Once more, beware of Solifidianism; crying nothing but, ‘Believe, believe!’ and condemning those as ignorant or legal who speak in a more scriptural way.