Wesley Corpus

The having our thoughts and affections centred in God, this is Christian simplicity; the having them in any degree ancentred from God, this is dissipation. And it little differs in the real nature of things and in the eye of God, the Judge of all, whether a man be kept in a state of dissipation from God, by crowns and empires, and thousands of gold and silver, or by cards, and dancing, and drinking, and dressing, and mistressing, and masquerades, and picking straws. 7. Dissipation is then, in the very root of it, separation from God; in other words, Atheism, or the being without God in the world. It is the negative branch of ungodliness. And, in this true sense of the word, certainly, England is the most dissipated nation that is to be found under heaven. And whether our thoughts and affections are dissipated, scattered from God, by women, or food, or dress, or one or ten thousand pretty trifles, that dissipation (innocent as it may seem) is equally subversive of all real virtue and all real happiness. It carries its own punishment: Though we are loaded with blessings, it often makes our very existence a burden; and, by an unaccountable anxiety, gives a foretaste of what it is to be “punished with everlasting destruction from the presence of the Lord!” March 26, 1783.