Wesley Corpus

How much more easily may we do this, when the heart is, tenderly indeed, but equally attached to more than one; or, at least, without any great inequality | What angelic wisdom does it require to give enough of our affection, and not too much, to so near a relation | And how much easier is it (just to touch on one point more) wholly to conquer our natural desires, than to gratify them exactly so far as Christian temperance allows! just so far as every pleasure of sense prepares us for taking pleasure in God. 7. You have leisure to improve yourself in every kind, to wait upon God in public and private, and to do good to your neighbour in various ways, as Christian prudence shall suggest; whereas those who are married are necessarily taken up with the things of the world. You may give all your time to God without interruption, and need ask leave of none but yourself so to do. You may employ every hour in what you judge to be the most excellent way. But if you was married, you may ask leave of your companion; otherwise what complaints or disgust would follow ! And how hard is it even to know (how much more to act suitably to that knowledge) how far you ought to give way, for peace’ sake, and where to stop ! What wisdom is requisite, in order to know how far you can recede from what is most excellent, particularly with regard to conversation that is not “to the use of edifying,” in order to please your good-natured or ill-natured partner, without displeasing God! 8. You may give all your worldly substance to God; nothing need hinder. You have no increasing family, you have no wife or children to provide for, which might occasion a thousand doubts, (without any extraordinary measure of divine light,) whether you had done either too much or too little for them. You may “make yourself friends of” all “the mammon of unrighteousness” which God entrusts you with; having none that has any right to complain, or to charge you with unkindness for so doing. You may lay out all your talents of every kind entirely for the glory of God; as you have none else to please, none to regard, but Him that lived and died for you. 9.