Wesley Corpus

Man is an immortal spirit, created in the image and for the enjoyment of God. This is the one, the only end of his being; he exists for no other purpose. God is the centre of all spirits; and while they cleave to Him, they are wise, holy, and happy; but in the same proportion as they are separated from Him, they are foolish, unholy, and unhappy. This disunion from God is the very essence of human dissipation; which is no other than the scattering the thoughts and affections of the creature from the Creator. Wherefore fondness for sensual enjoyments of any kind; love of silly, irrational pleasures; love of trifling amusements; luxury, vanity, and a thousand foolish desires and tempers, are not so properly dissipation itself, as they are the fruits of it, the natural effects of being unhinged from the Creator, the Father, the centre of all intelligent spirits. 6. It is this against which the Apostle guards in his advice to the Christians at Corinth: “This I speak, that ye may attend upon the Lord without distraction.” It might as well be rendered, without dissipation, without having your thoughts any way scattered from God. 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.