Wesley Corpus

93. You can never reconcile it with any degree of common sense, that a man who wants nothing, who has already all the necessaries, all the conveniences, nay, and many of the super fluities, of life, and these not only independent on any one, but less liable to contingencies than even a gentleman’s freehold estate; that such an one should calmly and deliberately throw up his ease, most of his friends, his reputation, and that way of life which of all others is most agreeable both to his natural temper and education; that he should toil day and night, spend all his time and strength, knowingly destroy a firm con stitution, and hasten into weakness, pain, diseases, death,-to gain a debt of six or seven hundred pounds! 94. But suppose the balance on the other side, let me ask you one plain question: For whatgain (setting conscience aside) will you be obliged to act thus? to live exactly as I do? For what price will you preach (and that with all your might, not in an easy, indolent, fashionableway) eighteen or nineteen times. every week; and this throughout the year? What shall I give you to travel seven or eight hundred miles, in all weathers, every two or three months? For what salary will you abstain from all other diversions, than the doing good, and the praising God? I am mistaken if you would not prefer strangling to such a life, even with thousands of gold and silver. 95. And what is the comfort you have found out for me in these circumstances? Why, that I shall not die a beggar. So now I am supposed to be heaping up riches, that I may leave them behind me. Leave them behind me ! For whom? my wife and children? Who are they? They are yet unborn. Unless thou meanest the children of faith whom God hath given me. But my heavenly Father feedeth them. Indeed, if I lay up riches at all, it must be to leave behind me; seeing my Fel lowship is a provision for life. But I cannot understand this. What comfort would it betomy soul, now launched into eternity, that I had left behind me gold as the dust, and silver as the sand of the sea? Will it follow me over the great gulf? or can I go back to it?