To Charles Wesley

THE THEOLOGIAN SELF-INTERPRETED

O grant that nothing in my soul May dwell, but Thy piire love alone!

O may Thy love possess me whole.

My joy, my treasure, and my crown.

Strange flames far from my heart remove!

.My every act, word, thought, be love.

And I am still persuaded, this is what the Lord Jesus hath bought for me with his own blood.

Now, whether you desire and expect this blessing or not, is it not an astonishing thing that you or any man living should be disgusted at me for expecting it? Is it not more astonishing still that well-nigh all the religious world should be up in arms concerning it? and that they should persuade one another that this hope is "subversive of the very foundations of Christian experience"? Why, then, whoever retains it cannot possibly have any Christian experience at all! Then my brother, Mr. Fletcher and I, and twenty thousand more, who seem both to fear and to love God, are in reality children of the devil and in the road to eternal damnation!

In God's name, I entreat you, make me sensible of this! Show me by plain strong reasons what dishonour this hope does to Christ;10 wherein it opposes justification by faith or any fundamental truth of religion. But do not wrest and wiredraw u and colour my words as Mr. Hervey (or Cudworth) has done, in such a manner that when I look in that glass, I do not know my own face! "Shall I call you (says Mr. Hervey) my father or my friend? For you have been both to me." So I was. And you have as well requited me! It is well, my reward is with the Most High.

Wishing all happiness to you and yours, I am, dear sir, Your affectionate brother and servant.

To Charles Wesley l Whitehaven, June 27, 1766 Dear Brother, I think you and I have abundantly too little intercourse with each other.

Are we not "old acquaintances"? Have we not known each other for 10. Manuscript defective; this reading conjectural.

11. Wesley first wrote withdraw, then amended it to wiredraw; cf. Oxford English

Dictionary, XII. i. Letters, V, 15-17. One of the remarkable features of Wesley's career after 1739

Wesley, John. John Wesley, edited by A. C. Outler, Oxford University Press USA - OSO, 1980. ProQuest

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SELF-IMAGES IN THE LETTERS

half a century? And are we not jointly engaged in such a work as probably no two other men upon earth are? Why, then, do we keep at such a distance? It is a mere device of Satan. But surely we ought not at this time of day to be ignorant of his devices. Let us therefore make the full use of the little time that remains. We at least should think aloud and use to the uttermost the light and grace on each bestowed. We should help each other, Of little life the best to make, And manage wisely the last stake.2

In one of my last I was saying I do not feel the wrath of God abiding on me; nor can I believe it does. And yet, this is the mystery: [I do not love God. I never did]. Therefore [I never] believed in the Christian sense of the word. Therefore [I am only an] honest heathen, a proselyte of the Temple, one of the ^o/Jov/wroi rov Biov ["God-fearers," Acts 13:16].

And yet to be so employed of God; and so hedged in that I can neither get forward nor backward! Surely there never was such an instance before, from the beginning of the world! If I [ever have had] that faith, it would not be so strange. But [I never had any] other eAtyx0* ["awareness"] of the eternal or invisible world than [I have] now; and that is [none at all], unless such as fairly shines from reason's glimmering is the steadiness of his mood and the near total absence of emotional depressions.

This letter reveals one of the most striking exceptions, and carries us back to the patterns of the pre-Revival past. (Cf. Letters, I, 269, 270, 292.) It was written in a rare moment of leisure and reflection, after a tour of Scotland that could only be judged a dismal failure (cf. Journal, V, 167-72; VI, 240) —and at the height of his marital difficulties, that weighed on him more heavily than he ever publicly acknowledged. It is addressed to his brother, on whom he had depended heavily but who was now quietly slipping into the background of the Revival. The parts in brackets (excepting Scripture references and translations) were written in shorthand.

The despair in the second and third paragraphs belongs in Wesley's self-portrait. It was no merely speculative opinion of his that faith is a constant risk and that there is no state of spiritual progress in this life from which one might not lapse — yet also no lapse from which one may not be reclaimed. Here is such a lapse — under grinding pressures and grim frustrations. It reminds one of the old anxieties about the groundlessness of existence that had been so acute in 1738, before and after "Aldersgate."

Yet, as swiftly as the shutters of an anxious heart in crisis open, they close again, and we are back in the affairs of the Revival: —Wesley's difficulties with the preachers, his plans for the future, etc. Other letters dating from the same period have no echo of this depression. The rest of Wesley's summer is serene and the conference (which Charles did not attend) turned out to be something of a triumph (cf. Journal, V,

173-84).

2. Cf. Abraham Cowley, Anacreontiques, Ode V, "Age," in Works (1707), I, 51.

Wesley, John. John Wesley, edited by A. C. Outler, Oxford University Press USA - OSO, 1980. ProQuest

Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/nottingham/detail.action?docID=684619.

Created from nottingham on 2021-10-22 14:50:48.

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