Untitled article by Geo. Wright

Publishing Committee · Battle Creek, Mich. · Mar 3, 1859

From Wesley's Journal.

By Geo. Wright

[The following is from Wesley's Journal, Vol. VI, p. 746. Some even among us may be benefited by its perusal. GEO. WRIGHT.]

1. Be active, be diligent; avoid all laziness, sloth, indolence. Fly from every degree, every appearance of it; else you will never be more than half a christian.

2. Be cleanly. In this let the Methodists take pattern by the Quakers. Avoid all nastiness, dirt, slovenliness, both in your person, clothes, house, and all about you. Don't stink above ground. This is bad fruit of laziness; use all diligence to be clean, as one says,

"Let thy mind's sweetness have its operation Upon thy person, clothes and habitation."

3. Whatever clothes you have, let them be whole; no rents, no tatters, no rags. These are a scandal to either man or woman; being another fruit of vile laziness. Mend your clothes, or I shall never expect you to mend your lives. Let none ever see a ragged Methodist.

6. Use no tobacco, unless prescribed by a physician. It is an uncleanly and an unwholesome self-indulgence; and the more customary it is, the more resolutely should you break off from every degree of that evil custom.

7. Use no snuff. . . . This is a silly, nasty, dirty custom. . . . But let christians be in this bondage no longer. Assert your liberty, and that all at once; nothing will be done by degrees. But just now you may break loose, through Christ strengthening you.

8. Touch no dram. It is a liquid fire. It is slow but sure poison. It saps the very springs of life. . . . I would sacredly abstain from this because the evil is so general; and to this, and snuff, and smoky cabins, I impute the blindness so exceeding common throughout this nation."

God was in Christ, says the Apostle, reconciling the world unto himself; that is, God was in Christ doing those things that would restore to himself the obedience and affection of every one that believed. Christ represents himself as a ransom for the soul; as laying down his life for believers. He is represented as descending from an estate of the highest felicity; taking upon him the nature of man, and humbling himself even to the death of the cross, a death of the most excruciating tortures; and thus bearing the sins of men in his own body on the tree, that through his death God might be just, and the justifier of every one that believeth in Jesus.

It was thus by a self-denial surpassing description, by a life of labors for human good, accomplished by constant personal sacrifices, and tending at every step toward the center of the vortex; he went on till finally, life closed to a crisis, by the passion in the garden, the rebuke and the buffet, and the cruel mockery of the Jews and the Romans, and then bearing his cross, faint with former agony of spirit, and his flesh quivering with recent scourging, he goes to Calvary, where the agonized sufferer for human beings cried, It is finished, and gave up the ghost.

Such is the testimony of the Scriptures; and it may be affirmed without hesitancy, that it would be impossible for the human soul to exercise full faith in the testimony, that it was a guilty and needy creature, condemned by the holy law of a holy God, and that from this condition of spiritual guilt and danger, Jesus Christ suffered and died to accomplish its ransom—we say, a human being could not exercise full faith in these truths and not love the Saviour.—Plan of Salvation.