Manuscript Sermons, 1725-1741

1This final section includes a cluster of seventeen manuscript sermons (together with three fragments) which John Wesley produced in the years between 1725 and 1741. Ten of the sermons, and the fragments, are extant in his own hand; seven have survived in Charles Wesley’s copies from manuscripts supplied him by his elder brother.

2The holographs of the sermons that Wesley published in his lifetime have long since disappeared—discarded, one presumes, by printers with no interest in the problems thus created for future editors. This means that the manuscripts which Wesley chose to keep in his files (some upwards of six decades) were items which he also chose not to publish. These included unpublished sermons written by himself, together with transcripts of sermons by others whom Wesley found edifying (e.g., Benjamin Calamy, William Tilly, et al.). His own reasons for not publishing them are clear enough (save in the case of Nos. 141, ‘The Image of God’, and 146, ‘The One Thing Needful’); in general, they are clearly unmemorable. What goes unexplained are his motives for preserving them over the course of sixty-five years or so. However, their importance in any serious study of his theological beginnings and subsequent development is crucial. They show, more clearly than anything else, how typically Anglican his early views of Christian faith and the Christian life were, as a young cleric, as an Oxford don, as his father’s curate in a rural parish—or, finally, in the case of Nos. 150 and 151, ‘Hypocrisy in Oxford’, as the sententious evangelist returning to the university he had abandoned, to ‘deliver his soul’ in a parting diatribe. All current study of these sermons (in terms of their dates, sequence, provenance, etc.) must depend heavily upon Professor Richard P. Heitzenrater’s pioneering essay, ‘John Wesley’s Early Sermons,

304:202Ten complete sermons, two fragments, and two versions of a single sermon (one in English, the other in Latin) are extant in John Wesley’s handwriting.

4In these early writings, the brothers Wesley employed a system of abbreviated longhand adapted from various sources, including their father’s manuscripts. They used very few quotation marks or italics; their underlinings usually indicate intended deletions (together with occasional inkings through letters, words, and phrases). In this edition, a full text has been reconstructed by Professor Baker, the unit editor, and Professor Heitzenrater, with quotation marks inserted in the more obvious places, minor errors corrected silently, and the styling modernized as in the edition at large.

5In point of style, these texts are markedly more turgid than we are accustomed to in the later sermons—again with the exceptions noted. What we do not know is how closely Wesley kept to his written text when preaching, or how far he allowed for at least occasional spontaneous comments.