Notes:
Sermon 144: The Love of God
1Here is the young Wesley under the influence of those ‘mystic writers’ whom he would come later to deplore. It is, in effect, an exaltation of the First Commandment—the entire, unqualified, disinterested love of God—with no more than a muted acknowledgement of the Second Commandment, about the love of neighbour (linked though they are in all three Synoptic Gospels).
Matt. 19:17-19; Mark 12:30-33; Luke 10:27.
See Summa Theologica, Pt. II-II, Q. 25, Art. 1, and Q. 26, Art. 2.
2This sermon, however, throws a useful light on Wesley’s later comments, in Savannah, on the deathbed statements of a colonial surgeon, Henry Lascelles:
“The next day [May 31, 1736] I made Mr. Lascelles’s will; who, notwithstanding his great weakness, was quite revived when any mention was made of death or eternity.” “Tuesday, June 1. After praying with [Mr. Lascelles], I was surprised to find one of the most controverted questions in divinity, disinterested love, decided at once by a poor old man without education or learning, or any instructor but the Spirit of God…. ‘Let God put me where he will or do with me what he will, so I may but set forth his honour and glory…. Let him work his will, in my life or in my death.JWJ, May 31-June 7, 1736.
3It would become the hallmark of Wesley’s mature theology that the two commandments would be coupled, always in the right order; indeed, he would come to define holiness as ‘the love of God and neighbour’. Would this marked shift in perspective explain why so eloquent a sermon would go unpublished? Or was it merely the circumstance that, once Charles had borrowed the original, John did not see it again?
404:330At any rate, it survives only in Charles’s MS volume of his brother’s sermons, where it stands as the first entry.
Colman Collection, MA; pp. 1-33.
5John’s diary indicates that he composed it, in the first place over the course of a fortnight, September 2-15, 1733. He then preached it at All Saints sometime shortly thereafter. In the list of his early sermons, it is numbered ‘61’.
See Heitzenrater, ‘John Wesley’s Early Sermons’, p. 124.
Mark 12:30
Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength.
11. When God had formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into him the breath of life,
Gen. 2:7.
Matt. 22:20.
See Luke 10:42.
22. Thou shalt love the Lord thy God, was the whole of that law which God gave to man in his original state. But when he had wilfully degraded himself from that state of happiness and perfection, by transgressing the single prohibition which was appointed for the test of his love, a more particular law became needful for him, for a remedy of those many inventions he had found out, whereby, being alienated from the love of God, he was enslaved to the love of his creatures, and consequently to error and vice, to shame and misery. A more particular law was accordingly given him, by the rules whereof he was fully apprised of every avenue at which sin and pain might break in upon his soul. By this too he was directed to those several means which God had appointed for the renewal of his nature. And to complete its use, till his nature was renewed after the image of him that created him, it pointed out all those thoughts, and words, and works, by so many express injunctions, which the love of God, when that was the spring of his soul, produced without any injunction.
33. Yet we may easily observe that even in this state of man, love 04:332is still the fulfilling of the law;
See Rom. 13:10.
See Matt. 4:4.
See Heb. 1:1-2.
See 1 Tim. 1:5.
I shall endeavour, first, to lay down a plain sense of this commandment;
Secondly, to prove this sense to be the true one; and,
Thirdly, to answer the grand objection against it.
1I. First, I am to lay down a plain sense of this commandment, ‘Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength.’
11. The love of God may be taken in various senses: as it is, first, for obedience to him. So St. John: ‘This is the love of God, that we keep his commandments.’
1 John 5:3.
Johnson, Dictionary, will later define this as ‘a rhetorical figure by which one word is put for another…“he died by steel”, that is, by a sword.’ Cf. An Address to the Clergy, II.2(5); and Directions Concerning Pronunciation and Gesture, §§13-16 (on figures of speech).
Cf. Prov. 3:7.
204:3332. By the same figure, the love of God has been sometimes taken for a desire of enjoying him. For this too immediately flows from love, and increases in the same proportion with it. Whence some eminent men have unwarily confounded the stream with the fountain, and have improperly termed the desire of enjoying God, love of desire. As if love and desire were all one, whereas desire is as essentially distinct from the love that produces it as is any fruit from the tree upon which it grows.
33. Love itself is, by the common consent of mankind, and agreeably to universal experience, divided into love of complacency, or delight, and love of gratitude, or benevolence.
A distinction running back to Thomas Aquinas; see Summa Theologica, Pt. I-II, Q. 31, and Pt. II-II, Q. 106. See also R. J. Deferrari, ed., A Latin-English Dictionary of St. Thomas Aquinas (1960), ‘complacentia’ and ‘gratitudo’.
1 John 4:19.
Typical usages in the holy living tradition; see below, II.10.
44. As to the measure of love prescribed in these words, all commentators agree that they mean at least thus much: we must not love anything more than God, we may not love the creature above the Creator.
See Rom. 1:25; cf. Poole, Annotations, on Matt. 22:37-38; and Henry, Exposition, on Matt. 22:37 and Mark 12:30.
55. But we must go higher than this, or we shall never rise up to the plain
sense of this commandment. ‘Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart,
and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength’ imports
in ordinary construction (to use the words of a great master of reason as well
as love), ‘that we love God, not only with the most and best, but with the whole
of our affection; that we love him not only with every capacity, passion, and
faculty, with the understanding, will, and affections, but with every degree of
every power, with all the latitude of our will, with the whole possibility of
our souls; that we devote to him, not only the highest degree of our love, but
every degree of it; in one word, that God be not only the principal, but the
only object of our love.’
Norris, Sermons, vol. 3,
S[ermon] 1, p. 7[, 11]. [This was John Norris of Bemerton
(1657-1711), a Christian Platonist whose influence on Wesley was
pervasive. What Wesley has done here is to abridge Norris’s Practical Discourses upon Several Divine Subjects
(1693), III.7, 11, most of what is quoted or paraphrased being
from p. 11: ‘That we ought to love God not only with the best and
most, but with the whole of our affection; that we love him
entirely, not only with an integrity of parts, but with an integrity
of degrees, that we love him not only with every capacity, passion,
and faculty, with the understanding, suppose [sic], will, and affections [here expressed by “mind”,
“soul”, and “heart”], but in every degree of every power, with all
the latitude of our will and with the whole possibility of our
souls; that we bestow on him not only the highest degree of our
love, but every degree of it, the whole. In one word, that God be
not only the principal but the only object of our
love.’]
66. Not that God is so to be the only object of our love as to exclude his creatures from a subordinate share of it. ‘The Lord rejoiceth in his works;’
Cf. Ps. 104:31.
Cf. Gen. 1:31.
See Rom. 5:5.
77. And even that love of the creatures which does not flow from the love of God, if it lead thereto, is accepted. For this end hath he given us them to enjoy, that by these steps we may ascend to 04:335higher enjoyments. Therefore whatever love tends to the love of God is no more forbidden than that which flows from it.
88. Yet farther, there are many of the works of his hands which God expressly commands us to love; and that not only with a love of gratitude or benevolence, but of complacence, too. For such surely is natural affection; such is that tenderest of all passions toward our fellow-creatures, which our blessed Redeemer does not disdain to compare to the love between himself and his church.
See Eph. 5:32; see also BCP, Matrimony.
An exaggerated statement of the theory of wholly disinterested love, espoused by the quietists, of ‘dying to the world’ and all its goods. Did Wesley have something like this in mind in his critique of ‘the mystic writers’ in that famous ‘shipboard memorandum’ of Jan. 24, 1738, quoted in Moore, I.342, and reprinted by Curnock in JWJ, I.420?
99. This therefore considered, the sense of that command is easily resolved into this: ‘Thou shalt so love the Lord thy God with all thy powers, and with the whole force of all, as ever to remember that thou art bound, yea, by this very law, (1) to obey him thou lovest, and therefore to love those things which he commands thee to love, so far as he commands it; (2) to cherish that love which is the necessary effect of thus loving the Lord thy God, viz., the love of those men who are renewed after his image in righteousness and true holiness; and, (3) to use all the means which experience and reason recommend as conducive to this great end—in particular, to love all his creatures so far as it tends to the love of thy Creator.’ Indeed this third rule includes both the preceding, seeing all obedience to God tends to the love of him; and seeing every other fruit of divine love increases the love from which it sprung. The full sense of the first and great commandment is therefore contained in this single sentence—‘Thou shalt love God alone for his own sake, and all things else only so far as they tend to him.’
A variation on one of the oldest and most constant themes in the Christian tradition from Origen to Bonaventura to the Cambridge Platonists. Cf. Augustine, Confessions, X.vi.8-vii.11; but see also Henry Hammond, A Practical Catechism (1700), I.iii.57-58.
II. That this is the mark toward which we are all to press if we would attain the prize of our high calling;
See Phil. 3:14.
11. From every part of the Holy Scriptures it appears that love is the proper worship of a reasonable nature.
See Rom. 12:1: ἡ λογικὴ λατρεία.
Mark 12:29-30.
Cf. Ps. 50:13-14 (BCP).
Mic. 6:7.
See 1 Cor. 13:3.
22. ‘Hear, O Israel, God is thy Lord!’
Cf. Deut. 6:4, quoted above in Mark 12:29.
Matt. 4:10.
Rom. 12:1.
304:3373. What wonder is it, then, that the essential wisdom of the Father knew no mean between a single and an evil eye!
See Matt. 6:22-23.
Jas. 4:8.
1 John 5:20-21.
1 John 2:15.
44. If any farther proof from the Holy Scriptures be required of this first principle of all religion, let us hear St. Paul’s words: ‘Whether ye eat or drink, or whatever ye do, do all to the glory of God.’
Cf. 1 Cor. 10:31.
See Ps. 139:4.
55. ’Tis true, if the literal sense of these Scriptures were absurd, and apparently contrary to reason, then we should be obliged not to interpret them according to the letter, but to look out for a looser meaning.
A consistent hermeneutical rule of Wesley’s; see No. 21, ‘Sermon on the Mount, I’, §6 and n.
66. And how reasonable it is so to love the Lord our God with all our heart and with all our strength as to love nothing else but for 04:338his sake and in subordination to the love of him, may appear, first, from the general concession of all men ‘that we ought to love nothing above God’. This is granted to be of the last concern. All men own that on this eternity depends. Reason, therefore, must direct to make all sure here; to run no hazard of so mighty a stake; whatever we do, to secure from all possible danger our passport into a happy eternity. But this cannot be done while we retain any love not subordinate to the love of God. For while we love any object besides God, we are never secure that we shall not love it above him. So long as the very disease of our nature is the loving the creature above the Creator,
Note this characterization of the essence of sin, and of sin as disease; cf. Nos. 44, Original Sin; 13, On Sin in Believers, III.8; and 17, ‘The Circumcision of the Heart’, I.5 and n.
Cf. Job 38:11.
77. The same truth may be as evidently inferred from that other concession made by all men, ‘that we may not entertain any love which is contrary to, or obstructive of, the love of God’. For all love which does not either directly or remotely tend to the love of God obstructs it.
Cf. III.3, below; note the echoes here of the vexed question about adiaphora (‘things indifferent’); see Leonard Trinterud, ed., Elizabethan Puritanism, pp. 5, 101-6, 246; see also Clyde Manschreck, ed., Melanchthon on Christian Doctrine, pp. 319-22; and John Beardslee, ed., Reformed Dogmatics (Gisbert Voetius on ‘precision’), pp. 319-34. Wesley’s point here is that there are no moral choices that can be regarded as ‘indifferent’. This thesis had already drawn fire from moderate Anglicans, who charged the Methodists with the view that ‘religion was designed to contradict nature.’ Thus, said a letter published in Fog’s Weekly Journal, Dec. 9, 1732 (pp. 1-2), the Methodists hold ‘that no action whatever is indifferent; [this contention] is the chief hinge on which their whole scheme of religion turns.’
804:3398. But this is not the heaviest charge against that love of the creatures which is not conducive to the love of God. No; it is not only obstructive, but subversive of it—they are inconsistent and incompatible. Indeed many loves may consist in the same heart, so they be all subordinate to one. But two ultimate loves are as flat a contradiction as two firsts, or two lasts. So that when the son of Sirach says, ‘Woe be to the fearful hearts, and faint hands, and the sinner that goeth two ways,’
Ecclus. 2:12.
99. Nor can it be said that there may be an unsubordinate love which yet is not an ultimate love. For as every end which is subordinate to no other is itself an ultimate end, so every love which is subordinate to no other is itself an ultimate love, ultimate and subordinate being contradictory terms, between which there is no mean.
1010. But who is this, touching whom we thus coldly debate whether he should wholly possess or only share our affection? Is it not the Lord—our God—the All-sufficient! The All-perfect! In whom are hid all the treasures of loveliness! Is it not he of whose faithfulness, of whose wisdom, of whose goodness, there is no number? And are we afraid of loving him too much? With too fervent, too entire an affection? Hath the love of God toward us been restrained? Hath he set any bounds to this ocean? Who is he that hath raised us from the dust? Who breathed into us these living souls? Who upholdeth us by the word of his power? Who protects us by his gracious providence? Who redeemed us by the blood of his Son? Who sanctifies us by the grace of his Spirit? O God, are the creatures of thy hand, the purchase of thy Son’s blood, disputing whether they may not love thee too much? 04:340Whether thou art worthy of all their affection? Does not then the essential loveliness of his nature deserve, not all, but infinitely more than all our love? Is not our whole affection immeasurably less than the least of his mercies? Or if the whole mite of our love would overpay these, hath he no more? Is his hand shortened? Is he not able, is he not willing, hath he not sworn, to render us a thousandfold for every particle of love we give him? Can we withhold from him one atom of the whole mass without tearing one star from our own crown?
See No. 57, ‘On the Fall of Man’, II.8 and n.
1III. 1. The grand objection that has been frequently made against this sense of the great commandment (to which most others are easily reducible), which I proposed to consider in the third place, is this, ‘that did it oblige us so to love God with all our heart as to love nothing else but for his sake, and in order to the love of him, such an obligation would be destructive of that happiness which our blessed religion was designed to establish. It would reduce us to a gloomy and melancholy state, and make the true Christian of a sad countenance.
See Matt. 6:16; in the letter to Fog’s Weekly Journal, the Methodists are labelled ‘sons of sorrow’.
A summary of the general deist criticism of orthodox Christianity as antipathetic to true happiness, as in Toland, Woolston, Tindal, Chesterfield, et al. Tindal’s point was typical: ‘“true happiness” consists in the rational regulation of “natural appetites”, bodily health, and “the pleasures of the senses”’ (Christianity as Old as the Creation [1730], p. 14; cf. Leslie Stephen, History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century [1902], I.139).
22. I shall reply first to the particular branches of this objection, and then in general to the whole. And with regard to the first branch of it, be it observed that the happiness whereof it supposes the entire love of God to be destructive is a happiness that is to result from an enjoyment of the creatures, not referred to the 04:341Creator: that is, it is such a happiness as never did, nor ever will exist. ‘That happiness is not, cannot be found in any creature’ (to use the beautiful words of the above-cited author),
I.e., John Norris.
A paraphrase from Norris, Treatise on Christian Prudence, 152-53.
3[3.] But does it not make men gloomy and melancholy, by depriving them of the innocent pleasures of life? They who speak thus seem not to be aware how easy it is to produce a cloud of witnesses, and those heathen as well as Christian, who, though they allow there are a thousand sorts of pleasure, which, considered with regard to the whole species, are neither good nor bad, yet utterly deny that any individual pleasure is barely innocent. But we need them not, since plain reason is enough to show (how strange soever it may sound to some ears) that this expression can never be used with propriety. It must import either too much or too little. For every pleasure, weighed with the circumstances that attend it, is either more or less than innocent. If it tends to the love of God, it is more; if it does not, it is less than innocent. Pleasures of all sorts, used in that proportion wherein they enliven and strengthen our minds, and make us more fit for discharging the duties of our respective stations, deserve a better title than that of innocent: they are virtuous and rewardable. And pleasures of any sort, used in any other proportion, deserve not so good a title, as implying a sinful and punishable waste of time, and of the other talents which God hath lent us. If these be the innocent pleasures in the objection, we own the entire love of God does destroy them. But it deprives us of none that in any way conduce to that even cheerfulness which is both the parent and daughter of divine love, and life of virtue, and the beauty of holiness.
404:342[4.] The clearness and strength of reason with which one of our most celebrated divines confirms this important truth will excuse the repetition of his words:
Some of the heathen philosophers were of opinion that no actions (whether pleasing or not) are indifferent, but that all are positively either good or evil. Wherein they meant, not that no actions are indifferent in their own nature, but that no actions are indifferent in fact. In fact, I say, for in this state actions, besides their formal essence, include the end and intention of the doer. And in this sense they affirmed that a good man made all his indifferent actions good; and on the contrary an ill man made all his indifferent actions evil. For they laid down this for a rule, that every man ought to fix a certain general purpose and scope to all his actions, viz., to act agreeably to right reason, and that while a man held his eye upon this, so long all his actions, even those that were in themselves indifferent, were made wise and good. But on the contrary, while this was not fixed, all a man’s actions, however indifferent in their own nature, became loose, irrational, and evil. And so St. Paul tells us that every Christian ought to have a general purpose to which all his actions should be directed. The charge runs: ‘Whether ye eat, or drink, or whatever ye do, do all to the glory of God.’ Now ’tis certain that if we have an eye to the glory of God in all that we do, this is an aim that will sanctify all our actions, though in themselves indifferent. But on the contrary, so long as we have not an eye to this general end, all the mass of our indifferent actions become an irrational and profuse wasting of that precious time which God has given us for better uses, i.e., to devote and give it back again to himself. We should therefore be often putting the question to our soul—
“Dic anima, quo tendis? et in quod dirigis arcum?Cf. Persius, Satires, iii.60.
A then familiar metaphor in the sport of archery, where it signifies shooting at random marks; cf. OED.
Dr. Young’s Sermons [on Several Occasions], Vol. 2, p. 184. [This was Edward Young (‘the Elder’, c. 1643-1705), Dean of Salisbury. His Sermons were published in two volumes (1702-3). Wesley extracted eight of them for the Christian Lib. (1755), Vol. XLVI.]
5[5.] As to the last part of this objection, that such a love of God would reduce our enjoyments to so narrow a compass that they would not balance our pains, nor suffice for our support under the troubles we are daily exposed to, I answer, it was never designed they should: God hath provided for other supports for us. And, in fact, who is he whom these did ever support under 04:343sharp pain, or heavy affliction? For whom did these comforts ever suffice when God wrote bitter things against him? When the waters came in even unto his soul, and the floods of trouble ran over him? Not one, ever since the world began—‘miserable comforters are they all,’
Job 16:2.
66. I come now to the direct and adequate answer to all the parts of this celebrated objection. The entire love of God, though it does exclude all such enjoyment of his creatures as neither directly nor remotely conduces to our enjoying him; though it does particularly prevent our leaning on those broken reeds when affliction presses down our soul; and though it does set us above what are sometimes called innocent pleasures, that is, unnecessary, untending,
A compression of ‘unattending’; i.e., ‘inattentive’ or ‘careless’. The form ‘untending’ is not in OED or in Johnson’s Dictionary.
See Eccles. 1:14, etc.
Cf. 1 Tim. 6:17.
See 2 Cor. 3:18.
Susannah (Annesley) Wesley to JW, Jan. 1, 1734, 25:364 in this edn.
77. Here is the sufficient, and the only sufficient support under all the evils of life. Evils? Nothing is an evil to him who loves God! All things are to him very good! He has but one desire—to delight in God; and God hath given him the desire of his heart. And while his spirit cleaves steadfastly to him, he is safe from the power of evil. Indeed, if his heart were not whole with God, as many things as he loved besides him, so many ways would he lie open to disappointment, and fear, and grief, and misery. But so long as he has one object of his love, and regards all things else only as they minister unto it, his heart standeth fast. For he is assured that ‘neither life nor death, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate him from the love of God.’
Cf. Rom. 8:38-39.
88. I shall conclude in the words of that happy and excellent man above cited, who so well practised what he taught:
“Ye have heard what is the full and true extent of divine love, and the full and true import of the great commandment—which now appears to be a great commandment indeed! Both worthy of him who gave it, and worthy of that solemn mark of attention wherewith it was more than once delivered, ‘Hear, O Israel!’ And let all the whole creation hear, and with silence attend to this great law, which, lest any should fancy himself unconcerned in it, is expressly directed to every creature: ‘Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength.’ ‘My son, give me thy heart,’Prov. 23:26.
Cf. Norris, Practical Discourses, III.69-70.
BCP, Communion, Sanctus.
Norris, Practical Discourses, III.82-83.
See Ken, Exposition of the Church Catechism, 82.
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Entry Title: Sermon 144: The Love of God