​PREFACE

In his Journal in 1757, John Wesley made the comment, ‘I do indeed live by preaching.’ He had long before recognized, ‘My tongue is a devoted thing.’ Preaching was a primary means by which the Good News was spread in the Methodist Revival. But Wesley also recognized that written sermons, in published form, provided an excellent medium for nurture and reflection among his people. He began to publish sermons (many of them never preached as such) in 1746 with an eye toward helping the reader ‘see in the clearest manner what those doctrines are which I embrace and teach as the essentials of true religion.’

Wesley stated in his Preface to the collection (Sermons on Several Occasions) that the three volumes of sermons, published in 1746, 1748, and 1750, contained ‘the substance of what I have been preaching for between eight and nine years last past’. Most of the works were newly written or re-written, except for the first four sermons in volume one, which had been preached before the university at Oxford in 1738 or later (one of which was actually Charles’s). His earlier sermons, some of them already published separately but most of them unpublished, were omitted from that first collected edition, since his own perception at the time was that he had not been an ‘altogether’ Christian before 1737–38.

In 1760, Wesley published yet another volume of Sermons on Several Occasions (though not numbered ‘4’) to bring the total number of sermons in the four volumes to forty-three. A decade later, when he decided to publish his collected Works, he began the series with four volumes of sermons that included ten additional sermons that he had written and/or preached since 1760.

In the 1770s and 1780s, Wesley wrote more new sermons than he had previously published. Many of these he printed (in two instalments each) in his Arminian Magazine, begun in 1778. These were then published in volumes 5–8 of yet another collected edition of Sermons of Several Occasions (1787–88), bringing the total in that collection to about a hundred sermons. After Wesley’s death, George Story published a ninth volume to include the Magazine sermons after 1788. The whole body of Wesley’s sermons is composed of 151 published works and unpublished manuscripts.

This volume presents a selection of fifty sermons from the Bicentennial Edition of The Works of John Wesley (1980–84). Albert C. Outler, editor of the Sermons unit, had for some time considered also producing a supplemental one-volume collection of Wesley’s ‘best’ sermons. Professor Outler felt that ​the recent tendency to focus only on forty-four ‘standard’ sermons (pre-1763) had overlooked Wesley’s own comment that some additional later sermons represented his ‘maturest’ thoughts. For Wesley, Outler says, ‘the project remained open-ended,’ as seen in his continuing to publish new sermons written during the last twenty-five years of his life.

A week before his death, Professor Outler suggested a list of sermons for such a volume, choosing a broad range of topics that spread across Wesley’s lifetime. Many of these Outler saw as ‘landmark’ sermons, though by accident of timing (and decisions of the British Methodist Conference in the twentieth century) they had not generally been considered ‘standard’ sermons. Outler’s list was subsequently enhanced by the addition of a few sermons suggested by persons who teach doctrinal and historical studies in the church and the academy.

For years, Outler struggled with the question of how to order the sermons in the larger project, torn between three approaches: the basic ordering of the last Wesley collection (somewhat arbitrary, though partly chronological, partly theological); a new ordering by theological outline; or a new ordering by chronological sequence. The latter was his first impulse, in order to exhibit Wesley’s thought ‘in its successive stages of development.’ Such an ordering, he felt, would highlight the question of constancy and change in Wesley’s theology. On the one hand, it would demonstrate the continuity of some basic ideas from his Oxford period onward; on the other hand, it would ‘shatter most of the conventional views’ of the constancy of his theological course after 1738. In the end, Outler decided to order the 151 sermons in the Works project in a manner following Wesley’s own publications. For this one-volume anthology, however, he suggested a chronological sequence, following his initial impulse.

The sermons selected for this volume, therefore, represent the heart of Wesley’s theology, expressed in a variety of ways throughout his lifetime. The Board of Directors of the Wesley Works Editorial Project had long considered the possibility of producing selections from the various units of the larger collection. In paperback and focused on the Wesley text, such individual volumes would provide a less expensive alternative for home or classroom study of major Wesley documents. For more detailed research, the scholarly apparatus and the more comprehensive collection of texts is still invaluable and available in the larger edition. This anthology was approved by the Board in 1990 as a work supplementary to the Bicentennial Edition being produced by the Wesley Works Editorial Project.

The text of the sermons here presented was initially produced by the textual editor of the Works project, Professor Frank Baker, and is virtually the same as in the larger edition. For the most part based on the first editions, these texts represent the collation of all known editions published in Wesley’s ​lifetime. The spelling, capitalization, and punctuation have been modernized in most instances, but no attempt has been made to change the characteristic syntax of his eighteenth-century style.

The introductions to each sermon in this volume are for the most part distilled from those of Professor Outler in the larger work. A few revisions have been made in the light of subsequent research. In the introductions, titles of sermons that were first published separately are given in italics; titles of other sermons are given in quotation marks.

The modern editorial footnotes to the sermons themselves have been removed, but Wesley’s annotations have been retained. Most of the Wesleyan notes are simple citations of selected biblical quotations and have been returned to their original parenthetical position in the body of the text. A few citations have been silently corrected or extended to minimize the use of editorial brackets. The meaning of the Greek, Hebrew, and Latin words or phrases that Wesley occasionally used is normally clear in context. Translations of the Latin quotations that might otherwise be obscure have been provided.

It is hoped that the more widespread availability and study of these materials will enhance the broader appreciation of Wesley’s thought in our own day and contribute to a better understanding of the Wesleyan heritage.

Richard P. Heitzenrater
Southern Methodist University
Dallas, Texas