I still find, and find it to my comfort, that I am not in the number of the rich. If I am not, I am not in the number of them that are in danger of falling into temptation and a snare, and into many foolish and hurtful lusts, which drown men in destruction and perdition.
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"Cleanliness is indeed next to godliness."
"I am not afraid of dying. I have no fear of death."
"The first thing that I would advise you to do, is, to get a clear and distinct notion of the state of the world."
"It is not the being of sin, but the love of sin, that condemns us."
"The more I see of the working of the present government, the more I am convinced that they are ripe for destruction."
English Anglican cleric and founder of Methodism, whose open-air preaching and class-meeting structure created the largest 18th-century evangelical revival. Closely associated with Charles Wesley (his hymn-writing brother) and George Whitefield (early co-revivalist, later doctrinal opponent). For an intellectual contrast, see George Whitefield, Calvinist evangelical revivalist — Whitefield's predestinarian Calvinism vs Wesley's free-grace Arminian theology split the early Methodist movement permanently in the 1739-41 break. The founding evangelical Calvinist-Arminian schism — the two parallel evangelical traditions American Christianity descends from.
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Wesley finds comfort in not being wealthy, viewing poverty as spiritual protection rather than hardship. The rich face unique temptations that ensnare them in foolish, harmful desires leading to ruin. By staying poor, he avoids that particular category of spiritual danger entirely — reframing financial lack not as deprivation but as a shield against the corrupting pull of money and the destructive choices wealth enables.
Wesley practiced radical frugality throughout his life, earning considerable sums from book sales yet giving away nearly everything — he reportedly died with little more than a few coins. He preached dozens of sermons on money's spiritual dangers and coined 'earn, save, give all you can.' His Methodist movement was rooted in the working poor, and he saw his own modest means as essential to personal credibility and spiritual integrity.
Eighteenth-century England saw a new merchant class accumulating unprecedented wealth through trade and early industrialization, while the working poor suffered brutal conditions in mines and mills. Prosperity was increasingly equated with virtue and divine favor — a proto-prosperity gospel among the establishment. Wesley ministered primarily to the laboring poor, and his claim that wealth endangered the soul directly challenged the class-aligned Church of England and the era's emerging capitalist values.
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