Doing good to bodies and souls

The Text

The second rule’s particulars are not a list of charitable options; they are an ordered anatomy of mercy. Good is to be done first to bodies — fed, clothed, the sick and imprisoned visited — then to souls — instructing, reproving, exhorting “all we have any intercourse with” — then especially within the household of faith, including a startlingly concrete economic clause (“employing them preferably to others, buying one of another, helping each other in business”), then by diligence and frugality, and finally at a named price: “the reproach of Christ… as the filth and offscouring of the world.” The order is the argument. Mercy that stops at bodies is incomplete; mercy that skips bodies for souls is a fraud; mercy that costs the giver nothing is not yet the mercy Wesley means.

Translation Notes

“To their bodies… To their souls.” The two are sequential and inseparable, and the sequence matters: bodies first. Wesley does not begin with the soul and add the body as relief work; he begins with hunger, nakedness, sickness, prison — Matthew 25:35–36 verbatim — and then refuses to stop there. The structure forbids both reductions: the social gospel that feeds and never speaks of God, and the pietism that evangelizes the unfed.

“the household of faith, or groaning so to be.” Galatians 6:10 (“especially unto them who are of the household of faith”). The qualifier or groaning so to be is pure Wesley and easy to miss: the preferential circle includes not only believers but those longing to believe — the same “groaning for redemption” of the preamble (annotation 1) and the “desire” of the one condition (annotation 4). The in-group is defined by direction, not attainment.

“buying one of another, helping each other in business.” This is the most concrete economic sentence in any Christian rule of life: a frank instruction to trade preferentially within the covenant community, “and that so much the more because the world will love its own, and them only.” It is either covenantal mutual aid or sectarian favoritism, and which it is has been argued for two centuries.

“diligence and frugality, that the gospel be not blamed.” Frugality here is a means, not an end — the point is “that the gospel be not blamed,” that Methodists not discredit Christ by idleness or debt. But this clause carries, unintentionally, the seed of Wesley’s deepest fear about his own movement, addressed below.

Historical Context

Every particular was concrete in 1743. “Visiting… them that are sick, or in prison” was the Strangers’ Friend Society and Wesley’s own relentless prison work (the Oxford “Holy Club” had begun in the Castle jail). “Clothing the naked” and “food to the hungry” were literal lending stocks and clothing collections Wesley organized. The household-of-faith economic clause met a real situation: Methodists were often poor, often discriminated against in trade, and mutual employment was survival, not tribalism. The diligence- and-frugality clause met another: a movement of the working poor needed to be visibly honest and industrious “that the gospel be not blamed” by its enemies.

The deepest historical irony is internal. Wesley lived long enough to watch the diligence-and-frugality clause work too well. In Thoughts upon Methodism (1786) he wrote what may be the most clear-eyed thing any founder ever said about his own movement: “I fear, wherever riches have increased, the essence of religion has decreased in the same proportion… for religion must necessarily produce both industry and frugality, and these cannot but produce riches. But as riches increase, so will pride, anger, and the love of the world.” The second rule’s own clause, kept faithfully, manufactured the prosperity Wesley believed was dissolving Methodism. That is not a side note; it is the clause’s own tragedy written by its author.

Lines of Interpretation

The disputed questions: is the household-of-faith clause solidarity or sectarianism, and does the diligence clause sanctify a prosperity that corrodes faith?

Roman Catholic

Tradition: the corporal and spiritual works of mercy

The body/soul structure is the corporal works (feed, clothe, visit the sick and imprisoned) and the spiritual works (instruct, admonish) in their classic pairing, rooted in Matthew 25. The Catholic reading takes the ordering as obvious and obligatory: both, in order, because the human being is both.

Strengths

• Names the genre exactly and keeps body and soul welded as Wesley does
• Holds the works as binding mercy, not optional charity

Weaknesses

• The enumerated-works tradition can make the open “every possible sort” tidy
• The merit shadow again; Wesley keeps these as fruit and means, not ground

Reformed

Tradition: vocation, calling, and the Protestant ethic

The Reformed reading hears “diligence and frugality” as sanctified vocation — work as calling, thrift as stewardship — and recognizes, soberly, the Weberian outcome: the very ethic produces capital, and capital tests the soul.

Strengths

• Takes the diligence clause seriously as theology of work, not mere prudence
• Honest about the unintended economic consequence Wesley himself named

Weaknesses

• Can read the clause as endorsing accumulation when its stated end is “that the gospel be not blamed,” not gain
• The Protestant-ethic frame can eclipse the give all you can that Wesley made the clause’s necessary third term

Anabaptist

Tradition: the mutual-aid community; economic koinōnia

The household-of-faith clause is, on this reading, plain believers’-church economics: the covenant community is also an economy, members preferring members not from tribal narrowness but because the church is a body whose members bear one another’s material life (Acts 2:44–45; 4:32).

Strengths

• Reads the economic clause as koinōnia, not favoritism — its likely original sense for a persecuted poor movement
• Recovers a dimension most modern Methodism has entirely lost

Weaknesses

• Can romanticize an in-group economics that, absent the universal “to all men,” does curdle into sectarianism
• The believers’-church frame underplays Wesley’s insistence the same people do good to all

Liberation / the poor seen by name

Tradition: the preferential, embodied encounter

Wesley’s own gloss on visiting the sick — you must see them with your own eyes — grounds a liberationist reading: mercy is not transfer payment but presence; the poor are not a category but faces, and the giver is changed by the seeing.

Strengths

• Recovers the embodied, face-to-face character the modern delegated charity loses
• Matches Wesley’s text precisely: the visit is the point, not the donation

Weaknesses

• Can moralize the encounter and underplay structural change the universal clause also demands
• The “household of faith” priority sits awkwardly with a thoroughgoing preferential option for the poor as such

Wesleyan Voice

Wesley’s authoritative commentary on this section is On Visiting the Sick, and its first sentence reframes the entire second rule. “It is generally supposed, that the means of grace and the ordinances of God are equivalent terms… But are they the only means of grace?” His answer is no: visiting the sick is itself a means of grace — and then the line that should govern all Methodist service: “if you do not [see them with your own eyes], you lose a means of grace.” The works of mercy in this section are not the church’s charitable output; they are channels through which grace reaches the one doing them. This is why Wesley will not allow delegation to a physician or an almoner to satisfy the rule: “his going would not fulfil your duty… you lose a means of grace; you lose an excellent means of increasing your thankfulness to God.” Mercy that is outsourced is mercy from which the giver has removed themselves — and removed themselves, on Wesley’s theology, from grace.

The body-then-soul order is Wesley’s settled practice, not sentiment. In On Visiting the Sick he instructs the visitor to “begin with inquiring into their outward condition” — food, fuel, clothing, medical care — and then to “administer help of a more excellent kind, by supplying their spiritual wants.” Bodies are not a pretext for souls and souls are not an afterthought to bodies; the order is incarnational, and reversing or truncating it falsifies the rule. Wesley’s needling aside — that “ladies of the first quality, yea, Princesses of the blood” in Paris dress the sores of hospital patients with their own hands, “a pattern for the English, poor or rich” — is the rule’s class edge: this is not benevolence dispensed downward; it is the well-placed abasing themselves to the meanest offices.

The diligence-and-frugality clause is where the Wesleyan voice turns tragic, and intellectual honesty requires letting it. Wesley meant the clause as protection — “that the gospel be not blamed.” But he saw, near the end, that he had written a perpetual-motion machine for the destruction of the thing he loved: religion produces industry and frugality; these produce riches; riches produce pride, anger, and the love of the world; and so “the form of religion remains, but the power is gone.” His own remedy was the missing third term he hammered everywhere else — gain all you can, save all you can, and therefore give all you can. The second rule’s frugality is safe only when chained to the second rule’s giving; unhooked from it, the clause is, by Wesley’s own diagnosis, a slow poison. A Wesleyan who quotes “diligence and frugality” approvingly and omits Wesley’s terror at its fruit has read the clause exactly half as far as its author did.

Hymnody

This section’s hymn is the prayer to be given away. Charles Wesley’s “Jesus, the gift divine I know… freely thou hast given to me, O let me give myself to thee” turns “of the ability which God giveth” into surrender. “Forth in thy name, O Lord, I go… thee may I set at my right hand, whose eyes my inmost substance view” is the diligence clause sanctified — labor as worship, watched by God, not amassed for self. And the great consecration hymn — “O Thou who camest from above the pure celestial fire to impart… ready for all thy perfect will, my acts of faith and love repeat” — makes works of mercy themselves the altar fire, repeated, not the overflow of a feeling. Tellingly, the Wesleyan repertoire has no hymn in praise of thrift or accumulation; the songs about money are all about losing it gladly (“wealth, honour, pleasure… tempt me no longer”), which is the hymnal quietly siding with the late, frightened Wesley against the comfortable reading of his own clause.

Pastoral and Liturgical Use

The first pastoral use is to keep the order unbroken. Preach this section against both of the church’s chronic halvings: the congregation that runs a food pantry and never speaks of Christ has done the first half; the congregation that evangelizes and never asks whether anyone is cold has done a fraud. Wesley’s instruction to the sick-visitor — outward condition first, then the soul, and both in person — is the template. The pastoral discipline is to refuse the parishioner’s preferred half and assign the other.

The second use is the recovery of mercy as a means of grace, which changes who service is for. A church taught that visiting the sick is a channel of grace to the visitor stops framing service as the strong helping the weak and starts framing it as the way the congregation itself is fed. This is the cure for two opposite pathologies at once: the burnout of those who give from depletion, and the condescension of those who give from surplus. Both vanish when the visit is understood as the place grace is received, not only spent.

The third use is the hardest and most Wesleyan: preach the frugality clause with its author’s fear attached. To a comfortable Methodist congregation, “diligence and frugality” is the most flattering line in the document — it sounds like God endorsing the suburban virtues. The pastoral honesty this entry demands is to read the clause and then read Thoughts upon Methodism in the same breath: this very diligence made us rich, and our riches are, by our founder’s own testimony, dissolving us — unless the give all you can that he chained to it is preached at least as loudly. A church that can quote the frugality and not the warning has become the case study.

Further Reading

• Matthew 25:31–46 — the corporal works of mercy, verbatim behind this section
• Galatians 6:10 — “especially unto them who are of the household of faith”
• Acts 2:44–45; 4:32–35 — the economic koinōnia behind the mutual-aid clause
• Hebrews 13:13; 1 Corinthians 4:13 — “the reproach of Christ… the offscouring of the world”
• John Wesley, On Visiting the Sick — works of mercy as a means of grace; bodies-then-souls; see with your own eyes
• John Wesley, The Use of Money and The Danger of Riches — the diligence/frugality clause and its necessary third term, give all you can
• John Wesley, Thoughts upon Methodism (1786) — “wherever riches have increased, the essence of religion has decreased”
• The rule these particulars itemize: [[general-rules/second-rule-do-good]]
• The works of piety that complete the works of mercy: [[general-rules/third-rule-the-ordinances-of-god]]