The catalog of harms

The Text

After the first rule states the principle — cease from evil, especially the normalized kind — the document does something a creed never does: it gets specific, and embarrassingly so. It names God’s name taken in vain, Sabbath-breaking by work or trade, drunkenness and the liquor traffic, fighting and lawsuits and tit-for-tat, smuggling, usury, evil-speaking against ministers and magistrates, the golden rule’s converse, gold and costly apparel, worldly diversions and books, “softness and needless self-indulgence,” laying up treasure on earth, and borrowing one cannot repay. To the modern reader it looks like a grab-bag of eighteenth-century Methodist scruples — and that first impression is the whole interpretive problem of the entry. The question is whether this list is dated moralism or a single, coherent diagnosis specified at the exact points a respectable person could be sinning without anyone, including himself, noticing.

Translation Notes

“buying or selling spirituous liquors, or drinking them, unless in cases of extreme necessity.” The item with the most tangled history. Wesley’s 1743 form is strict and threefold: not buying, not selling, not drinking — distilled spirits, “that liquid fire,” unless in extreme necessity (he means medicinal). American temperance revision in the nineteenth century pushed this clause back and forth; the modern Book of Discipline settles on Wesley’s fuller, stricter wording. Note what Wesley targets: not wine or beer as such (he was no teetotaler in the later sense) but distilled spirits and the trade in them — a public-health and a commerce judgment, not a blanket abstinence.

“speaking evil of magistrates or of ministers.” Wesley wrote “ministers or those in authority.” This is the catalog’s most politically loaded item — the High-Tory, established-church Wesley forbidding sedition and clergy-bashing in the same breath. The American recension’s “magistrates or of ministers” softens the monarchical edge but keeps the substance: the tongue turned against ordained and civil authority is named a harm, not a liberty.

“the giving or taking things on usury.” Not interest as such in the modern sense; Wesley glosses it elsewhere as interest “even the laws of our country forbid” — predatory, exploitative lending, “whereby all pawn-broking is excluded.” The American text adds the clarifying “i.e., unlawful interest.” The target is the creditor who devours the poor, not ordinary commerce.

“softness, and needless self-indulgence.” Softness is an older word for the refusal of hardship, the cushioning of the self. It is the catalog’s hinge: it moves the list, without changing register, from the gross and external (drink, brawling) to the inward and respectable (comfort, finery, hoarding). That continuity is the key to reading the whole thing.

Historical Context

Each item had a concrete eighteenth-century life. Gin had devastated the English poor (Hogarth’s Gin Lane is 1751); smuggling (“uncustomed goods”) was a normalized national economy on the south coast; “going to law” was ruinous and endemic; the dress and diversion items addressed a society in which a Methodist artisan could bankrupt a household imitating gentry fashion. The list is not abstract ethics; it is a pastoral triage of where Wesley actually watched his people destroy themselves and others, and where the class examination could see it.

Crucially, almost every item is a sin that was legal, profitable, and respectable. None of these required a Methodist to do anything the law punished (smuggling and ruinous usury aside, and even those were widely winked at). This is the “especially that which is most generally practiced” clause of the first rule made concrete: the catalog is a deliberately counter-customary list, a register of the ways a person of good standing in 1743 England could be prosperous, admired, and damned.

Lines of Interpretation

The disputed question is unity: is this a coherent theology of sin or a culturally bound miscellany the church should now quietly retire?

Reformed

Tradition: the Decalogue expounded; the law’s third use

The Reformed reading recognizes a catechetical structure: the items track the second table of the Decalogue (the name of God, the Sabbath, then sins against life, property, truth, and contentment), expounded after the Heidelberg/Westminster manner from gross act to inward disposition. The catalog is a Methodist exposition of the law.

Strengths

• Supplies the unity the list seems to lack: it is the moral law, ordered, not a miscellany
• Explains the move from outward to inward as standard catechetical method, not Methodist eccentricity

Weaknesses

• Forces a tidier Decalogue scheme than the actual order supports
• Can turn a pastoral triage into a code, losing the prophetic, occasional character Wesley gave it

Roman Catholic

Tradition: disordered appetite; the capital sins

The Catholic moral tradition reads the catalog as a map of concupiscence — the disordered loves under the capital vices: avarice (usury, treasure, defrauding), gluttony (drink, softness), pride and vanity (apparel, evil speech), wrath (fighting, railing). The list is one disease (disordered love) shown in its respectable symptoms.

Strengths

• Names the deep unity: not many scruples but one disordered love, specified
• Accounts for the seamless move from drink to finery to hoarding — all avarice/gluttony/pride in different dress

Weaknesses

• Wesley’s frame is the love-of-neighbor command, not formally the seven capital sins; the schema is illuminating but imported
• Can spiritualize away the social-economic bite (smuggling, usury) the list keeps concrete

Anglican

Tradition: casuistry; Wesley’s own sermons On Dress, The Use of Money, The Danger of Riches

The most native reading: the catalog is the bullet-point of Wesley’s own ethical preaching for people who would never read the sermons. The Use of Money is the theory; “usury… treasure… borrowing… gold and costly apparel” is its rule-of-thumb. On Dress and The Danger of Riches stand behind the finery and hoarding items.

Strengths

• Demonstrably correct: the catalog is Wesley’s sermons compressed, not free-floating moralism
• Restores the items’ seriousness by giving each its full argument

Weaknesses

• Ties the list so tightly to Wesley’s occasional preaching that its perennial force can seem merely his opinion
• The casuistic mode invites exactly the loophole-hunting Wesley’s “of every kind” was meant to forbid

Modern / Ecumenical

Tradition: the dated-versus-perennial debate

The honest modern reading concedes that the forms are dated (calashes and smuggling are not live temptations) while arguing the structure is not: every item is a normalized, profitable harm to God, neighbor, or self, and a contemporary catalog could be written on the identical principle.

Strengths

• Intellectually honest about the cultural specificity without discarding the rule
• Recovers the generative principle (“most generally practiced”) as still binding even where the instances changed

Weaknesses

• “Translate it for today” can become a license to delete whatever the current culture also normalizes — the precise failure the slavery clause exposes
• Risks treating the list as infinitely revisable when its point was to resist the revising pressure of custom

Wesleyan Voice

Wesley’s own sermons supply the unity the list appears to lack, and it is not the Decalogue or the capital vices but the second great commandment run through the ledger. In The Use of Money he lays down the rule behind half the catalog at once: “we are… to gain all we can without hurting our neighbour… we cannot, if we love everyone as ourselves, hurt anyone in his substance” (there is usury, defrauding, ruinous bills), nor “in his body” (there is “that liquid fire, commonly called drams or spirituous liquors,” and the trades that “impair health”), nor by “robbing or defrauding the king of his lawful customs” (there is smuggling). The catalog is not a list of taboos. It is the love of neighbor, specified negatively at every point where eighteenth-century respectability let a person profit by breaking it.

The internal items obey the same logic turned Godward and inward. “Gold and costly apparel,” “softness and needless self-indulgence,” “laying up treasures upon earth” are The Danger of Riches and On Dress in shorthand: the disordered love of comfort and status that Wesley thought destroyed more Methodists than gin ever did. (His late despair — that Methodists grew diligent and frugal, therefore rich, therefore proud and soft, therefore no longer Methodists — is this section of the catalog read as prophecy fulfilled.) “Speaking evil of ministers or those in authority,” “the using many words in buying or selling,” the golden rule’s converse — these are the tongue and the deal brought under the same command. The unifying Wesleyan claim is exact: there is no such thing here as a harm that is private. Every item injures God, neighbor, or the self God means to save, and the desire of salvation, if real, ceases all of them — “of every kind.”

And the catalog’s deepest Wesleyan feature is the one the modern “it’s dated” reading must reckon with honestly. The list’s organizing principle is the first rule’s “especially that which is most generally practiced.” Wesley deliberately catalogued the respectable sins — the legal, profitable, customary ones. That principle does not date even where the instances do; it is permanently embarrassing, because it always points at whatever the present church has, in turn, normalized. The intellectually honest Wesleyan use of this list is not to smile at the calashes. It is to ask what is on our uncatalogued list — and to notice that the next entry, the slaveholding clause, is the catastrophic historical proof that the question is not rhetorical.

Hymnody

This is the one section of the General Rules with almost no hymnody, and the silence is honest: you cannot sing a list of prohibitions, and the Wesleys did not try. What the tradition sings instead is the disordered love the catalog itemizes, prayed against at the root. “O for a heart to praise my God, a heart from sin set free” asks for the inward cure of which the whole catalog is the outward chart. Charles Wesley’s hymns on riches and contentment — “Saviour, the world’s and mine, … wealth, honour, pleasure, and what else this short-enduring world can give, tempt me no longer” — are “gold and costly apparel” and “treasures upon earth” turned into petition. The absence of any hymn that celebrates the avoidances, and the presence of many that beg to be freed from the loves beneath them, is itself the right reading of the catalog: these are symptoms, and the hymnody goes for the disease.

Pastoral and Liturgical Use

The first pastoral use is to read the list for its principle, not its inventory. Preaching the catalog item by item to a modern congregation produces either antiquarian amusement (calashes) or legalistic anxiety (is a glass of wine forbidden?). Preaching its principle — the love of neighbor and the love of God, specified at the points your culture has made profitable and respectable — produces conviction. The pastoral skill is to do with this list what Wesley did: write the local, contemporary verse of it. What, here, is the legal-profitable-customary harm? Predatory lending still sits in the text under “usury.” “Laying up treasures upon earth” and “needless self-indulgence” did not date at all. The work is translation, not deletion.

The second use is the discipline of self-application. The catalog’s built-in danger, which Wesley names in The Almost Christian, is that it is checkable — and so it tempts the keeper to a clean scorecard and a hard eye on the neighbor. The right use is the reverse: the list is a mirror for the examiner first. A class or covenant group that uses it to audit each other’s drink and dress has weaponized it; one that uses it to ask “where am I prospering by a harm everyone here finds normal?” has kept it.

The third use is the honest hinge to what follows. This catalog ends, in the American text, with a clause Wesley never wrote and the respectable church could not keep. To teach the catalog without arriving, deliberately, at the slaveholding clause is to teach the comfortable nine-tenths and skip the sentence that judges the whole. The pastoral integrity of this entry is that it points forward: [[general-rules/the-slaveholding-clause]] is where the catalog stops being someone else’s quaint scruples and becomes the church’s indictment of itself.

Further Reading

• Exodus 20; Isaiah 1:16–17; Micah 6:8 — the moral-law and prophetic substrate
• Matthew 7:12 — the golden rule, whose converse the catalog forbids
• 1 Corinthians 6:1–8 — “brother going to law with brother”
• 1 Timothy 6:6–10; James 5:1–6 — riches, usury, “treasure upon earth”
• John Wesley, The Use of Money (Sermon 50) — the theory behind usury, smuggling, the liquor trade, “hurt no one in body or substance”
• John Wesley, The Danger of Riches and On Dress — the apparel, softness, and treasure items
• John Wesley, The Almost Christian — the danger of the checkable list
• The Works of John Wesley, Bicentennial Edition, vol. 9 — the critical text and the recension history of the catalog
• The rule this list itemizes: [[general-rules/first-rule-do-no-harm]]
• The clause the catalog builds toward: [[general-rules/the-slaveholding-clause]]