A major problem in understanding and interpreting the several hundred published sermons, theological essays, tracts, and prefaces John Wesley wrote across 66 years is that no chronological list of them has ever been published. The simplest matters of context being thus difficult to establish, scholars have tended to omit citing particular works and to refer only to a volume number and page in his collected writings. The result has been to perpetuate a bad habit: quoting anything John Wesley said on a given subject to stand as a summary of his lifelong thought about it. Yet each sermon and each essay was a separate text, composed for a particular occasion.

Consider the sermons. Although in 1763 Wesley designated as "standard" his first four volumes of sermons, they included all he had published since Aldersgate except the one on "Free Grace." And that designation was simply a legal one, prompted by the necessity of drawing up a model deed that would protect Wesleyan chapels from diversion to non-Wesleyan preaching. He revised for publication in the volumes of 1746,1748,1750, and 1760 sermons he had in all but a few cases composed and preached many times earlier. The revisions took place in a few weeks of the months preceding the appearance of each volume. In his own comprehensive edition of his Works, published in 1771, Wesley mingled nine other sermons with those from the first four volumes. Occasional sermons continued to appear, and in 1779 he began publishing six sermons a year in The Arminian Magazine, a practice he continued until his death in 1791. Some of these sermons are among his finest. Many of them expound texts he had preached on repeatedly in preceding decades and may, therefore, have been polished versions of older manuscripts. Whether early or late, however, each one reflected both the immediate concerns of its author at the time he first wrote it, as well as his sense of its worth and soundness at the time he revised it for printing.

Wesley's Journal and letters have, by contrast, always been quoted by date, though the letters were never placed in chronological order in any published work until John Telford drew together a complete edition in eight volumes in 1931. Wesley edited and published his Journal in sections. These appeared usually within a year or two of the last date to which each referred. The Journal thus constitutes an intentionally public record, as only a few of the letters do. Scholars also can and should cite the hymns by the date of their first publications, as well as by reference to John Wesley's selections for the standard hymnbook in 1782, for G. Osborn's great collection of the Poetical Works of John and Charles Wesley, printed in 13 volumes in 1869, placed the hymn books in the chronological order of their composition. We greatly need an edition of the "Large Minutes" that will assign such dates as are known to each question and response and explain what is known of the manner in which successive versions were edited and published.

The list below is intended to make it convenient for students to set whatever passage from Wesley they are considering, whether from a letter, journal, hymn, sermon, preface, or a theological or devotional essay, in the context of his other important published writings composed in roughly the same period of time. In the left-hand column appear the dates that I have concluded may reasonably be assigned to the composition of each sermon, preface, or tract. In the years before 1738, I have often determined these dates from manuscripts in Wesley's handwriting, as recently discovered by Richard Heitzenrater at the Methodist Archives and Research Center at the University of Manchester, England. Beginning with the so-called "Aldersgate Sermon," preached before the University at St. Mary's Church, Oxford, on June 7, 1738, whenever I have indicated a specific day, month, and year, the source is usually from either Wesley's Journal for that date or the date he attached to the work in its original published version, usually indicated in the volume and page number in his Works cited in the note in the accompanying parenthesis. Reading down the numbers of the sermons indicating their sequence in his Works, as they appear in the second column from the left, indicates how sharp is the contrast between the topical and logical order Wesley imposed on the first 53 sermons and a straightforward chronological order.

In the cases of a number of sermons, I have opted for a much earlier date than Edward H. Sugden assigned, in his edition of the Standard Sermons published in 1955-56. In this I have relied upon rather specific allusions to the text and content of the sermon that appeared in the Journal, or .upon other contemporary evidence. For example, the poem attached to the sixth discourse on the Sermon on the Mount (published in 1748), which parallels a central argument of that discourse, appeared in the second volume of Hymns and Sacred Poems, published in 1740. I have relied partly on this evidence to conclude that the substance of the first six sermons on this series, not published until 1748, date from the series Wesley preached several times in the late summer and fall of 1739. When the Journal or other evidence did not seem to establish a precise date for the composition of a sermon, I have simply cited the date or period indicated in the Journal when Wesley prepared the manuscript for the press.

From September, 1754 forward, I have relied upon multiple references in the Sermon Register published in Nehemiah Curnock's edition of The Journal of John Wesley, volume eight, as well as the Journal itself, to justify earlier dates than are usually assigned to certain crucial sermon-on texts that Wesley employed repeatedly as the great revival of Christian Perfection between 1758 and 1762 got under way. These include several notable ones that Wesley published only after the troubles with George Bell and Thomas Maxfield reached their climax in 1763, and that scholars have sometimes (I think mistakenly) attributed to Wesley's effort to fence out their fanaticisms. Among them were "Scripture Way of Salvation," "The Lord Our Righteousness," and "The Repentance of Believers."

Students who are dubious of my judgments of the evidence for the earlier dating of a sermon (summarized or cited in the parentheses following the title and text) may of course rely on the publication date, uniformly cited in the same place. Indeed, they will occasionally find evidence for a more aggressive judgment. For in all periods, whenever I found the text, or the description of a sermon seemingly on that text, noted in either the Journal or the Sermon Register at a date much earlier than the one I assigned to Wesley's composition of the substance of the published version, I have indicated that and other alternative possibilities in the parenthetical note.

When Wesley began publishing additional sermons in the Arminian Magazine in January 1781, he made my task seem easier by signing many of them with a date. But he never told his readers whether that date represented the first substantial composition and delivery of the sermon, or simply the time he prepared it for publication. I suspect the latter was frequently the case. When, therefore, I have run across significant or frequent use of the text of such a dated sermon at an earlier time I have either indicated the early use of the text in the parenthetical note or, when the Journal or other cited sources justified it, simply assigned the earlier date in the left-hand margin. In cases where Wesley assigned no date, I felt more free to rely on other evidence. Examples are the important undated sermons, "On Patience" and "On Perfection," published in March of 1784 and 1785, respectively. I have found reason to believe that both were composed at the dates cited in his Journal for 1761. I have also cited in the parenthetical notes important earlier references to the texts of the very latest group of sermons that Wesley published and dated from 1788 onward.

For the essays, prefaces, and polemical letters Wesley published to explain and defend the scriptural and doctrinal basis of his teaching, I have generally used the dates appended to them in the Works, and cited the volume and page number in the attached parenthetical notes, unless the Journal clearly indicates the date of their composition. The latter, of course, takes priority. But in some cases, as indicated in the notes, I have had to rely-or for what I thought were sufficient reasons chosen to rely-upon Richard Green's bibliography.

Those who use this list should know that I have prepared it while concerned primarily with three aspects of John Wesley's theology: his view of the nature of the authority and inspiration of Scripture; his doctrine of the Holy or (as he himself translated the Hebrew adjective) the "Sanctifying" Spirit; and his doctrine of Christian perfection. I assume that my focus upon these issues caused me to miss or search less intensely for probable earlier dates of sermons on other subjects. A glance at the dates I have assigned to sermons Wesley preached during the years from 1756 to 1765 will make clear not only how preoccupation with these three issues shaped my work, but also how crucial the doctrine of entire sanctification was to him during that significant decade.

Unless Albert Outler's edition of Wesley's sermons, part of the new Oxford edition of his Works, appears before the publication of this list, many students will be surprised at the absence of several favorites. The great one "On the Holy Spirit," described in the many earlier editions of his Works as preached at Oxford in 1736, when Wesley was in Georgia, was not his. The manuscript, discovered among Wesley's papers after his death and published by Thomas Jackson in 1830, is in the handwriting of John Gambold; and Wesley himself seems to have written the note on the back attributing it to Gambold. The sermon on "Grieving the Holy Spirit of God" he borrowed almost entirely from William Tilly. He often quoted the text, however, and in seeming reference to the substance of the sermon.

This loss of pieces of inauthentic evidence concerning Wesley's doctrinal development before Aldersgate is balanced, however, by the recent discovery of new and authentic ones. The manuscript copies of most of the sermons published by permission of Charles Wesley's widow over the great poet's name in 1816 are in fact in John Wesley's handwriting, as are the dates between 1724 and 1736 when he preached them. Those titled "Winning Souls," "A Single Intention," and "Love of God and Neighbour" join the early Wesley canon, alongside "Circumcision of the Heart" and several recently discovered manuscript ones to be published in Dr. Outler's first volume. Together, they give us a much richer view of the theology of sanctification he had carved out of Scripture before he perceived its pervasive promise that the two sublime moments of assurance, bringing regeneration and purity of heart, are crucial to the process by which God perfects His children in love, and that both come "by grace, . . . through faith, and that not of ourselves but by the gift of God."

It would seem to me helpful if Wesley scholars should adopt henceforth the practice of citing in footnote references to his Works the title of the particular essay, preface, tract or sermon being quoted, and in each case put the likely or certain date of its composition in parentheses following the title, before indicating the volume and page number where it appears in the Works. This would focus the attention of all readers on particular writings, and keep before us always the necessity of considering each one in the context of related events described or alluded to in his other works composed around the same time.

AM-The Arminian Magazine

CWS-Charles Wesley, Sermons . . . (London, 1816).

DWJ-John Wesley, "Diary," in parallel dated notes to JJW, listed below.

GB-Richard Green, The Works of John and Charles Wesley. A Bibliography (rev. ed.; London, 1906). The number following the abbreviation is the one in Green's series, not the page number.

JCW-Charles Wesley, Journal (ed. Thomas Jackson; 2 vols.; London, 1849; reprinted, Kansas City, Missouri, 1980).

JJW-John Wes1ey, Journal (ed. Nehemiah Curnock; 8 vols.; London, 1909-16).

LJW-John Wesley, Letters (ed. John Telford; 8 vols.; London, 1931).

MARC-Methodist Archives and Research Center, The John Rylands Library of the University of Manchester, England.

OJW-Albert C. Outler, John Wesley (The Library of Protestant

Thought, NY, 1964).

SR-Sermon Register of John Wesley's texts, by date, from 14 January

1747 to 25 December 1761, in JJW, VIII, 171-252.

WJW-John Wesley, Works (14 vols.; New York, 1872; reprinted,

Grand Rapids, Mich., 1958-59, and Kansas City, Mo., 1978).

WJWJ-John Wesley, Works (ed. Thomas Jackson; 3rd ed.; London, 1829-31).

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Edited by Aaron R. Bynum of Northwest Nazarene University (Nampa, Idaho) for the Wesley Center for Applied Theology.