Wesley concludes the year with this entry: “December 30--At my brother’s request, I sat again for my picture. This melancholy employment always reminds me of that natural reflection,-- ‘Behold, what frailty we in man may see! His shadow is less given to change than he.’” Little more remains to be related respecting the year 1771, except the points following. It is a curious fact, that, in the year when Fletcher began to render Wesley important service by the publication of his “Checks,” Fletcher’s future wife, Miss Bosanquet, applied to Wesley for advice on the subject of female preaching. Our space prevents the possibility of discussing such a topic at the length which it deserves; but Wesley’s letter, hitherto unpublished, will be acceptable, as showing that, however much importance he was disposed to attach to church order, he was not the man to make all things bend to it. “LONDONDERRY, _June 13, 1771_. “MY DEAR SISTER,--I think the strength of the cause rests there,--on your having an _extraordinary_ call. So, I am persuaded, has every one of our lay preachers; otherwise, I could not countenance his preaching at all. It is plain to me, that the whole work of God termed Methodism is an extraordinary dispensation of His providence. Therefore, I do not wonder if several things occur therein, which do not fall under the ordinary rules of discipline. St. Paul’s ordinary rule was, ‘I permit not a woman to speak in the congregation.’ Yet, in extraordinary cases, he made a few exceptions; at Corinth in particular. “I am, my dear sister, your affectionate brother, “JOHN WESLEY.”[150] In 1771, Wesley began a revision and republication of all the works which he had published during the last five-and-thirty years, with the exception of his Notes on the Old and New Testament, his “Christian Library,” his “Natural Philosophy,” and his books for Kingswood school. It was during this year that he issued a careful reprint of the four volumes of sermons published in 1746, 48, 50, and 60, with the addition of ten sermons, most of which had been published separately. Besides these, he published five 12mo volumes of his collected works, embracing the sermons just mentioned; and making together about 1800 printed pages, in which he not only corrected the errors of the press, but his own mistakes, and did, what has not been done in any subsequent edition of his works,--placed an asterisk before the passages and paragraphs which he judged were most worthy of the reader’s notice. He likewise published the fourteenth “Extract” from his journal, extending from May 27, 1765, to May 5, 1768. 12mo, 128 pages.[151]