“He earnestly recommended to them a method and order in all their actions. After their morning devotions (which were at a fixed and early hour, from five to six being the time, morning as well as evening), he advised them to determine with themselves what they were to do all the parts of the day. By such foresight, they would, at every hour’s end, not be in doubt how to dispose of themselves; and, by bringing themselves under the necessity of such a plan, they might correct the impotence of a mind that had been used to live by humour and chance, and prepare it by degrees to bear the other restraints of a holy life. “The next thing was to put them upon keeping the fasts, visiting poor people, and coming to the weekly Sacrament: not only to subdue the body, increase charity, and obtain Divine grace; but (as he expressed it) to cut off their retreat to the world. He judged, that, if they did these things, men would cast out their name as evil, and, by the impossibility of keeping fair any longer with the world, oblige them to take their whole refuge in Christianity. But those, whose resolutions he thought would not bear this test, he left to gather strength by their secret exercises. “It was his earnest care to introduce them to the treasures of wisdom and hope in the Holy Scriptures: to teach them not only to endure that book, but to form themselves by it, and to fly to it as the great antidote against the darkness of this world. For some years past, he and his friends read the New Testament together at evening. After every portion of it, having heard the conjectures the rest had to offer, he made his observations on the phrase, design, and difficult places. One or two wrote these down from his mouth. “He laid much stress upon self-examination. He taught them (besides what occurs in his Collection of Prayers) to take account of their actions in a very exact manner, by writing a constant diary. In this, they noted down in cipher, once if not oftener in the day, what chiefly their employments had been in the several parts of it, and how they had performed each. Mr. Wesley had these records of his life by him for many years past. And some I have known, who, to seal their convictions and make their repentance more solemn, would write down such reflections upon themselves as the anguish of their soul at that time suggested, adding any spiritual maxim which some experience of their own had confirmed to them.