About This Edition

Between 1749 and 1755, John Wesley compiled and published A Christian Library: fifty small volumes of extracts from the devotional and practical writings he considered most useful for the formation of Methodist preachers and societies. It was not a scholar's anthology. Wesley pruned, abridged, and occasionally rewrote his sources to fit them for a reader with little time and less money — a lay preacher riding a circuit, a society member snatching an hour before or after work. The Library was meant to be carried, read in pieces, and returned to.

This site restores that original shape. Later reprints compressed Wesley's fifty volumes into thirty or fewer, folding several of his original books into one — useful for a library shelf, less so for a saddlebag, and further still from how Wesley himself divided the set. This edition instead follows Wesley's own volume divisions, verified one at a time against the 1755 printing, rather than mapped wholesale in advance. That's why the shelf on the front page fills in gradually: a volume's spine lights up only once its actual contents have been checked against a real first-edition scan, not assumed.

The text itself is lightly modernized: obsolete spellings that carry no meaning of their own (shew for show, chuse for choose, and the like) are updated, while Wesley's own voice, capitalization of divine names, and the rhythm of his prose are left untouched. Each work carries a brief editor's headnote — author, dates, and enough context to place the piece — plus, where Wesley traced a connection himself, cross-references to his sermons, Notes, journal, and hymns.

A few features specific to this site: works are grouped by theological tradition and era, and by genre as each volume is verified. Wesley's own editorial voice — his "To the Reader" prefaces, easy to lose inside a long work page — is collected on its own. A source tracker records, work by work, whether the original edition Wesley abridged from has been identified — the visible frontier of a future Critical Edition that will diff this text against those sources directly.

Rights & Attribution

A Christian Library was compiled and abridged by John Wesley (1749–1755). The texts it gathers are in the public domain. This edition's introductions, headnotes, the apparatus of cross-references to Wesley's own sermons, Notes, journal, and hymns, the tradition/era/genre classifications, and the modernized presentation are the editor's.

Published by Wroot Press.

Print editions, volume by volume, are being published on Amazon as each is finished: see the series page →