John Wesley never wrote a system of divinity, and said he never would. Yet across half a century of occasional sermons a single, consistent metaphysic runs from end to end. This book argues that what looks like the absence of system in Wesley's thought is the presence of a *genre* — the serial discourse written for a lay reading public, not the architectonic treatise — and reconstructs the whole generative structure that genre concealed: a single doctrine of God unfolding, chapter by chapter, into creation, providence, the invisible world, the human creature, and the last things.
Wesley did the work of a systematic theologian in the tools of a magazine editor. He furnished a whole cosmos — the vehicle of the soul, the empiricism of the invisible, the conscious intermediate state, a providence that reaches to the particular — and never once collected it. This is the gathering: not a new way to read Wesley, but the plan of the system he had all along, laid out at last under its classical heads.