Date: Tuesday, August 28, 1750

"Sorrow is a kind of rust of the soul, which every new idea contributes in its passage to scour away."

— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)

Date: 1754

"The mind of man does often what princes and states have done. It gives a currency to brass and copper coined in the several philosophical and theological mints, and raises the value of gold and silver above that of their true standard."

— St John, Henry, styled first Viscount Bolingbroke (1678-1751)

Date: 1759

"Our suffering souls like gold refine, / And whiten us in blood Divine."

— Wesley, John and Charles

Date: 1759

"Their grief, however, like their joy, was transient; every thing floated in their mind unconnected with the past or future, so that one desire easily gave way to another, as a second stone cast into the water effaces and confounds the circles of the first."

— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)

Date: 1762

"Yet with the mind of Jesus steel'd / He cannot to entreaties yield"

— Wesley, John and Charles

Date: 1762

"Try me then, and try me still / In the furnace of distress, / … I shall at last come forth as gold."

— Wesley, John and Charles

Date: 1762

"Your wood I will convert to brass; / Your souls shall take a finer mould, / The Jewish into Christian pass, / The iron age be turn'd to gold."

— Wesley, John and Charles

Date: 1762

"What but the casting in of grace / This stony, iron heart, can raise, / To heavenly turn my earthly love, / And lift my soul to things above"

— Wesley, John and Charles

Date: 1762

"Out of their hearts the dross remove, / Their worldly care, and worldly love; / As silver and as gold refine"

— Wesley, John and Charles

Date: 1779, 1781

"Truth indeed is always truth, and reason is always reason; they have an intrinsick and unalterable value, and constitute that intellectual gold which defies destruction: but gold may be so concealed in baser matter that only a chymist can recover it; sense may be so hidden in unrefined and plebe...

— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)