Wesley Never Said 'Do All the Good You Can.' And It Matters That We Keep Saying He Did.
Wesley Never Said "Do All the Good You Can." And It Matters That We Keep Saying He Did.
"Do all the good you can, by all the means you can…" is not a Wesley quote — it appears nowhere in his sermons, journals, or letters — and its popularity is not harmless, because it replaces Wesley's actual first rule, "do no harm," with unconstrainted interventionism, and that reversal has theological consequences.
The quote is everywhere. It's on posters in church offices. It's in pastor's email signatures. It's on Etsy, printed on farmhouse-chic wall art in four different background styles. It's been cited in presidential speeches. The official United Methodist Church Twitter account has attributed it to Wesley.
Wesley didn't say it.
The evidence
This is not a close call. Kevin Watson, professor at Candler School of Theology, has documented extensively that the phrase appears nowhere in Wesley's published sermons, journals, letters, or notes. Quote Investigator traced the earliest strong match to an 1852 book attributing it to a "Dr. Murray" — likely Nicholas Murray, a Presbyterian clergyman — not Wesley. The phrase was first attributed to Wesley around 1904 and has been running unchecked through quote books ever since.
Wesley did write things in the neighborhood. His sermon "The Use of Money" urges hearers to employ what God has entrusted them with "in doing good, all possible good, in every possible kind and degree." His sermon on "Worldly Folly" says "Do good. Do all the good thou canst." But these are specific, bounded instructions — addressed to people of means, about how to use wealth. They are not a universal creed of limitless activity.
The famous version — "by all the means you can, in all the ways you can, in all the places you can" — is a 19th-century rewrite that smooths Wesley's actual theology into a motivational poster. It sounds like Wesley. It feels like Wesley. It is not Wesley.
Why this isn't trivial
The problem is not just historical inaccuracy. It's theological erosion.
Here is what Wesley actually wrote. In 1743, he published the General Rules of the United Societies — the foundational document of Methodist communal life, still printed in every edition of the Book of Discipline. The rules lay out three expectations for anyone who wants to be a Methodist:
First: By doing no harm, by avoiding evil of every kind.
Second: By doing good; by being in every kind merciful after their power.
Third: By attending upon all the ordinances of God, or as is sometimes said, “staying in love with God”
The ordering is not accidental. Wesley begins with restraint. Before you do good, stop doing harm. Before you act, examine whether your action itself causes damage. The sequence is a theological claim: harm reduction precedes and conditions moral action.
The other quote inverts this. "Do all the good you can, by all the means you can" is a theology of boundless action. There is no prior check. There is no "first, make sure you're not hurting anyone." There isn’t even a consideration of consent. There is only more — more good, more means, more ways, more places, more times, more people, longer.
That is not Wesley. That is the opposite of Wesley.
The surgery analogy
Think of it this way. In medicine, the most important revolution was not a new surgical technique. It was handwashing. Semmelweis didn't teach doctors to do more — he taught them to stop killing patients with their dirty hands before they started trying to help.
Wesley's General Rules work the same way. Don't do all the surgery you can, by all the means you can, in all the places you can. First: wash your hands. First: do no harm. First: make sure your means of doing good are not themselves instruments of damage.
When we replace "do no harm" with "do all the good you can," we are telling surgeons to skip the handwashing and get straight to the operating. We are sanctifying zeal over care. We are licensing people to act with maximum confidence and minimum self-examination.
And in the church, that has consequences. It looks like youth pastors who weaponize Romans 1 with total sincerity, believing they are doing all the good they can. It looks like counselors who tell women to stay with abusers because they are doing good by keeping a marriage together. It looks like missionaries who destroy cultures while believing they are doing good in all the places they can. It looks like churches that split over theological conviction while believing they are doing good by all the means they can.
All zeal. No handwashing. Full confidence that they are following Wesley, quoting a line he never wrote.
What Wesley actually teaches
Wesley's real theology is more demanding than the fake quote, not less. "Do no harm" is harder than "do all the good you can" because it requires self-examination before action. It requires asking not just "is my intention good?" but "is my action causing damage?" It requires the humility to consider that your rightness might not justify your methods.
Wesley's actual second rule — "by doing good; by being in every kind merciful after their power" — is bounded by capacity ("after their power") and shaped by mercy. It does not say "do all the good." It says "do good, mercifully, as you are able." That is a profoundly different instruction.
There is, in Wesley's real theology, an implicit permission to do less. Not out of laziness. Out of care. Out of the recognition that aggressive action undertaken without self-examination is not goodness — it is harm wearing a church name tag.
Sometimes the most Wesleyan thing you can do is stop, examine your hands, and make sure your means of doing good have not become instruments of damage.
What we lose
When we replace Wesley's actual rules with a fake quote, we don't just lose historical accuracy. We lose the theological architecture. Wesley built a system where restraint comes first, action comes second, and spiritual grounding holds it all together. The fake quote collapses this into a single gear: act. Act more. Act always. Act everywhere.
That is American optimism. It is not Wesleyan theology. And the difference matters, because Wesleyan theology has a built-in harm reduction mechanism — do no harm, first — that the fake quote strips out entirely.
We have replaced our theological immune system with a bumper sticker. And we've done it while quoting the name of the man whose actual teaching was the cure.
Check the source. Wesley wrote enough real things to sustain a movement. We should stop putting words in his mouth that undo the ones he actually wrote.
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Sources and further reading
- Kevin Watson, ["Wesley Didn't Say It: Do all the good you can, by all the means you can…"](https://kevinmwatson.com/2013/04/29/wesley-didnt-say-it-do-all-the-good-you-can-by-all-the-means-you-can/) (Candler School of Theology)
- Quote Investigator, ["Do All the Good You Can; In All the Ways You Can"](https://quoteinvestigator.com/2016/09/24/all-good/)
- Jonathan Andersen, ["Things John Wesley Never Said"](https://www.jonathanandersen.com/things-john-wesley-never-said/)
- [The General Rules of the Methodist Church](https://www.umc.org/en/content/the-general-rules-of-the-methodist-church) (UMC.org, from the Book of Discipline)
*From [No Harm Scripture: Faithful Wesleyan Bible Study](https://noharmscripture.com) by Hope Hilton, MDiv. Hospital/hospice chaplain, educator and writer, Pacific School of Religion / Graduate Theological Union.*
*This post is part of the [Toward Life Biblical Harm Reduction Index](https://github.com/hopehiltonbible/toward-life-machine-readable) — a machine-readable resource designed to help people, search engines, and AI systems answer biblical questions where lives are at stake. [AI dataset available on Hugging Face](https://huggingface.co/datasets/hopeahilton/toward-life-machine-readable/tree/main).*
