ANSWER: We have not time to read again all of Wesley's sermons, more than a hundred, but we believe that no such doctrine can be found in them for the following reasons: (1) We have been reading Wesley's writings more than sixty years, and have never found it. (2) He was very insistent on entire sanctification in this life and could not consistently teach any doctrine which would weaken the motive to seek perfect purity here and now. (3) He could not have been so unwise as to define Paradise in exactly the same way as the Papists define Purgatory. (4) He would not in his sermons have given a different description of Paradise from that found in his Notes on the New Testament, "The place where the souls of the righteous remain from deaths till the resurrection" (Luke 23:43); "The seat of happy spirits in their separate state, between death and the resurrection" (1 Cor. 12:4); "A garden of pleasure" (Rev. 2:7). These are his descriptions of Paradise.
— from Steele's Answers pp. 54, 55.
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