From the present-indicative interlude of Tom's dream, with its apotheosis in the ascension of the thousands of sweepers who leave the implements of their trade and "rise upon clouds, and sport in the wind," the poem returns with a piece of overtly monitory advice from the Angel: "if he'd be a good boy, / He'd have God for his father & never want joy."
John Wesley, whose ministry inspired Methodism (it's sometimes forgotten that he died an Anglican) made this note on 2 John 1:9:
Receive this as a certain Rule. Whosoever transgresseth any Law of God, or of Christ, hath not God--for his Father and his God. He that abideth in the doctrine of Christ--believing and obeying it, he hath both the Father and the Son--for his God.The echos of Wesley's gloss in the Angel's words to Tom are unmistakable. They introduce the central dilemma of the poem: what is Tom's "duty"? Caught in a web of sacrifice to a system whose religious and economic mechanisms of coercion are beyond his, or anyone else's, control, what does it mean to be a "good boy"? Tom once again finds himself in the position of Isaac beholding the kindling. He has no choice but accession to a test of faith that's meant for others. And they--whether a father who, like the speaker's, has sold him into misery, or the reader, whose chimneys are swept--they have turned away from the difficulties of the test, leaving the child, perhaps literally, to burn.