Wesley Corpus

6. I think St. Austin’s description of his own case (whether it prove anything more or less) greatly illustrates that light, that assurance of faith, whereof we are now speaking. He does not appear, in writing this confession to God, to have had any adversary in view, nor to use any rhetorical heightening at all; but to express the naked experience of his heart, and that in as plain and unmetaphorical words as the nature of the thing would bear. [In his reply to the letter of Dec. 30, 1745, sect. 8, ‘Smith’ thought Augustine ‘flighty and injudicious; . . . the same impetuosity of temper which made him so profligate a rake whilst a sinner made him so flighty and rapturous when he became a saint.’] 7. I believe firmly, and that in the most literal sense, that ‘without God we can do nothing’; that we cannot think, or speak, or move an hand or an eye without the concurrence of the divine energy; and that all our natural faculties are God's gift, nor can the meanest be exerted without the assistance of His Spirit. What, then, do I mean by saying that faith, hope, and love are not the effect of any or all our natural faculties I mean this: that, supposing a man to be now void of faith and hope and love, he cannot effect any degree of them in himself by any possible exertion of his understanding and of any or all his other natural faculties, though he should enjoy them in the utmost perfection. A distinct power from God, not implied in any of these, is indispensably necessary before it is possible he should arrive at the very lowest degree of Christian faith or hope or love. In order to his having any of these (which, on this very consideration, I suppose St. Paul terms the ‘fruits of the Spirit’) he must be created anew, thoroughly and inwardly changed by the operation of the Spirit of God; by a power equivalent to that which raises the dead and which calls the things which are not as though they were.