Wesley Corpus

Many years since, Madame Bourignon’s Works were put into my hands, particularly the treatises you mention, and her Exterior and Interior Life, written by herself. It was easy to see that she was a person dead to the world and much devoted to God; yet I take her to have been very many degrees beneath both Mr. De Renty and Gregory Lopez; nay, I do not believe she had so much Christian experience as either David Brainerd or Thomas Walsh. What makes many passages, both in her life and writings, so striking is that they are so peculiar; they are so entirely her own, so different from everything which we have seen or read elsewhere. But this is in reality not an excellence, but a capital defect. I avoid, I am afraid of, whatever is peculiar, either in the experience or the language of any one. I desire nothing, I will accept of nothing, but the common faith and common salvation; and I want you, my dear sister, to be only just such a common Christian as Jenny Cooper was. [See letter of June 25, 1782; and for Jane Cooper, that of Sept. 1765.] The new expressions of Madame Bourignon [Antoinette Bourignon (1616-80), the French Mystic. For Wesley's translation of ‘Come, Saviour, Jesus, from above,’ see Telford's Methodist Hymn-Book Illustrated, pp. 311-12.] naturally tended to give you a new set of ideas. They would surely set your imagination at work, and make you fancy wonderful things; but they were only shadows. I cannot doubt in the least but either Mr. ----- or you or your sister has experienced more of the life of faith and deeper communion with the Father and the Son than ever she did in her life. As I apprehend your mind must be a little confused by reading those uncommon treatises, I wish you would give another deliberate reading to the Plain Account of Christian Perfection; and you may be assured there is no religion under heaven higher or deeper than that which is there described. But it is certainly possible to have your mind as well as your heart continually stayed upon God. This you did experience for some time, and you should be continually expecting to receive it again. ‘Ask, and it shall be given’: For all the promises are sure To persevering prayer.