Wesley Corpus

To Hester Ann Roe Date: DARLINGTON, June 25, 1782. Source: The Letters of John Wesley (1782) Author: John Wesley --- MY DEAR HETTY, -- It is certain there has been for these forty years such an outpouring of the Spirit and such an increase of vital religion as has not been in England before for many centuries; and it does not appear that the work of God at all decays. In many places there is a considerable increase of it; so that we have reason to hope that the time is at hand when the kingdom of God shall come with power, and all the people of this poor heathen land shall know Him, from the least unto the greatest. I am glad you had so good an opportunity of talking with Mr. Sellars. Surely, if prayer was made for him, so useful an instrument as he was would not be suffered to lose all his usefulness. I wish you could make such little excursions oftener, as you always find your labor is not in vain. Many years since, Madame Bourignon’s Works were put into my hands, particularly the treatises Mr. Sellars so strongly recommends, with her Exterior and Interior Life, written by herself. It was easy to see she was a person dead to the world and much devoted to God; yet I take her to be very many degrees beneath both Mr. De Renty and Gregory Lopez -- nay, I do not believe she had so much genuine Christian experience as either David Brainerd or Thomas Walsh. What makes many passages both in her life and in her writings so striking is that they are so peculiar -- they are so entirely her own, so different from everything which we have seen or heard elsewhere! But this is in reality not an excellence, but a capital defect. Her expressions naturally tend to give a new set of ideas: they will set imagination at work, and make us fancy we saw wonderful things, but they were only shadows. I avoid, I am afraid of, whatever is peculiar, either in the experience or language of any one. I desire nothing, I will accept of nothing, but .the common faith and the common salvation.