Wesley Corpus

You mention four other instances of self-contradiction: (1) ‘You claim and you disclaim miracles. You claim them, as having seen many miraculous attestations to your ministry; you disclaim them, desiring none to believe your words farther than they are confirmed by Scripture and reason: that is, you claim them in one sense, and disclaim 1 them in another.’ Perhaps so; but this is no contradiction. (2) ‘You are not at leisure yet either to permit or forbid to marry.’ Indeed I am. Although I commend those who are as ‘eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven’s sake,’ yet I know ‘all men cannot receive this saying,’ and that ‘it is better to marry than to burn.’ (3) ‘The newly justified has at once, in that hour, power over all sin, and finds from that hour the work of God in the soul slowly and gradually increasing. What, until he has power over more than all sin’ No: but until he has more power over all sin, the struggle between the flesh and the Spirit gradually decreasing; and till he has more peace, more joy in the Holy Ghost, more of the knowledge and love of God. (4) ‘But surely the tip-top of all inconsistencies is what follows, even as explained in your own way: many receive from the Holy Ghost an attestation of their acceptance as perceptible as the sun at noonday; and yet these same persons at other times doubt or deny that they ever had such attestation.’ The fact stands thus: (1) A man feels in himself the testimony of God's Spirit that he is a child of God; and he can then no more deny or doubt thereof than of the shining of the sun at noonday. (2) After a time this testimony is withdrawn. (3) He begins to reason within himself concerning it; next, to doubt whether that testimony was from God; and, perhaps, in the end to deny that it was. And yet he may be all this time in every other respect ‘of sound memory as well as understanding.’ Now, whether these propositions are true or false, they are not contradictory to each other. They cannot, unless it were affirmed that the same person has and has not the same testimony at the same time.