Wesley Corpus

That you may deafly see wherein we agree or wherein we differ, I have sent you the Minutes of some of our late Conferences. Several concessions are made therein, both with regard to Assurance and Christian Perfection; some difficulties cleared, and a few arguments proposed, though very nakedly and briefly. When you have read these, you may come directly to any point of controversy which may still remain; and ff you can show me that any farther concessions are needful, I shall make them with great pleasure. On the subject of your last I can but just observe, first, with regard to the assurance of faith, I apprehend that the whole Christian Church in the first centuries enjoyed it. For though we have few points of doctrine explicitly taught in the small remains of the ante-Nicene Fathers, yet I think none that carefully reads Clemens Romanus, Ignatius, Polycarp, Origen, or any other of them, can doubt whether either the writer himself possessed it or all whom he mentions as real Christians. And I ready conceive, both from the Harrnonia Confessionurn and whatever else I have occasionally read, that all the Reformed Churches in Europe did once believe ‘Every true Christian has the divine evidence of his being in favor with God.’ So much for authority. The point of experience is touched upon in the Conferences. As to the nature of the thing, I think a divine conviction of pardon is directly implied in the evidence or conviction of things unseen. But if not, it is no absurdity to suppose that, when God pardons a mourning, broken-hearted sinner, His mercy obliges Him to another act -- to witness to his spirit that He has pardoned him. I know that I am accepted; and yet that knowledge is sometimes shaken, though not destroyed, by doubt or fear. If that knowledge were destroyed or wholly withdrawn, I could not then say I had Christian faith. To me it appears the same thing to say, ‘I know God has accepted me,’ or “I have a sure trust that God has accepted me.’