Wesley Corpus

'But in the first propagation of religion God began with the understanding, and rational conviction won the heart' (page 163). Frequently, but not always. The jailer's heart was touched first, then he understood what he must do to be saved. In this respect, then, there is nothing new in the present work of God. So the lively story from Moliere is just nothing to the purpose. ['But, for this discordancy, between his Mission and St. Paul's, he has a salvo. He observes occasionally, in several places of his Journal, that God now not only does a new work, but by new ways. This solution of our spiritual empiric will perhaps put the reader in mind of the quack in Moliere, who, having placed the liver on the left side and the heart on the right, and being told that the structure of the parts was certainly otherwise, replied: Oui, cela etoit autre fois ainsi; mais nos avons change tout cela, et nous faisons maintenant la medecine d'une methode toute nouvelle.'--The Doctrine of Grace, pp. 163-4; p. 136, 2nd Edn.] In drawing the parallel between the work God has wrought in England and in America I do not so much as 'insinuate that the understanding has nothing to do in the work' (page 165). Whoever is engaged therein will find full employment for all the understanding which God has given him. 'On the whole, therefore, we conclude that wisdom which divests the Christian faith of its truth, and the test of it, reason, and resolves all religion into spiritual mysticism and ecstatic raptures, cannot be the wisdom from above, whose characteristic is purity' (page 166). Perhaps so. But I do not 'divest faith either of truth or reason'; much less do I resolve all into 'spiritual mysticism and ecstatic raptures.' Therefore, suppose purity here meant sound doctrine (which it no more means than it does a sound constitution), still it touches not me, who, for anything that has yet been said, may teach the soundest doctrine in the world.