Wesley Corpus

'No, not the new birth itself, but your enthusiastic, ridiculous account of it.' What is, then, my account of the new birth I gave it some years ago in these words:-- 'It is that great change which God works in the soul when He brings it into life; when He raises it from the death of sin to the life of righteousness. It is the change wrought in the whole soul by the almighty Spirit of God, when it is "created anew in Christ Jesus," when it is "renewed after the image of God in righteousness and true holiness; when the love of the world is changed into the love of God, pride into humility, passion into meekness, hatred, envy, malice into a sincere, tender, disinterested love to all mankind. In a word, it is that change whereby the earthly, sensual, devilish mind is turned into "the mind which was in Christ Jesus."' [Sermon on the New Birth. See Works, vi. 71.] This is my account of the new birth. What is there ridiculous or enthusiastic in it 'But what do you mean by those tempests, and cries, and pains, and infernal throes attending the new birth' I will tell you as plainly as I can, in the very same words I used to Dr. Church, after premising that some experience much, some very little, of these pains and throes:-- '"When men feel in themselves the heavy burthen of sin, see damnation to be the reward of it, behold with the eye of their mind the horror of hell, they tremble, they quake, and are inwardly touched with sorrowfulness of heart, and cannot but accuse themselves, and open their grief unto Almighty God, and call unto Him for mercy. This being done seriously, their mind is so occupied, partly with sorrow and heaviness, partly with an earnest desire to be delivered from this danger of hell and damnation, that all desire of meat and drink is laid apart, and loathing of worldly things and pleasures comes in place, so that nothing then liketh them more than to weep, to lament, to mourn, and both with words and behaviour of body to show themselves weary of life."