Wesley Corpus

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. This afternoon I was agreeably surprised by a letter from our dear Miss Ritchie. It seems as if God, in answer to many prayers, has lent her to us yet a little longer. ‘He bringeth down to the grave, and bringeth up again. Wise are all His ways!’ Take particular care, my dear Hetty, of the children: they are glorious monuments of divine grace; and I think you have a particular affection for them and a gift to profit them. -- I always am, my dear friend, Yours most affectionately.