Wesley Corpus

It was reasonable to believe that he would have risen long ago and maintained his own cause, either by sending the famine or pestilence among us, or by pouring out his fury in blood. And many wise and holy men have frequently declared that they daily expected this; that they daily looked for the patience of God to give place, and judgment to rejoice over mercy. 4. Just at this time, when we wanted little of “filling up the measure of our iniquities,” two or three Clergymen of the Church of England began vehemently to “call sinners to re pentance.” In two or three years they had sounded the alarm to the utmost borders of the land. Many thousands gathered together to hear them; and in every place where they came, many began to show such a concern for religion as they never had done before. A stronger impression was made on their minds, of the importance of things eternal, and they had more earnest desires of serving God than they had ever had from their earliest childhood. Thus did God begin to draw them toward himself, with the cords of love, with the bands of a man. Many of these were in a short time deeply convinced of the number and heinousness of their sins. They were also made throughly sensible of those tempers which are justly hateful to God and man, and of their utter ignorance of God, and entire inability, either to know, love, or serve him. At the same time, they saw in the strongest light the insignificancy of their out side religion; nay, and often confessed it before God, as the most abominable hypocrisy. Thus did they sink deeper and deeper into that repentance, which must ever precede faith in the Son of God. And from hence sprung “fruits meet for repentance.” The drunkard commenced sober and temperate; the whoremonger abstained from adultery and fornication; the unjust from oppression and wrong. He that had been accustomed to curse and swear for many years, now swore no more. The sluggard began to work with his hands, that he might eat his own bread. The miser learned to deal his bread to the hungry, and to cover the naked with a garment. Indeed, the whole form of their life was changed: They had “left off doing evil, and learned to do well.” 5.