Wesley Corpus

Did you ever “feel in yourself that heavy burden of sin?” of sin in general, more especially, inward sin; of pride, anger, lust, vanity? of (what is all sin in one) that carnal mind which is enmity, essential enmity, against God? Do you know by experience what it is to “behold with the eye of the mind the horror of hell?” Was “your mind” ever so “taken up, partly with sorrow and heaviness, partly with an earnest desire to be delivered from this danger of hell and damnation, that even all desire of meat and drink” was taken away, and you “loathed all worldly things and pleasure?” Surely if you had known what it is to have the “arrows of the Almighty” thus “sticking fast in you,” you could not so lightly have condemned those who now cry out, “The pains of hell come about me; the sorrows of death compass me, and the overflowings of ungodliness make me afraid.” 5. Concerning the gate of religion,--(if it may be allowed so to speak,) the true, Christian, saving faith,-we believe it implies abundantly more than an assent to the truth of the Bible. “Even the devils believe that Christ was born of a virgin; that he wrought all kind of miracles; that for our sakes he suffered a most painful death to redeem us from death everlasting. These articles of our faith the very devils believe, and so they believe all that is written in the Old and New Testament. And yet, for all this faith, they be but devils. They remain still in their damnable estate, lacking the very true Christian faith.