Wesley Corpus

There is no intercourse between your soul and God. “You have neither seen him,” (by faith, as our Lord witnessed against them of old time,) “nor heard his voice at any time.” You have no spirit ual “senses exercised to discern spiritual good and evil.” You are angry at infidels, and are all the while as mere an infidel before God as they. You have “eyes that see not, and ears. that hear not.” You have a callous, unfeeling heart. 51. Bear with me a little longer: My soul is distressed for you. “The god of this world hath blinded your eyes,” and you are “seeking death in the error of your life.” Because you do not commit gross sin, because you give alms, and go to the church and sacrament, you imagine that you are serving God: Yet, in very deed, you are serving the devil; for you are doing still your own will, not the will of God your Saviour. You are pleasing yourself in all you do. Pride, vanity, and self-will (the genuine fruits of an earthly, sensual, devilish heart) pollute all your words and actions. You are in dark mess, in the shadow of death. O that God would say to you in thunder, “Awake, thou that sleepest, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall give thee light !” 52. But, blessed be God, he hath not yet left himself with out witness: All are not lost! There be, who faith prefer, Though few, and piety to God! who know the power of faith, and are no strangers to that inward, vital religion, “the mind that was in Christ; right eousness, and peace, and joy in the Holy Ghost.” Of you who “ have tasted the good word of God, and the powers of the world to come,” I would be glad to learn if we have “erred from the faith,” or walked contrary to “the truth as it is in Jesus.” “Let the righteous smite me friendly, and reprove me;” if haply that which is amiss may be done away, and what is wanting supplied, till we all come to the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ. 53. Perhaps the first thing that now occurs to your mind relates to the doctrine which we teach.