Wesley Corpus

But how fatal a mistake is this ! Supposing your opinion to be true, yet a. true opinion concerning repentance is wholly different from the thing itself; and you may have a true opinion concerning faith all your life, and yet die an unbeliever. Supposing therefore the opinion of particular redemption true, yet how little does it avail toward salvation l Nay, were we to suppose that none can be saved who do not hold it, it does not follow that all will be saved who do: So that if the one proved a man to be in ever so bad a state, the other would not prove him to be in a good one; and, consequently, whoso ever leans on this opinion, leans on the staff of a broken reed. Would to God that ye would mind this one thing, to “make your own calling and election sure!” that every one . of you (leaving the rest of the world to Him that made it) would himself “repent and believe the gospel !” Not repent alone, (for then you know only the baptism of John,) but believe, and be “baptized with the Holy Ghost and with fire.” Are you still a stranger to that inward baptism wherewith all true believers are baptized? May the Lord constrain you to cry out, “How am I straitened till it be accomplished!” even till the love of God inflame your heart, and consume all your vile affections ! Be not content with anything less than this! It is this loving faith alone which opens our way into “the general Church of the first-born, whose names are written in heaven l’’ which giveth us to “enter within the veil, where Jesus our fore-runner is gone before us!” 5. There is a still wider difference in some points between us and the people usually termed Quakers. But not in these points. You, as well as we, condemn “all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men; ” all those works of the devil which were recited above, and all those tempers from which they spring.