Wesley Corpus

Does it not directly tend to make both the one and the other imagine, that they are what indeed they are not; that they are Christians, while they are utterly without Christ, and with out God in the world? To close this point: If men are not Christians till they are renewed after the image of Christ, and if the people of England, in general, are not thus renewed, why do we term them so? ‘The god of this world hath’ long ‘blinded their hearts. Let us do nothing to increase their blindness; but rather to recover them from that strong delusion, that they may no longer believe a lie. “Let us labour to convince all mankind, that to be a real Christian is, to love the Lord our God with all our heart, and to serve him with all our strength; to love our neighbour as ourselves, and therefore to do unto every man as we would he should do unto us.” (Second Letter to Dr. Church, Vol. VIII. pages 470-472.) To change one of these Heathens into a real Christian, and to continue him such, all the ordinary operations of the Holy Spirit are absolutely necessary. “But what are they?” I sum them up (as I did in the “Farther Appeal to Men of Reason and Religion”) in the words of as learned and orthodox a Divine as ever England bred: “Sanctification being opposed to our corruption, and answering fully to the latitude thereof, whatsoever holiness and perfection is wanting in our nature must be supplied by the Spirit of God. Wherefore, we being by nature totally void of all saving truth, and under an impossibility of know ing the will of God; this ‘Spirit searcheth all things, yea, even the deep things of God, and revealeth them unto the sons of men; so that thereby the darkness of their under standing is expelled, and they are enlightened with the know ledge of God. The same Spirit which revealeth the object of faith, generally, to the universal Church, doth also illumi nate the understanding of such as believe; that they may receive the truth. For faith is the gift of God, not only in the object, but also in the act. And this gift is a gift of the Holy Ghost working within us.