"By Grace are ye Saved Through Faith."

121 for the thorns and briers through which they passed; but for the wormwood and the gall they drank, during dreary years, they had not been so well fitted to awaken, to comfort, and to guide others. Being now possessed of the true key to all sound religious experience, and of a power in their ministry which they had never wielded before, the brothers immediately entered upon an energetic course of evangelical labor, calling sinners to repentance, and proclaiming to rich and poor, old and young, men and women of moral habits, and profligate transgressors, including convicts under sentence of death, pardon and peace as "the common salvation," to be obtained by all alike, through faith in the blood of Christ. Others caught the theme and carried on the work.*

Before the end of the month Charles Wesley's health was so far improved that he was able to go abroad. In consequence of his affliction he was, as yet, unable to address congregations in public; but, like the apostles at Jerusalem, "daily, and in every house," where he could gain access, "he ceased not to teach and preach Jesus Christ." In private companies, where many resorted to him, he read the Scriptures, sang hymns, related his religious experience, and urged upon all the duty and privilege of an immediate application to Christ, in faith for pardon and peace and holiness. The most perfect picture of his feelings and character at this period is that which was drawn years afterward by his own hand: "How happy are they, who their Saviour obey!"

The doctrine of present salvation from sin, by faith in the Lord Jesus, was like fire in his bones. His heart burned with love to Christ, and with zeal for the advancement of his work and glory; his bowels yearned in pity for the souls of unregenerate men, while his faith set at defiance all opposition. Scarcely a day passed but one or more persons were convinced of the truth, and believed to the saving of their souls.

Eighteen days after his conversion (June 11th), John Wesley preached before the University at Oxford that famous sermon on "By grace are ye saved through faith "-henceforth his favorite theme, and the key-note of his ministry. He describes this faith and its fruits, answers objections, and shows that to preach salvation by faith only is not to preach against holiness

* Watson's Life of Wesley. † No. I., in Standard Edition of his Sermons

and good works. To the rich, the learned, the reputable before him, he makes faithful application:

When no more objections, then we are simply told that salvation by faith only ought not to be preached as the first doctrine, or at least not to be preached to all. But what saith the Holy Ghost? "Other foundation can no man lay than that which is laid, even Jesus Christ." So, then, that "whosoever believeth on him shall be saved," is, and must be, the foundation of all our preaching; that is, must I preached first. "Well, but not to all." To whom, then, are we not to preach it? Whom shall we except? The poor? Nay; they have a peculiar right to have the gospel preached unto them. The unlearned? No. God hath revealed these things unto unlearned and ignorant men from the beginning. The young? By no means. "Suffer these," in anywise, to come unto Christ, "and forbid them not." The sinners? Least of all. "He came not to call the righteous, but sinners, to repentance." Why then, if any, we are to except the rich, the learned, the reputable, the moral men. And it is true, they too often except themselves from hearing; yet we must speak the words of our Lord. For thus the tenor of our commission runs: "Go and preach the gospel to every creature." If any man wrest it, or any part of it, to his destruction, he must bear his own burden. But still, "as the Lord liveth, whatsoever the Lord saith unto us, that we will speak."

How could Wesley ever be called a papist, even by foolish enemies, when he preached doctrine so destructive of the Romish delusion? "At this time more especially will we speak, that 'by grace are ye saved through faith,' because never was the maintaining this doctrine more seasonable than it is at this day. Nothing but this can effectually prevent the increase of the Romish delusion among us. It is endless to attack, one by one, all the errors of that Church. But salvation by faith strikes at the root, and all fall at once where this is established. It was this doctrine, which our Church justly calls the strong rock and foundation of the Christian religion, that first drove popery out of these kingdoms; and it is this alone can keep it out. Nothing but this can give a check to that immorality which hath 'overspread the land as a flood.' Can you empty the great deep drop by drop? Then you may reform us by dissuasives from particular vices. But let the righteousness which is of God by faith' be brought in, and so shall its proud waves be stayed."

Such was the great doctrine which Wesley began to preach in 1738. It was the preaching of this doctrine that gave birth to the revival of religion-"the religious movement of the eighteenth century "-called Methodism.

CHAPTER X.

Christian Experience: Its Place in Methodism-The Almost Christian-Wesley's Conversion; His Testimony-The Witness of the Holy Spirit-The Witness of Our Own Spirit-Joint Testimony to Adoption.

IT

T is not the truth, but the personal apprehension and application of the truth, that saves. The concrete doctrine, as embodied and illustrated in experience, is of at least equal practical importance with the abstract doctrine, as stated in books. Methodism puts emphasis on experience. St. Paul more than once told how he was converted. The subjective aspects of Christianity, as presented in his epistles, are as striking as the objective. Experimental religion is not a cant phrase; it expresses a real and a great fact. It has been well said: Methodism reversed the usual policy of religious sects, which seek to sustain their spiritual life by their orthodoxy; it has sustained its orthodoxy by devoting its chief care to its spiritual life, and for more than a century had no serious outbreaks of heresy, notwithstanding the masses of untrained minds, gathered within its pale, and the general lack of preparatory education among its clergy. No other modern religious body affords a parallel to it in this respect.*

The doctrine of conscious conversion, and of a direct witness of the Spirit testifying to the heart of the believer that he is a child of God, was the doctrine which exposed the founder of Methodism to the opposition of the formalists of the Church, and the ridicule of the philosophists of the world. His personal experience connects itself with this doctrine. He has made the full disclosure; and according to an eminent authority "it is the only true key to his theological system and to his public ministry." It would be difficult, he thinks, to fix upon a more interesting and instructive moral spectacle than that which is presented by the progress of his mind, through all its deep and serious agitations, doubts, difficulties, hopes, and fears, from his earliest. religious awakenings to the moment when he found that steadfast peace which never afterward forsook him, but gave serenity Watson's Life of Wesley.

* Stevens's History of Methodism.

to his countenance, and cheerfulness to his heart, to the last moment of a prolonged life. This critical passage of Wesleyan biography is thus defended by Watson against the solutions or cavils of men whose treatment of the subject is as unjust to Christianity as to Methodism:

"If the appointed method of man's salvation, laid down in the gospel, be gratuitous pardon through faith in the merits of Christ's sacrifice, and if a method of seeking justification by the works of moral obedience to the Divine law be plainly placed by St. Paul in opposition to this, and declared to be vain and fruitless; then, if in this way the Wesleys sought their justification before God, we see how true their own statement must of necessity have been-that, with all their efforts, they could obtain no solid peace of mind, no deliverance from the enslaving fear of death and final punishment, because they sought that by imperfect works which God has appointed to be attained by faith alone. Theirs was not, indeed, a state of heartless formality and self-deluding Pharisaism, aiming only at external obedience. It was just the reverse of this; they were awakened to a sense of danger, and they aimed at-nay, struggled with intense efforts after-universal holiness, inward and outward. But it was not a state of salvation; and if we find a middle state like this described in the Scriptures -a state in transit from dead formality to living faith and moral deliverance the question, with respect to the truth of their representations as to their former state of experience, is settled.

"Such a middle state we see plainly depicted by the Apostle Paul, in the seventh chapter of the Epistle to the Romans. There the mind of the person described 'consents to the law that it is good,' but finds in it only greater discoveries of his sinfulness and danger; there the effort, too, is after universal holiness-to will is present,' but the power is wanting; every struggle binds the chain tighter; sighs and groans are extorted, till self-despair succeeds, and the true Deliverer is seen and trusted in: 'O wretched man that I am, who shall deliver me from the body of this death? I thank God through Jesus Christ my Lord.' The deliverance also, in the case described by St. Paul, is marked with the same characters as those exhibited in the conversion of the Wesleys: 'There is now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, who walk not after the flesh but after the Spirit; for the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus hath made

Wesley's Steadfast Testimony.

125

me free from the law of sin and death.' 'Therefore, being justified by faith, we have peace with God, through our Lord Jesus Christ. Every thing in the account of the change wrought in the two brothers, and several of their friends about the same time, answers, therefore, to the New Testament. Nor was their experience, or the doctrine upon which it was founded, new, although in that age of declining piety unhappily not common."

Southey, against whose callous and flippant criticism Watson more especially wrote, thought Wesley's feelings might have been accounted for by referring to "the state of his pulse or stomach." But it does not appear that his health was at all disordered. Fanaticism and enthusiasm are terms in plentiful use. Coleridge, in a marginal note, explains the phenomenon of Wesley's conversion as "a throb of sensibility accompanying a vehement volition of acquiescence." The world has not ceased to wonder why Southey -the ci-devant Socinian--should write the life of John Wesley. Total want of sympathy for the best parts of his subject "rendered him as incapable of laying down the geography of the moon as of giving the moral portraiture of Wesley." His incompetency for such a task was aptly expressed by one of Wesley's early biographers: "Sir, thou hast nothing to draw with, and the well is deep."*

That so devout and self-denying a man should be a stranger to the full salvation-only an "almost Christian"-offends the formalist. On May 24, 1738, John Wesley "received such a sense of the forgiveness of sins as till then he never knew." This was his steadfast testimony. The place and the hour-"about a quarter before nine"-he circumstantially and minutely recollects. His testimony is: "I felt my heart strangely warmed. I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone, for salvation; and an assurance was given me that he had taken away my sins, even mine." This must be accepted as the time of his conversion-meaning, by this term, his obtaining the conscious forgiveness of his sins, and the witness of the Holy Ghost to his adoption as a child of God.

*Southey purposed making the amende honorable in a third edition, for his misconception, and accordingly his misrepresentation, of Wesley, that "the love of power was the ruling passion of his mind;" but this modification of the work was suppressed by his son, a bigoted Churchman, on whom the responsibility of its publication was devolved. See "Smith's History of Wesleyan Methodism," page 635