TWICE-BORN MEN
REMARKABLE CONVERSIONS OF WELL-KNOWN MEN
IN DIFFERENT AGES AND IN VARIED RANKS OF LIFE
Compiled by HY. PICKERING
Founder of the Methodists
JOHN WESLEY, whose name is known world wide, wrote on 1st February, 1738: “It is now two years “and almost four months since I left my native country in order to teach the Georgian Indians the nature of Christianity. But what have I learned myself in the meantime? Why (what I the last of all suspected), that I, who went to America to convert others, was never myself converted to God. I am not mad, though I thus speak, but I speak the words of truth and soberness, if haply some of those who still dream may awake and see that as I am so are they. Are they read in philosophy? So was I. In ancient or modern tongues? So was I also. Are they versed in the science of divinity? I, too, have studied it many years. Can they talk fluently upon spiritual things?The very same could I do. Are they plenteous in alms? Behold, I gave all my goods to feed the poor. Do they give their labour as well as of their substance? I have laboured more abundantly than they all. Are they willing to suffer for their brethren? I have thrown up my friends, reputation, ease, country; I have put my life into my hand, wandering into strange lands; I have given my body to be devoured by the deep, parched up with heat, consumed by toil and weariness, or whatsoever God should please to bring upon me; but does all this (be it more or less, it matters not) make me acceptable to God? Does all I ever did or can know, say, give, do, or suffer, justify me in His sight? Yea, or the constant use of all the means of grace? Or that I am, as touching outward, moral righteousness blameless? Or, to come closer yet, the having a rational conviction of all the truths of Christianity? Does all this give me a claim to the holy, heavenly, Divine character of a Christian? By no means.
This, then, have I learned in the ends of the earth, that I am fallen short of the glory of God, that my whole heart is altogether corrupt and abominable, and consequently my whole life; seeing it cannot be that an evil tree should bring forth good fruit; that, alienated as I am from the life of God, I am a child of wrath, an heir of Hell; that my own works, my own sufferings, my own righteousness, are so far from making any atonement for the least of those sins, which are more in number than the hairs of my head; that the best of them need an atonement themselves, or they cannot abide His righteous judgment; that, having the sentence of death in my heart, and having nothing in or of myself to plead I have no hope but that of being justified freely through the Redemption that is in Jesus.
“If it be said that I have faith (for many such things have I heard from many miserable comforters), I answer, so have the devils a sort of faith, but still they are strangers to the covenant of promise; the faith I want is a sure trust and confidence in God, that through the merits of Christ, my sins are forgiven, and I reconciled to the favour of God. I want that faith which enables every one that hath it to cry out, ‘ I live, yet not I, but Christ liveth in me—and the life which I now live, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me” (Gal 2:20).
On the 24th of May, nearly four months after the above was written, while sitting listening to one reading Luther’s preface to the Epistle to the Romans, while he was describing the change which God works in the heart through faith in Christ, John Wesley trusted in Christ and was saved; his own words are: “I felt my heart strangely warmed. I felt I did trust in Christ, in Christ alone for salvation, and an assurance was given me that He had taken away my sins—even mine—and saved me from the law of sin and death.”
A tablet at the entrance to the Postman’s Park, in Aldersgate St., London, marks the spot where took place the conversion of this great sinner, who became as great a saint, and the most indefatigable Open-air Evangelist.