Scriptural Sanctification - Media Sabda Org

sanctification; for in both cases a believer testifies to a work consciously wrought in him by the
power of the Holy Spirit. Fancy and fanaticism are deeply seated in human nature. Nevertheless,
experience is experience. Unless Methodists have wholly misread the Bible, it teaches the working
of the mighty power of God in human souls. If it is a reality, we cannot but know it. If it is a
delusion, let us give up at once and forever the contention that religion is the life of God in the soul
of man, and deny that men are partakers of the divine nature. When freed from self-deception and
the possible admixtures of error imposed from without by traditional formulas, in the light of which
another seeks to lead the subject of experience to explain it, experience stands in the soul itself for
indisputable reality -- otherwise all the personal religious foundations are gone. If there are not
verifiable certainties of Christian experience, Methodism has been from the beginning a stupendous
blunder. The late Dr. R. W. Dale, in his "Living Christ and the Four Gospels," gives a vivid picture
of the dissipation of a Christian scholar's doubts by a plain man's experience. The learned divine
leaves his study and finds his way to a humble home where "he sits by the side of some poor, aged,
and illiterate man, whose strength is slowly wasting, and the conditions of whose life are very
cheerless; but the old man had traveled by the same path that all the saints have traveled. As the
scholar listened, he could recall, at point after point, identical experiences of his own. It was as if the
man were telling the story of years which he had spent in some foreign country which the scholar
also had visited. They had seen the same cities and harbors and churches and palaces, the same ruins,
the same mountains and rivers, the same crops, the same trees and flowers. The old man's account
of them was very different from what his own account would have been, the old man's theories and
explanations of them and his own were still more different, but it was certain that what he had seen
the old man had seen."
The doctrinal rather than the experimental presentation of Christian truth has characterized for
the most part the method of theologians. To this rule, John Wesley, as in so many other particulars,
was a noteworthy exception: in few other things have his wisdom and independence, his common
sense and courage, been more conspicuously displayed. The Christian consciousness, with its
well-defined peculiarities, of which many German theologians since Schleiermacher's day have made
so much -- some of them seeking to draw the entire system of dogmatics from this source -- had in
Wesley's time been ignored or underestimated. As in many questions of Biblical criticism, both as
to method and results, the founder of Methodism anticipated some of the most recent advances of
the highest scholarship -- compare his text emendations and translations in his "Notes on the New
Testament" with the Revised Version of 1881 -- so he was one of the earliest theologians and
religious teachers to draw attention to the doctrinal as well as the practical value of religious
experience, and to insist on the evidential value of the Christian consciousness. Every thoughtful
reader of that most marvelous record of apostolic activities outside the Holy Scriptures, Wesley's
Journal, must have been struck with the confirmation of his own faith which John Wesley derived
from the experiences of the people called Methodists whom God raised up under his ministry.
Dr. Brooks seems to me to have kept in the main to the well-defined truths of Wesleyan
orthodoxy on the subject of entire sanctification. He is not only Wesleyan, but, what is better, he is
scriptural, devoting his first eleven chapters to "the removing of those things that are shaken, as of
things that are made, that those things which cannot be shaken may remain." Whatever be the
advance in modern forms of statement, it is necessary to allow that the essential, delivering truths
of the gospel have been recognized in their true light, and realized in their appointed power, since