`The veteran Methodist scholar Geoffrey Wainwright in a superb essay on Wesleyan hymnody and Chalcedon reminisced:
"When Paul Tillich was still a figure in twentieth-century theology I liked to say to students that Charles Wesley had captured first Tillich and then Chalcedon in just two lines:
“Being’s source begins to be,
And God himself is born.”
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John Wesley has rightly been described as a reasonable enthusiast. But his sermons are too often dismissed as rational argument over-endowed with logic and theological precision, lacking the vitality and imagination necessary to sustain interest and persuade the spirit. How about this then, as a pargrapah that, for spiritual experience described and communicated, stands alongside the effusive Francis De Sales, the intense Teresa of Avila, the passionately alight Augustine, and the enigmatic author of the Cloud of Unknowing, as an account of authentic experience of God, given classic expression in words.
From what has been said, we may learn...what the life of God in the soul of a believer is; wherein it properly consists; and what is immediately and necessarily implied therein. It immediately and necessarily implies the continual inspiration of God's Holy Spirit; God's breathing into the soul, and the soul's breathing back what it first receives from God; a continual action of God upon the soul, and a re-action of the soul upon God; an unceasing presence of God, the loving, pardoning God, manifested to the heart, and perceived by faith; and an unceasing return of love, praise, and prayer, offering up all the thoughts of our hearts, all the words of our tongues, all the works of our hands, all our body, soul, and spirit, to be a holy sacrifice, acceptable unto God in Christ Jesus.
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