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Sermon 17: The Circumcision of the Heart

https://wesleyworks.ecdsdev.org/sermons/Sermon017

398 An Introductory Comment

This is a landmark sermon in more ways than one. First, it is the earliest of Wesley’s sermons in SOSO and carefully placed at the beginning of his second volume (1748) as an updated version of a sermon written fifteen years earlier for delivery in St. Mary’s, Oxford, on January 1, 1733. Second, it is one of Wesley’s most careful and complete statements of his doctrine of holiness, and he continued to regard it as such thereafter. In a later summary statement of his theological development to John Newton (May 14, 1765) he would write: ‘Jan. 1, 1733, I preached the sermon on “The Circumcision of the Heart”, which contains all that I now teach concerning salvation from all sin, and loving God with an undivided heart.’ Still later, (JWJ, September 1, 1778), he would recall: ‘I know not that I can write a better [sermon] on “The Circumcision of the Heart” than I did five and forty years ago. Perhaps, indeed, I may have read five or six hundred books more than I had then, and may know a little more history or natural philosophy than I did. But I am not sensible that this has made any essential addition to my knowledge of divinity. Forty years ago [i.e., 1738] I knew and preached every Christian doctrine which I preach now.’ Third, it supports the thesis that the basic elements of Wesley’s soteriology (with the exception of the Moravian emphases on ‘faith alone’ and on ‘assurance’) were already in place long before his Aldersgate experience. Original sin is there (though more as a disease than an obliterated imago Dei) and so also is the non posse non peccare (I.3: ‘without the Spirit of God we can do nothing but add sin to sin’). Christ’s atonement is affirmed as the sole ground of our redemption, and in I.7, he can add (in 1748) a personal confession in the language of his Aldersgate experience without disturbing the rhetoric or sense in any noticeable way: ‘I have an advocate with the Father…Jesus Christ the righteous is my Lord and the propitiation for my sins. I know…he hath reconciled me, even me, to God; and I have redemption through his blood, even the forgiveness of sins.’ The theme of the Christian’s participation in God is lovingly spelled out as the essence of Christian existence: ‘the being joined to the Lord in one Spirit. One design…to pursue to the end of time: the enjoyment of God in time and 399eternity.’ The means to this single end are also delineated—not faith alone, but humility (i.e., repentance), faith, hope, and love. Fourth, it helped to establish Wesley as a man of mark in the university. How else could one explain those six university sermons in the next two-and-one-half years (viz., out of proportion to the regular rotations; see above, Intro. to Sermon I, pp. 109-11 above).

Wesley’s diary entries show that he began to plan this sermon in late November and began to write it on December 8. The project was then complicated by the appearance of a derogatory letter in Fog’s Weekly Journal, Saturday, December 9, about ‘this Sect called Methodists’, on the various grounds of their ‘absurd and perpetual melancholy’, their ‘very near affinity to the Essenes among the Jews and the pietists among the Christians in Switzerland [sic]’, their ‘proposition that no action whatever is indifferent [which] is the chief hinge on which their whole scheme of religion turns’, and their ‘hypocrisy’, since ‘’tis certain that their Founder took formerly no small liberty in indulging his appetites…’. The obvious effect of any such defamation was the arousal of still more popular curiousity about the Methodists and their founder, and this assured him of a larger or more attentive audience than he might have expected otherwise. But it also made the occasion more crucial for Wesley’s career as a theologian, and this helps to explain the uncommon carefulness of his preparations. He spent close to thirty hours during the following fortnight writing a first draft; he then added as much more time in consultations with others about its further refinement: his brother Charles, his friend Hudson Martin, Euseby Isham (Rector of Lincoln), Dr. Joseph Smith (of Queen’s), Jonathan Colley (chaplain of Christ Church), and Emmanuel Langford (also of Christ Church).

Finally, on Monday, January 1, he mounted St. Mary’s pulpit to expound what would thenceforth become his most distinctive doctrine: Christian perfection understood as perfect love of God and neighbour, rooted in a radical faith in Christ’s revelation of that love and its power. His text was suggested by the occasion, the Feast of the Circumcision of Christ, and its Collect: ‘…Grant us the true circumcision of the spirit that, our hearts and all our members being mortified from all worldly and carnal lusts, we may in all things obey thy blessed will….’ Afterwards, he records his post-sermon mood as ‘chearfull’ and notes that the sermon had ‘found favour with the Rector [Isham] and the Vice-Chancellor’ (William Holmes of St. John’s). He seems not to have realized that Thomas Cockman, a prominent Latinist in the university, famed as the editor and translator of Cicero’s De Officiis (On Moral Obligations), 1699, had already preached two sermons before the 400university, January 2 and 6, 1731, on Salvation by Jesus Christ Alone…, both thoroughly Christocentric and both remarkably like ‘The Circumcision of the Heart’ on many basic points. The diaries show that Wesley had been out of town on the 2nd and had failed to attend the university service on the 6th. But Cockman’s sermons make clear that there was more evangelical teaching in Oxford than one would surmise from Wesley’s later descriptions of the place. There were those, however, who were unimpressed. A contemporary, Thomas Wilson, Jun. (1703-84), son of the famed Bishop of Sodor and Man, spoke for many in his curt evaluation of this sermon as ‘enthusiastic’; see The Diaries of Thomas Wilson, D.D.; 1731-37 and 1750, ed. C. L. S. Linnell (London, SPCK, 1964), p. 87.

‘The Circumcision of the Heart’ may profitably be paired with ‘Justification by Faith’ as two halves of the same ‘gospel’, and as twin foundation stones in Wesley’s theology as a whole. Moreover, Wesley’s deliberate placement of the two, out of chronological order but with a clear eye to his reader’s interest in the right order of Christian experience and life, is very much worth pondering.

401 The Circumcision of the Heart A Sermon preached at St. Mary’s, Oxford,
before the University,
on January 1, 1733.

Romans 2:29

Circumcision is that of the heart, in the spirit and not in the letter.

11. ’Tis the melancholy remark of an excellent man that ‘he who now preaches the most essential duties of Christianity runs the hazard of being esteemed by a great part of his hearers “a setter forth of new doctrines”.’

Cf. Acts 17:18-19. The ‘excellent man’ is probably William Law, whose recent Serious Call would have been widely familiar in Oxford: ‘And if in these days we want examples of these several degrees of perfection, if neither clergy nor laity are enough of this spirit; if we are so far departed from it that a man seems, like St. Paul at Athens, a setter forth of strange doctrines when he recommends self-denial, renunciation of the world, regular devotion, retirement, virginity, and voluntary poverty [the gist of Law’s ethical agenda], it is because we are fallen into an age where the love, not of many but of most, is waxed cold’ (Works, IV.80).

For further comments of this sort by Wesley himself, see Nos. 25, ‘Sermon on the Mount, V’, §1; and 150, ‘Hypocrisy in Oxford’, I.1; JWJ, May 28, 1738; and ‘A Short History of the People Called Methodists’, §11.

Most men have so lived away the substance of that religion, the profession whereof they still retain, that no sooner are any of those truths proposed which difference the Spirit of Christ from the spirit of the world than they cry out, ‘Thou bringest strange things to our ears; we would know what these things mean’

Cf. Acts 17:20.

—though he is only preaching to them ‘Jesus, and the resurrection’,

Acts 17:18.

with the necessary consequence of it. If Christ be risen, ye ought then to die unto the world, and to live wholly unto God.

22. A hard saying this to the ‘natural man’

Cf. No. 9, ‘The Spirit of Bondage and of Adoption’, §5 and n.

who is alive unto the world, and dead unto God, and one that he will not readily be persuaded to receive as the truth of God, unless it be so qualified 402in the interpretation as to have neither use nor significancy left. He ‘receiveth not the’ words ‘of the Spirit of God’, taken in their plain and obvious meaning. ‘They are foolishness unto him; neither’ indeed ‘can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned:’

1 Cor. 2:14.

they are perceivable only by that spiritual sense which in him was never yet awakened, for want of which he must reject as idle fancies of men what are both the ‘wisdom’ and the ‘power of God’.

1 Cor. 1:24.

33. That ‘circumcision is that of the heart, in the spirit, and not in the letter’, that the distinguishing mark of a true follower of Christ, of one who is in a state of acceptance with God, is not either outward circumcision or baptism, or any other outward form, but a right state of soul—a mind and spirit renewed after the image of him that created it—is one of those important truths that can only be ‘spiritually discerned’. And this the Apostle himself intimates in the next words: ‘Whose praise is not of men, but of God.’

Cf. Rom. 2:29; this is a subjective genitive: ‘praise from God’. See also John 12:43 and 1 Cor. 4:5; the stress is on God’s approval of Christian virtue in the ‘renewed’ creature. Cf. No. 4, Scriptural Christianity, I.6 and n.

As if he had said, ‘Expect not, whoever thou art who thus followest thy great Master, that the world, the men who follow him not, will say, “Well done, good and faithful servant!”

Matt. 25:23.

Know that the “circumcision of the heart”, the seal of thy calling, is “foolishness with the world”.

Cf. 1 Cor. 1:20-21.

Be content to wait for thy applause till the day of thy Lord’s appearing. In that day shalt thou “have praise of God”

1 Cor. 4:5; cf. Rom. 2:29.

in the great assembly of men and angels.’

I design, first, particularly to inquire wherein this circumcision of the heart

All printed edits, up to SOSO, II (1787), read ‘circumcision of heart’ here and in I.1, below; Wesley’s final reading quietly restores the definite article.

consists; and secondly to mention some reflections that naturally arise from such an inquiry.

1I. 1. I am first to inquire wherein that circumcision of the heart consists which will receive the praise of God. In general we may observe it is that habitual disposition of soul which in the Sacred Writings is termed ‘holiness’, and which directly implies the being cleansed from sin, ‘from all filthiness both of flesh and 403spirit’,

Cf. 2 Cor. 7:1.

and by consequence the being endued with those virtues which were also in Christ Jesus, the being so ‘renewed in the image of our mind’

Cf. Eph. 4:23.

as to be ‘perfect, as our Father in heaven is perfect’.

Cf. Matt. 5:48.

22. To be more particular, circumcision of heart implies humility, faith, hope, and charity.

Cf. 1 Cor. 13:13 (where ‘humility’ does not appear). Note that here Wesley uses the AV translation of ἀγάπη (‘charity’), whereas in II.9, below, he shifts to his much preferred usage, ‘love’. Cf. No. 91, ‘On Charity’ for his arguments for ‘love’; but see above, No. 5, ‘Justification by Faith’, III.6, where he uses ‘charity’, and below, No. 22, ‘Sermon on the Mount, II’, III.3, where he speaks of ‘“charity” or love’; see also the MS sermon, No. 149, ‘On Love’, II.1-2, where he discusses ‘the true meaning of the word “charity”’. Later, in JWJ, July 4, 1776, he will record: ‘In the evening I showed, to a still more crowded audience, the nature and necessity of Christian love, ἀγάπη, vilely rendered “charity” to confound poor English readers.’ For all that, ‘charity’ was standard usage among the generality of those same ‘poor English readers’; four of their principal translations read ‘charity’. Wesley, therefore, seems to have bowed to common usage where it seemed needful, but continued to advocate ‘love’ as a happier choice than ‘charity’ for ἀγάπη. Cf. his Notes, and Nos. 7, ‘The Way to the Kingdom’, I.9; 65, ‘The Duty of Reproving our Neighbour’, III.2; 76, ‘On Perfection’, 1.4; 80, ‘On Friendship with the World’, §24; 83, ‘On Patience’, §10. Cf. also his letter to Ann Bolton, Dec. 5, 1772.

Humility, a right judgment of ourselves,

An echo here, and in this whole para., of William Law, Christian Perfection, Works, III.103-4. See also Nos. 7, ‘The Way to the Kingdom’, II.1 and n.; and 21, ‘Sermon on the Mount, I’, I.7 and n. This stress on humility, and the equation of humility, self-knowledge, and repentance, is one of Law’s main themes, but so also it had been in Jeremy Taylor and other Anglican divines.

cleanses our minds from those high conceits of our own perfections, from the undue opinions of our own abilities and attainments which are the genuine fruit of a corrupted nature. This entirely cuts off that vain thought, ‘I am rich, and wise, and have need of nothing;’ and convinces us that we are by nature ‘wretched, and poor, and miserable, and blind, and naked’.

Cf. Rev. 3:17.

It convinces us that in our best estate we are of ourselves all sin and vanity; that confusion, and ignorance, and error, reign over our understanding; that unreasonable, earthly, sensual, devilish passions usurp authority over our will: in a word, that there is no whole part in our soul, that all the foundations of our nature are out of course.

Cf. Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, II. viii.

33. At the same time we are convinced that we are not sufficient of ourselves to help ourselves; that without the Spirit of God we can do nothing but add sin to sin; that it is he alone ‘who worketh 404in us’ by his almighty power, either ‘to will or do’

Cf. Phil. 2:13. Cf. No. 85, ‘On Working Out Our Own Salvation’, I.1-4.

that which is good—it being as impossible for us even to think a good thought without the supernatural assistance of his Spirit as to create ourselves, or to renew our whole souls in righteousness and true holiness.

44. A sure effect of our having formed this right judgment of the sinfulness and helplessness of our nature is a disregard of that ‘honour which cometh of man’

Cf. John 5:41, 44.

which is usually paid to some supposed excellency in us. He who knows himself neither desires nor values the applause which he knows he deserves not. It is therefore ‘a very small thing with him to be judged by man’s judgment’.

Cf. 1 Cor. 4:3.

He has all reason to think, by comparing what it has said either for or against him with what he feels in his own breast, that the world, as well as the god of this world, was ‘a liar from the beginning’.

Cf. John 8:44.

And even as to those who are not of the world, though he would choose (if it were the will of God) that they should account of him as of one desirous to be found a faithful steward of his Lord’s goods,

See Luke 12:42.

if haply this might be a means of enabling him to be of more use to his fellow-servants, yet as this is the one end of his wishing for their approbation, so he does not at all rest upon it. For he is assured that whatever God wills he can never want instruments to perform; since he is able, even of these stones, to raise up servants

See Matt. 3:9.

to do his pleasure.

55. This is that lowliness of mind which they have learned of Christ who follow his example and tread in his steps. And this knowledge of their disease, whereby they are more and more cleansed from one part of it, pride and vanity, disposes them to embrace with a willing mind the second thing implied in ‘circumcision of heart’—that faith which alone is able to make them whole, which is the one medicine given under heaven to heal their sickness.

Note the correlations here of faith, wholeness, and the theme of θεραπεία ψυχής. Cf. No. 13, On Sin in Believers, III.8 and n.

66. The best guide of the blind, the surest light of them that are in darkness, the most perfect instructor of the foolish,

See Rom. 2:19-20.

is faith. But it must be such a faith as is ‘mighty through God, to the pulling down of strongholds’,

2 Cor. 10:4.

to the overturning all the 405prejudices of corrupt reason, all the false maxims revered among men, all evil customs and habits, all that ‘wisdom of the world’ which ‘is foolishness with God’;

1 Cor. 3:19.

as ‘casteth down imaginations’ (reasonings) ‘and every high thing that exalteth itself against the knowledge of God, and bringeth into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ’.

2 Cor. 10:5.

77. ‘All things are possible to him that’ thus ‘believeth:’

Mark 9:23.

‘the eyes of his understanding being enlightened,’ he sees what is his calling,

Eph. 1:18.

even to ‘glorify God, who hath bought him with’ so high ‘a price, in his body and in his spirit, which now are God’s’

Cf. 1 Cor. 6:20.

by redemption, as well as by creation. He feels what is ‘the exceeding greatness of his power’

Eph. 1:19.

who, as he raised up Christ from the dead, so is able to quicken us—‘dead in sin’

Cf. Eph. 2:1, 5.

—‘by his Spirit which dwelleth in us’.

Rom. 8:11.

‘This is the victory which overcometh the world, even our faith:’

1 John 5:4.

that faith which is not only an unshaken assent to all that God hath revealed in Scripture, and in particular to those important truths, ‘Jesus Christ came into the world to save sinners;’

1 Tim. 1:15.

he ‘bare our sins in his own body on the tree’;

1 Pet. 2:24.

‘he is the propitiation for our sins; and not for ours only, but also for the sins of the whole world;’

N.B. The following part of this paragraph is now added to the sermon formerly preached. [The preceding quotation is from 1 John 2:2.]

but likewise the revelation of Christ in our hearts: a divine evidence or conviction of his love, his free, unmerited love to me a sinner;

See Heb. 11:1. This definition of faith is one that Wesley came to regard as normative; cf. No. 3, ‘Awake, Thou That Sleepest’, I.11 and n.

a sure confidence in his pardoning mercy, wrought in us by the Holy Ghost—a confidence whereby every true believer is enabled to bear witness, ‘I know that my Redeemer liveth;’

Job 19:15.

that I ‘have an advocate with the Father’, that ‘Jesus Christ the righteous is’ my Lord, and ‘the propitiation for my sins.’

1 John 2:1-2.

I know he ‘hath loved me, and given himself for me’.

Cf. Eph. 5:2.

He ‘hath reconciled me, even me to God’;

Cf. Rom. 5:10.

and I ‘have redemption through his blood, even the forgiveness of sins’.

Col. 1:14. In 1732 Wesley was still preoccupied with holy living. Here, in 1748, he has added his discovery of justifying faith as unmerited mercy and as the assurance of forgiveness through the merits of Christ’s propitiatory death.

8 4068. Such a faith as this cannot fail to show evidently the power of him that inspires it, by delivering his children from the yoke of sin, and ‘purging their consciences from dead works’;

Cf. Heb. 9:14.

by strengthening them so that they are no longer constrained to ‘obey sin in the desires thereof’; but instead of ‘yielding their members unto’ it, ‘as instruments of unrighteousness’, they now ‘yield’ them-selves entirely ‘unto God, as those that are alive from the dead’.

Cf. Rom. 6:12-13.

99. Those who are thus by faith ‘born of God’

1 John 3:9, etc.

have also ‘strong consolation through hope’.

Cf. Heb. 6:18.

This is the next thing which the ‘circumcision of the heart’ implies—even the testimony of their own spirit with the Spirit which witnesses in their hearts, that they are the children of God.

Rom. 8:16; see above, Nos. 10 and 11, ‘The Witness of the Spirit’, Discourses I and II; and No. 12, ‘The Witness of Our Own Spirit.’

Indeed it is the same Spirit who works in them that clear and cheerful confidence that their heart is upright toward God; that good assurance that they now do, through his grace, the things which are acceptable in his sight; that they are now in the path which leadeth to life, and shall, by the mercy of God, endure therein to the end. It is he who giveth them a lively expectation of receiving all good things at God’s hand—a joyous prospect of that ‘crown of glory’ which is ‘reserved in heaven’

1 Pet. 1:4; 5:4.

for them. By this anchor a Christian is kept steady in the midst of the waves of this troublesome world, and preserved from striking upon either of those fatal rocks, presumption or despair. He is neither discouraged by the misconceived severity of his Lord, nor does he ‘despise the richness of his goodness’.

Rom. 2:4.

He neither apprehends the difficulties of the race set before him

See Heb. 12:1.

to be greater than he has strength to conquer, nor expects them to be so little as to yield him the conquest till he has put forth all his strength. The experience he already has in the Christian warfare, as it assures him his ‘labour is not in vain’

1 Cor. 15:58.

if ‘whatever his hand findeth to do, he doth it with his might,’

Cf. Eccles. 9:10.

so it forbids his entertaining so vain a thought as that he can otherwise gain any advantage, as that any virtue can be shown, any praise attained, by ‘faint hearts and feeble hands’

Ecclus. 2:12; cf. Ezek. 7:12.

—or indeed by any but those who pursue the same 407course with the great Apostle of the Gentiles: ‘I (says he) so run, not as uncertainly; so fight I, not as one that beateth the air. But I keep under my body, and bring it into subjection; lest by any means when I have preached to others, I myself should be a castaway.’

1 Cor. 9:26-27.

1010. By the same discipline is every good soldier of Christ to ‘inure himself to endure hardships’.

Cf. 2 Tim. 2:3.

Confirmed and strengthened by this, he will be able not only to renounce ‘the works of darkness’,

Rom. 13:12.

but every appetite, too, and every affection which is not subject to the law of God. For ‘everyone’, saith St. John, ‘who hath this hope purifieth himself, even as he is pure.’

Cf. 1 John 3:3.

It is his daily care, by the grace of God in Christ, and through the blood of the covenant, to purge the inmost recesses of his soul from the lusts that before possessed and defiled it: from uncleanness, and envy, and malice, and wrath, from every passion and temper that is ‘after the flesh’,

John 8:15, etc.

that either springs from or cherishes his native corruption; as well knowing that he whose very ‘body is the temple of God’

Cf. 1 Cor. 6:19.

ought to admit into it nothing common or unclean; and that ‘holiness becometh’ that ‘house for ever

Ps. 93:6 (BCP).

where the Spirit of holiness vouchsafes to dwell.

An echo of the Puritan stress on self-examination and of Jeremy Taylor’s doctrine of repentance; cf. his Unum Necessarium (Works, II.419-646).

1111. Yet lackest thou one thing, whosoever thou art, that to a deep humility and a steadfast faith hast joined a lively hope, and thereby in a good measure cleansed thy heart from its inbred pollution. If thou wilt be perfect, add to all these charity: add love, and thou hast the ‘circumcision of the heart’. ‘Love is the fulfilling of the law,’

Rom. 13:10.

‘the end of the commandment’.

1 Tim. 1:5.

Very excellent things are spoken of love; it is the essence, the spirit, the life of all virtue. It is not only the first and great command,

Matt. 22:38.

but it is all the commandments in one. Whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are amiable or honourable; if there be any virtue, if there be any praise,

Phil. 4:8.

they are all comprised in this one word—love. In this is perfection and glory and happiness. The royal law of heaven and earth is this, ‘Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with dl thy strength.’

Mark 12:30.

12 40812. Not that this forbids us to love anything besides God: it implies that we ‘love our brother also’.

Cf. 1 John 4:21.

Not yet does it forbid us (as some have strangely imagined) to take pleasure in anything but God.

An obvious rejoinder to the accusation in the letter to Fog’s Weekly Journal that the Oxford Methodists ‘avoid, as much as is possible, every object that may affect them with any pleasant and grateful sensation…, fancying…that religion was designed to contradict nature.’

To suppose this is to suppose the fountain of holiness is directly the author of sin, since he has inseparably annexed pleasure to the use of those creatures which are necessary to sustain the life he has given us. This therefore can never be the meaning of his command. What the real sense of it is both our blessed Lord and his apostles tell us too frequently and too plainly to be misunderstood. They all with one mouth bear witness that the true meaning of those several declarations—‘The Lord thy God is one Lord; thou shalt have no other gods but me,’

Cf. Deut. 6:4, 14; Mark 12:29, 32.

‘Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy strength,’

Mark 12:30, etc.

‘Thou shalt cleave unto him;’

Deut. 13:4; Acts 11:23.

‘The desire of thy soul shall be to his name’

Isa. 26:8.

—is no other than this. The one perfect good shall be your ultimate end. One thing shall ye desire for its own sake—the fruition of him that is all in all.

See 1 Cor. 15:20-28.

One happiness shall ye propose to your souls, even an union with him that made them, the having ‘fellowship with the Father and the Son’,

Cf. 1 John 1:3.

the being ‘joined to the Lord in one Spirit’.

Cf. 1 Cor. 6:17.

One design ye are to pursue to the end of time—the enjoyment of God in time and in eternity.

Note here the combination of the theme of participation and of ‘the enjoyment of God’; cf. the Westminster Catechism, Q. and A. 1.

Desire other things so far as they tend to this. Love the creature—as it leads to the Creator. But in every step you take be this the glorious point that terminates your view. Let every affection, and thought, and word, and work, be subordinate to this. Whatever ye desire or fear, whatever ye seek or shun, whatever ye think, speak, or do, be it in order to your happiness in God,

Cf. No. 6, ‘The Righteousness of Faith’, II.9 and n.

the sole end as well as source of your being.

1313. Have no end, no ultimate end, but God. Thus our Lord: ‘One thing is needful.’

Luke 10:42.

And if thine eye be singly fixed on this 409one thing, ‘thy whole body shall be full of light.’

Matt. 6:22.

Thus St. Paul: ‘This one thing I do; […] I press toward the mark, for the prize of the high calling in Christ Jesus.’

Phil. 3:13-14.

Thus St. James: ‘Cleanse your hands, ye sinners, and purify your hearts, ye double-minded.’

Jas. 4:8.

Thus St. John: ‘Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world. […] For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eye, and the pride of life, is not of the Father, but is of the world.’

1 John 2:15-16. See below, II.9; also No. 7, ‘The Way to the Kingdom’, II.2 and n.

The seeking happiness in what gratifies either the desire of the flesh, by agreeably striking upon the outward senses; the desire of the eye, of the imagination, by its novelty, greatness, or beauty; or the pride of life,

Cf. 1 John 2:16—Wesley’s favourite text for an inclusive triad of sinful passions. Cf. No. 7, ‘The Way to the Kingdom’, II.2 and n.

whether by pomp, grandeur, power, or the usual consequence of them, applause and admiration: ‘is not of the Father’—cometh not from, neither is approved by, the Father of spirits—‘but of the world’—it is the distinguishing mark of those who will not have him reign over them.

1II. 1. Thus have I particularly inquired what that ‘circumcision of the heart’ is which will obtain the praise of God.

Cf. above, §3 and n.

I am in the second place to mention some reflections that naturally arise from such an inquiry, as a plain rule whereby every man may judge himself whether he be of the world or of God.

And, first, it is clear from what has been said that no man has a title to the praise of God unless his heart is circumcised by humility, unless he is little, and base, and vile in his own eyes; unless he is deeply convinced of that inbred ‘corruption of his nature, whereby he is very far gone from original righteousness’,

Cf. Art. IX, ‘Of Original or Birth Sin’ in the Thirty-nine Articles.

being prone to all evil, averse to all good, corrupt and abominable; having a ‘carnal mind’, which ‘is enmity against God, and is not subject to the Law of God, nor indeed can be’;

Cf. Rom. 8:7.

unless he continually feels in his inmost soul that without the Spirit of God resting upon him he can neither think, nor desire, nor speak, nor act, anything good or well-pleasing in his sight.

Heb. 13:21.

410No man, I say, has a title to the praise of God till he feels his want of God: nor indeed till he seeketh that ‘honour, which cometh of God only’,

John 5:44. Cf. above, §3 and n.

and neither desires nor pursues that which cometh of man, unless so far only as it tends to this.

22. Another truth which naturally follows from what has been said is that none shall obtain the honour that cometh of God unless his heart be circumcised by faith, even a ‘faith of the operation of God’;

Col. 2:12.

unless, refusing to be any longer led by his senses, appetites, or passions, or even by that blind leader of the blind,

Matt. 15:14.

so idolized by the world, natural reason, he lives and ‘walks by faith’,

2 Cor. 5:7.

directs every step as ‘seeing him that is invisible’,

Heb. 11:27.

‘looks not at the things that are seen, which are temporal, but at the things that are not seen, which are eternal’;

2 Cor. 4:18.

and governs all his desires, designs, and thoughts, all his actions and conversations, as one who is entered in within the veil,

Heb. 6:19.

where Jesus sits at the right hand of God.

See Col. 3:1; Mark 16:19; Acts 7:55.

33. It were to be wished that they were better acquainted with this faith who employ much of their time and pains in laying another foundation, in grounding religion on ‘the eternal fitness of things’, on ‘the intrinsic excellence of virtue’, and the beauty of actions flowing from it—on the reasons, as they term them, of good and evil, and the relations of beings to each other.

The men complained of here range from the third Earl of Shaftesbury (cf. his Inquiry Concerning Virtue or Merit, and his Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times [1st edn., 1711; 4th edn., 1727]), to Samuel Clarke (Discourse Concerning the Unchangeable Obligations of Natural Religion and the Truth and Certainty of the Christian Revelation [1706], espec. pp. 46 ff.; see also his Demonstration of the Being and Attributes of God [1705], Prop. XII, and espec. pp. 247-48), to Richard Fiddes (A General Treatise of Morality [1724]), to Francis Hutcheson’s Inquiry, and Essay. They include both deists and rationalists; cf. John Leland, A View of the Principal Deistical Writers…, 1754-56, 3 vols. (3rd edn., 1757). See also Notes and Queries (6th series), VIII.79, 138. For more complaints of the same sort, cf. No. 34, ‘The Original, Nature, Properties, and Use of the Law’, II.5.

Either these accounts of the grounds of Christian duty coincide with the scriptural or not. If they do, why are well-meaning men perplexed, and drawn from the weightier matters of the law by a cloud of terms whereby the easiest truths are explained into obscurity? If they are not, then it behoves them to consider who is the author of this new doctrine, whether he is likely to be ‘an angel 411from heaven’ who ‘preacheth another gospel’

Cf. Gal. 1:8.

than that of Christ Jesus—though if he were, God, not we, hath pronounced his sentence: ‘Let him be accursed!’

100

Ibid.

44. Our gospel, as it knows no other foundation of good works than faith, or of faith than Christ, so it clearly informs us we are not his disciples while we either deny him to be the author or his Spirit to be the inspirer and perfecter both of our faith and works. ‘If any man have not the Spirit of Christ, he is none of his.’

101

Rom. 8:9.

He alone can quicken those who are dead unto God, can breathe into them the breath of Christian life, and so prevent, accompany, and follow them with his grace as to bring their good desires to good effect. And ‘as many as are thus led by the Spirit of God, they are the sons of God.’

102

Rom. 8:14.

This is God’s short and plain account of true religion and virtue; and ‘other foundation can no man lay.’

103

1 Cor. 3:11.

55. From what has been said we may, thirdly, learn that none is truly ‘led by the Spirit’ unless that ‘Spirit bear witness with his spirit, that he is a child of God’;

104

Rom. 8:16. Cf. No. 5, ‘Justification by Faith’, IV.2 and n.

unless he see the prize and the crown before him, and ‘rejoice in hope of the glory of God’:

105

Rom. 5:2.

so greatly have they erred who have taught that in serving God we ought not to have a view to our own happiness. Nay, but we are often and expressly taught of God to have ‘respect unto the recompense of reward’,

106

Heb. 11:26.

to balance the toil with the ‘joy set before us’,

107

Cf. Heb. 12:2.

these ‘light afflictions’ with that ‘exceeding weight of glory’.

108

2 Cor. 4:17.

Yea, we are ‘aliens to the covenant of promise’, we are ‘without God in the world’,

109

Eph. 2:12.

until God of ‘his abundant mercy hath begotten us again unto a living hope’ of the ‘inheritance incorruptible, undefiled, and that fadeth not away’.

110

1 Pet. 1:3-4.

66. But if these things are so, ’tis high time for those persons to deal faithfully with their own souls—who are so far from finding in themselves this joyful assurance, that they fulfil the terms and shall obtain the promises of that covenant, as to quarrel with the covenant itself, and blaspheme the terms of it, to complain they are too severe, and that no man ever did or shall live up to them! 412What is this but to reproach God, as if he were an hard master requiring of his servants more than he enables them to perform; as if he had mocked the helpless works of his hands by binding them to impossibilities, by commanding them to overcome where neither their own strength nor his grace was sufficient for them?

77. These blasphemers might almost persuade those to imagine themselves guiltless who, in the contrary extreme, hope to fulfil the commands of God without taking any pains at all.

111

Note this early version of what will become Wesley’s definition of enthusiasm; cf. No. 37, ‘The Nature of Enthusiasm’, §27.

Vain hope! that a child of Adam should ever expect to see the kingdom of Christ and of God without striving, without ‘agonizing’ first ‘to enter in at the strait gate’!

112

Luke 13:24. Note Wesley’s preference here for ‘agonizing’ over ‘striving’ as a translation of ἀγωνίζεστε; cf. Notes, and Nos. 25, ‘Sermon on the Mount, V’, III.6; 31, ‘Sermon on the Mount, XI’, III.1, 5, 6; 89, ‘The More Excellent Way’, §5.

That one who was ‘conceived and born in sin’,

113

Cf. Ps. 51:5.

and whose ‘inward parts are very wickedness’,

114

Ps. 5:9.

should once entertain a thought of being ‘purified as his Lord is pure’

115

Cf. 1 John 3:3.

unless he ‘tread in his steps’,

116

Cf. 1 Pet. 2:21.

and ‘take up his cross daily’;

117

Luke 9:23.

unless he ‘cut off the right hand’, and ‘pluck out the right eye and cast it from him’;

118

Cf. Matt. 18:8-9.

that he should ever dream of shaking off his old opinions, passions, tempers, of being ‘sanctified throughout in spirit, soul, and body’,

119

Cf. 1 Thess. 5:23.

without a constant and continued course of general self-denial!

88. What less than this can we possibly infer from the above cited words of St. Paul, who, ‘living in “infirmities, in reproaches, in necessities, in persecutions, in distresses” for Christ’s sake, who being full of “signs, and wonders, and mighty deeds”, who having been “caught up into the third heaven”, yet reckoned’ (as a late author strongly expresses it) that ‘all his virtues’ would be ‘insecure, and’ even ‘his salvation in danger, without this constant self-denial. […] “So run I”, says he, “not as uncertainly; so fight I, not as one that beateth the air.” By which he plainly teaches us that he who does not thus run, who does not thus’ deny himself daily, does ‘run uncertainly, and fighteth to as little purpose as he that “beateth the air”.’

120

Cf. Law, Christian Perfection (Works, III.117), who quotes in turn 2 Cor. 12:10, 12; ver. 2, and 1 Cor. 9:26. Note how close Law comes to turning St. Paul’s triad (‘faith, hope, and love’) into a quartet by his addition of ‘self-denial’ as an equal theological virtue; Wesley follows him here in his stress on its equivalent, ‘humility’. Cf. John Worthington, whose Great Duty of Self-Resignation to the Divine Will (1675, 1689) was extracted by Wesley for his Christian Lib., XXIII-XXIV.

9 4139. To as little purpose does he talk of ‘fighting the fight of faith’,

121

1 Tim. 6:12.

as vainly hope to attain the crown of incorruption (as we may, lastly, infer from the preceding observations), whose heart is not circumcised by love. Cutting off both the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eye, and the pride of life,

122

1 John 2:16; see above, I.13 and n.

engaging the whole man, body, soul, and spirit, in the ardent pursuit of that one object, is so essential to a child of God that ‘without it whosoever liveth is counted dead before him.’

123

Cf. BCP, Collects, Quinquagesima, which speaks of charity as ‘that most excellent gift, …the very bond of peace and of all virtues.’

‘Though I speak with the tongues of men and angels, and have not love, I am as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal. Though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge, and though I have all faith so as to remove mountains, and have not love, I am nothing. Nay, though I give all my goods to feed the poor, and my body to be burned, and have not love, it profiteth me nothing.’

124

Cf. 1 Cor. 13:1-3.

1010. Here then is the sum of the perfect law: this is the true ‘circumcision of the heart’. Let the spirit return to God that gave it, with the whole train of its affections. ‘Unto the place from whence all the rivers came, thither’

125

Cf. Eccles. 1:7.

let them flow again. Other sacrifices from us he would not; but the living sacrifice of the heart he hath chosen. Let it be continually offered up to God through Christ, in flames of holy love. And let no creature be suffered to share with him: for he is a jealous God.

126

Exod. 20:5, etc.

His throne will he not divide with another: he will reign without a rival. Be no design, no desire admitted there but what has him for its ultimate object. This is the way wherein those children of God once walked, who being dead still speak to us:

127

See Heb. 11:4.

‘Desire not to live but to praise his name; let all your thoughts, words, and works tend to his glory. Set your heart firm on him, and on other things only as they are in and from him.’

128

Is this, and are the following three quotations, an imagined summary of what the saints have to tell us? More probably they are quotations from older devotional texts known to Wesley and to at least some of his audience, but not yet located in this context.

‘Let your soul be filled with so entire a love of him that you may love nothing but for his sake.’ ‘Have a 414pure intention of heart, a steadfast regard to his glory in all your actions.’ ‘Fix your eye upon the blessed hope of your calling, and make all the things of the world minister unto it.’ For then, and not till then, is that ‘mind in us which was also in Christ Jesus’,

129

Cf. Phil. 2:5.

when in every motion of our heart, in every word of our tongue, in every work of our hands, we ‘pursue nothing but in relation to him, and in subordination to his pleasure’; when we, too, neither think, nor speak, nor act, to fulfil our ‘own will, but the will of him that sent us’;

130

Cf. John 5:30; 6:38.

when whether we ‘eat, or drink, or whatever we do, we do all to the glory of God’.

131

Cf. 1 Cor. 10:31.

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Entry Title: Sermon 17: The Circumcision of the Heart

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