Notes:
Sermon 106: On Faith
This sermon was first published in SOSO, VIII.233-48 (1788), with the title as given here but with no indication of place and date. In the Arminian Magazine, where it appeared in the November and December issues (without title but numbered as ‘Sermon XLVIII’), it was dated as at ‘Stockport, April 9, 1788’. Wesley was in Stockport on April 9, and probably put the finishing touches on a manuscript that he had already been writing in snatches before sending it back to London to be printed. It may be interesting that Wesley had not preached on Heb. 11:6 before. However, on June 8, 1790 (in Newcastle), he returned to it; moreover, in his last two years he wrote two more sermons about ‘faith’ (Nos. 117, ‘On the Discoveries of Faith’; and 132, ‘On Faith, Heb. 11:1’) and another on 2 Cor. 5:7 (No. 119, ‘Walking by Sight and Walking by Faith’).
This present sermon summarizes Wesley’s gradual but decisive move away from his early, stark disjunctions between the conscious assurance of God’s favour and its total absence. Here, we find a sort of tacit retraction of his earlier harsh judgments against ‘lower degrees of faith’, as in The Almost Christian and Scriptural Christianity. It can be read, therefore, as a concluding comment on the whole idea of degrees of faith (each valid in its degree); indeed, it comes closer to an explicit statement of his vision of universal saving grace than anything else in the Wesley corpus.
Cf. Michael Hurley, S.J., ‘Salvation Today and Wesley Today’, in The Place of Wesley in the Christian Tradition, ed. Kenneth E. Rowe, pp. 94-116; note that Fr. Hurley does not mention this sermon but recognizes its motif as characteristic in other writings of Wesley.
Hebrews 11:6
Without faith it is impossible to please him.
11. But what is faith? It is a divine ‘evidence, and conviction of things not seen’;
Cf. Heb. 11:1; see No. 3, ‘Awake, Thou That Sleepest’, I.11 and n.
22. Something indeed of a similar kind has been written by that great and good man, Mr. Fletcher, in his treatise on the various dispensations of the grace of God.
Cf. John W. Fletcher, The Doctrines of Grace and Justice… (1777), sect. I, pp. 1-13. Fletcher’s ‘four capital dispensations’ are ‘I. Gentilism, which is frequently called “natural religion”;’ ‘II. Judaism, which is frequently called the Mosaic dispensation;’ ‘III. The Gospel of John the Baptist;’ and ‘IV. The Perfect Gospel of Christ.’
Cf. Heb. 11:6.
See Rom. 3:2.
Cf. Gen. 3:15.
33. But above both the heathen and Jewish dispensation was that of John the Baptist. To him a still clearer light was given: and he 03:493was himself ‘a burning and a shining light’.
John 5:35.
Cf. John 1:29.
Cf. Luke 7:28.
Cf. Rom. 8:15-16.
In order to explain this still farther I will endeavour by the help of God, first, to point out the several sorts of faith, and, secondly, to draw some practical inferences.
1I. In the first place I will endeavour to point out the several sorts of faith. It would be easy either to reduce these to a smaller number or to divide them into a greater. But it does not appear that this would answer any valuable purpose.
11. The lowest sort of faith, if it be any faith at all, is that of a materialist—a man who (like the late Lord Kames)
Henry Home, Lord Kames (1696-1782), a Scottish jurist and philosopher (of Castle Kames, Berwickshire); Wesley consistently misspelled his title as ‘Kaim’. A follower of David Hume, Kames had expounded his materialism in his Essays on the Principles of Morality and Natural Religion (1751) and Sketches of the History of Man (1774). Wesley had responded to the essay, ‘On Liberty and Necessity’, in his Thoughts Upon Necessity (1774), and in 1781 had denounced the Sketches as ‘a masterpiece of infidelity’ (cf. JWJ, May 24-25, 1774; July 6, 1781).
Cf. Heb. 11:1 (Notes).
Cf. Lucan, Civil War, ix.580: ‘Jupiter est quodcumque vides, quodcumque moveris’, ‘God is whatever we see, wherever we move.’
22. The second sort of faith, if you allow a materialist to have any, is the faith of a deist. I mean, one who believes there is a God, distinct from matter, but does not believe the Bible. Of these we may observe two sorts: one sort are mere beasts in human shape, wholly under the power of the basest passions, and having
“A downright appetite to mix with mud.π;Source unidentified.
Other deists are, in most respects, rational creatures, though unhappily prejudiced against Christianity. Most of these believe the being and attributes of God; they believe that God made and governs the world, and that the soul does not die with the body, but will remain for ever in a state of happiness or misery.
33. The next sort of faith is the faith of heathens,
See No. 1, Salvation by Faith, I.2 and n.
A blurred memory of Wesley’s conversation with Chicali in Savannah on July 3, 1736 (cf. JWJ, July 1).
44. It cannot be doubted but this plea will avail for millions of modern ‘heathens’. Inasmuch as to them little is given, of them little will be required.
See Luke 12:48.
For Wesley’s other references to the salvability of the heathen, see No. 91, ‘On Charity’, I.3 and n.
Cf. The Improvement of Human Reason, exhibited in the life of Hai Ebn Yokdhan, written above five hundred years ago, by Abu Jaafar Ebn Tuphail, translated from the original Arabic by Simon Ockley [1678-1728], with an appendix, in which the possibility of man’s attaining the true knowledge of God, and things necessary to salvation without instruction, is briefly considered (1708). This went through two other editions in the eighteenth century (1711 and 1731) and has been more recently ‘revised and edited with an introduction’ by A. S. Fulton (1929). The work of Abu Bakr Ibn Al-Tufail was introduced to the Western world by Edward Pocock (1671) in a Latin translation from the Arabic (Philosophus Autodidactus). Wesley read it in 1734, in a version entitled, The Life of Ebenezer Yokton, An Exact Entire Mystic; cf. Green, Wesley, p. 319. See also Robert Barclay’s Apology, Props. V-VI, ‘The Universal Saving Light’. The gist of the story in all these versions is the growth to maturity of a solitary child on a desert isle who, without benefit of schools or mosques, acquired the principles of ‘true religion, pure and undefiled’ (as well as the elements of science and philosophy)—hence Pocock’s Autodidactus. Abu Bakr has a similar story of ‘Don Antonio Trezzanio, who was self-educated and lived forty-five years in an uninhabited island in the East Indies’. Pope tells another version of the story in The Guardian, No. 61, May 21, 1713; its author is cited as ‘Telliamed’. Cf. No. 44, Original Sin, II.4.
See Jas. 1:27.
55. But in general we may surely place the faith of a Jew above that of a heathen or Mahometan. By Jewish faith I mean the faith of those who lived between the giving of the law and the coming of Christ. These—that is, those that were serious and sincere among them—believed all that is written in the Old Testament. In particular they believed that in the fullness of time the Messiah would appear ‘to finish the transgression, to make an end of sin, and bring in everlasting righteousness’.
Dan. 9:24.
66. It is not so easy to pass any judgment concerning the faith of our modern Jews. It is plain, ‘The veil is still upon their hearts, when Moses and the prophets are read.’
Cf. 2 Cor. 3:15.
Cf. 2 Cor. 4:4.
Acts 28:27.
77. I need not dwell upon the faith of John the Baptist, any more than the dispensation which he was under, because these, as Mr. Fletcher well describes them, were peculiar to himself. Setting him aside, the faith of Roman Catholics in general seems to be 03:496above that of the ancient Jews. If most of these are volunteers in faith,
I.e., credulous, not to say gullible. Wesley could have found this phrase in Shaftesbury’s ‘Letter Concerning Enthusiasm’ (1708): ‘If a reverend Christian prelate may be so great a volunteer in faith, as beyond the ordinary prescription of the Catholic church, to believe in fairies, why may not a heathen poet, in the ordinary way of his religion, be allowed to believe in muses?’; cf. Anthony Ashley Cooper, third Earl of Shaftesbury, Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions and Times (5th edn.; 1773), I.6. Wesley found the phrase (and idea) useful for polemical purposes, as in An Earnest Appeal, §14 (11:49 in this edn.); in JWJ, June 2, 1755; in Serious Thoughts Occasioned by the Late Earthquake at Lisbon, 1755; and in his letter to the London Magazine, Jan. 1, 1765.
Orig., ‘they’ changed to ‘were’ in the MS errata in Wesley’s copy of the Sermons.
Jude 3.
88. The faith of the Protestants, in general, embraces only those truths as necessary to salvation which are clearly revealed in the oracles of God.
Cf. No. 5, ‘Justification by Faith’, §2 and n.
Cf. Ps. 119:105 (BCP).
An echo of William Chillingworth’s famous slogan, ‘The Scripture is the only rule to judge all controversies by,’ in The Religion of Protestants (4th edn., 1674), p. 87; cf. the whole of Pt. I, ch. ii.
99. Hitherto faith has been considered chiefly as an evidence and conviction of such or such truths. And this is the sense wherein it is taken at this day in every part of the Christian world. But in the meantime let it be carefully observed (for eternity depends upon it) that neither the faith of a Roman Catholic nor that of a Protestant, if it contains no more than this, no more than the embracing such and such truths, will avail any more before God than the faith of a Mahometan or a heathen, yea of a deist or 03:497materialist. For ‘can’ this ‘faith save him?’
Jas. 2:14.
1010. But what is the faith which is properly saving? Which brings eternal salvation to all those that keep it to the end? It is such a divine conviction of God and of the things of God as even in its infant state enables everyone that possesses it to ‘fear God and work righteousness’.
Cf. Acts 10:35.
Ibid.
See No. 117, ‘On the Discoveries of Faith’, §§13-14; No. 119,‘Walking by Sight and Walking by Faith’, §1; and Wesley’s letters to Ann Bolton, Apr. 7, 1768, and Nov. 16, 1770; and to Alexander Knox, Aug. 29, 1777. Cf. also No. 9, ‘The Spirit of Bondage and of Adoption’, §2 and n.
John 3:36.
1111. Indeed nearly fifty years ago, when the preachers commonly called Methodists began to preach that grand scriptural doctrine, salvation by faith, they were not sufficiently apprised of the difference between a servant and a child of God. They did not clearly understand that even one ‘who feared God, and worketh righteousness, is accepted of him’. In consequence of this they were apt to make sad the hearts of those whom God had not made sad. For they frequently asked those who feared God, ‘Do you know that your sins are forgiven?’ And upon their answering, ‘No’, immediately replied, ‘Then you are a child of the devil.’ No; that does not follow. It might have been said (and it is all that can be said with propriety) ‘Hitherto you are only a servant; you are not a child of God.
Cf. No. 3, ‘Awake, Thou That Sleepest’, III.6 and n.
Cf. John 1:50.
1212. And, indeed, unless the servants of God halt by the way, they will receive the adoption of sons.
Gal. 4:5.
See Gal. 1:16.
Cf. Gal. 2:20.
Cf. Rom. 8:16; see No. 5, ‘Justification by Faith’, IV.2 and n.
Cf. Gal. 3:26 (Notes).
Gal. 4:6.
Cf. 1 John 5:10.
1313. It is easy to observe that all the sorts of faith which we can conceive are reducible to one or other of the preceding. But let us covet the best gifts, and follow the most excellent way.
See 1 Cor. 12:31.
Rom. 8:15-16; the Pauline version of the doctrine of assurance.
II. I proceed, in the second place, to draw a few inferences from the preceding observations.
11. And I would, first, infer in how dreadful a state, if there be a God, is a materialist—one who denies not only ‘the Lord that bought him’,
Cf. 2 Pet. 2:1.
Cf. Heb. 11:6.
22. Almost equally desperate is the case of the poor deist, how learned, yea, how moral soever he be. For you likewise, though you may not advert to it, are really ‘without God in the world’.
Eph. 2:12.
William Wollaston; cf. No. 90, ‘An Israelite Indeed’, §4 and n.
Francis Hutcheson; cf. No. 12, ‘The Witness of Our Own Spirit’, §5 and n. Samuel Wesley, Jun., Poems, p. 104, had referred to Thomas Hobbes as ‘a sweet-tongued orator’.
Wesley’s own inscribed copy of the third edn. of Hutcheson’s Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (1729) is still in the library of the Kingswood School.
Cf. No. 105, ‘On Conscience’, I.8-10 and n.; it is interesting to note Wesley’s return to this emphatic misrepresentation of Hutcheson’s text and intention.
33. But with heathens, Mahometans, and Jews, we have at present nothing to do; only we may wish that their lives did not shame many of us that are called Christians. We have not much more to do with the members of the Church of Rome. But we cannot doubt that many of them, like the excellent Archbishop of Cambrai,
François de Salignac de la Mothe-Fénelon; cf. No. 102, ‘Of Former Times’, §11 and n.
Gal. 5:6; cf. No. 2, The Almost Christian, II.6 and n.
The early texts read ‘of the church’. A marginal annotation in Wesley’s copy of AM (not in Wesley’s hand) adds ‘of England’.
44. Once more. I exhort you that fear God and work righteousness, you that are servants of God, first, flee from all sin as from the face of a serpent,
See Rev. 12:14.
John and Charles Wesley, ‘Watch in All Things’, Hymns and Sacred Poems (1742), p. 218 (Poet. Wks., II.273). For other quotations from this hymn, see No. 12, ‘The Witness of Our Own Spirit’, §19 and n.
and to work righteousness, to the utmost of the power you now have; to abound in works both of piety and mercy.
Cf. No. 14, The Repentance of Believers, I.13 and n.
See Gal. 4:7.
See Rom. 5:5.
Rom. 8:21.
55. I exhort you, lastly, who already feel the Spirit of God witnessing with your spirit that you are the children of God,
See Rom. 8:16.
Cf. Eph. 2:10.
Cf. Heb. 6:1.
Cf. Deut. 30:6.
Exod. 14:15.
Cf. Phil. 3:13-14.
Stockport, April 9, 1788
Place and date as in AM; but see above, p. 491, and cf. p. 479.
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Entry Title: Sermon 106: On Faith