Scriptural Sanctification - Media Sabda Org

Dr. Tillett says:
"It is a fact of curious interest that, while Mr. Wesley in the first instance derived his high and
holy ideal of religion from studying the Bible, and then applied that ideal to the experience,
character, and life of himself and others, pressing all up to the Bible ideal, his ideas of instantaneous
sanctification were derived mainly from certain Methodists professing to have experienced it, and
then the Bible was examined to see if it taught the doctrine."
We think both these writers, especially Dr. Mudge, do great injustice to Mr. Wesley, his early
followers, and the cause they did so much to advance.
1. We think Mr. Wesley showed the wisdom of the philosopher and the good sense of the practical
investigator by combining the Socratic and Baconian methods of investigation in his search for truth,
carefully questioning men as to the facts of their experience, and then generalizing these facts so as
to get at the theory supposed to be supported by them. For, conceding, for argument's sake, as Mr.
Wesley does as a fact, that the Scriptures do not, "in express terms," teach that sanctification is
instantaneous, yet he and others might very properly resort to experimental tests of its truth. The
theory being suggested by his scriptural view of full salvation by faith, and by the alleged experience
of a few who said they had tested the correctness of that view in their own full salvation, they might
very properly make conjectural or hypothetical tests of its truth, as other philosophers do of the
phenomena of nature. And they were as rational in so doing as were Columbus, Newton, and
Franklin, when they made such tests of suggested hypotheses touching the existence of a western
world, the law of gravitation, and the nature of electricity.
And the former started with something more than an unsupported hypothesis. As already stated,
the doctrine of salvation by faith and the professed experience of reliable witnesses raised a strong
presumption in favor of such hypothesis. On investigation, finding so many well-attested facts of
consciousness, certifying that the subjects of them were all sanctified instantaneously, Mr. Wesley
inferred rationally that the theory of instantaneous sanctification is true. Were not these hundreds of
experimenters as rational as Peter and other Jews who, at our Lord's suggestion, experimented in
doing God's will, as they understood it, as a condition of ascertaining the divinity of Jesus and the
authority of his utterances? Had not Mr. Wesley, their great leader, taught them that there is full and
present salvation offered them in the Bible, and that they might realize it by faith? Did they not very
naturally conclude that, if regeneration came instantaneously by faith, the fuller and completer
salvation would come in the same way?
On this supposition, one and another, and later on hundreds, tested this hypothesis by experiment,
and reported the resulting experience to Mr. Wesley. He then most carefully sifted and tested their
testimony, giving many days and weeks, if not years, to the work. After doing this in the case of
many hundreds if not thousands of his followers, he very rationally concluded that this clear and
general testimony from the facts of consciousness converted the hypothesis of instantaneous
sanctification into a well-established theory touching the same. And did Mr. Wesley act more
irrationally in accepting such testimony than the other apostles would have done to accept the
testimony of Peter to our Lord's divinity, or than the multitude at Pentecost did in believing his
public testimony to the fact that Jesus was their promised Messiah and Saviour?