Scriptural Sanctification - Media Sabda Org

SCRIPTURAL SANCTIFICATION:
An
Attempted Solution of the Holiness Problem
By The
Rev. John R. Brooks, D.D.
Chapter 15
TESTIMONY FROM EXPERIENCE CONTINUED
-- METHODIST CATHOLIC, PRESBYTERIAN, AND LUTHERAN WITNESSES --
We now introduce a witness who comes up to the highest standard of intelligence, culture, piety,
discriminating power, and reliability that Dr. Mudge or any one else can raise -- the saintly and
sainted John Fletcher, "Wesley's designated successor."
The gifted Robert Southey, of the Church of England, though not in sympathy with Methodism,
says:
"Fletcher was a man of rare talents, and rarer virtue. No age or country has ever produced a man
of more fervent piety, or more perfect charity; no Church has ever possessed a more apostolic
minister. He was a man of whom Methodism may well be proud, as the most able of its defenders."
Isaac Taylor, the distinguished and well-known Nonconformist author, says: "Fletcher was a saint;
as unearthly a being as could tread the earth at all." Robert Hall, his distinguished Baptist
contemporary, says: "Fletcher is a seraph who burns with the ardor of divine love. Spurning the
fetters of mortality, he almost habitually seems to have anticipated the rapture of the beatific vision."
The Rev. Dr. Dixon, one of the greatest of Wesleyan Methodist preachers, says: "I conceive Fletcher
to have been the most holy man who has been upon the earth since the apostolic age."
Before giving the testimony from the experience of this man, whom Southey regarded as "abler,"
and the others quoted as "holier" and "more seraphic," than Wesley himself, we will quote a
paragraph from his writings, giving his interpretation of the Bible touching instantaneous
sanctification. He says:
"If our hearts are purified by faith, as the Scripture expressly testifies; if the faith which peculiarly
purifies the heart of Christians is a faith in 'the promise of the Father,' which promise was made by
the Son, and directly points at a peculiar effusion of the Holy Ghost, the Purifier of spirits; if we may
believe in a moment, and if God may in a moment seal our sanctifying faith by sending us a fullness
of his sanctifying Spirit -- if this, I say, is the case, does it not follow that to deny the possibility of
the instantaneous destruction of sin, is to deny, contrary to Scripture and matter of fact, that we can
make an instantaneous act of faith in the sanctifying promise of the Father, and in the all-cleansing
blood of the Son, and that God can seal that act by the instantaneous operation of his Spirit?"
Of his experience, Mr. Fletcher, among other things, says:
"Last Monday evening he [God] spoke to me by these words 'Reckon yourself, therefore, to be
dead indeed unto sin, but alive unto God through Jesus Christ our Lord.' I obeyed the voice of God;