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The notion that Wesleyan religion is innocent of systematic structure and grounded upon experience is a myth sustained across the past two hundred years by his critics in the Reformed tradition to whom the only theology worthy of the name is Calvinist. For the past one hundred years, however Methodists as well have embraced that myth, sometimes because they were unable or unwilling to bear John Wesley's insistence that the doctrine of salvation is the heart of Christian theology, and sanctification the essence of salvation. The doctrine of Christian perfection was the central theme in all of his religious thought.

Wesley's system of theology was thoroughly biblical. He had early come to believe that the only proper way to approach the Scriptures, and the only means of grasping their unity, was through the hermeneutic of holiness that he derived chiefly from studying them. The command and the promise that we should love God with all our hearts and serve Him in holiness and righteousness all the days of our lives was to him the central theme of every part of the Bible, whatever the immediate setting and purposes of its many books. He was certain, moreover, that the system of biblical theology which emerged from close study of the texts guided by that hermeneutic was best and most scripturally communicated by preaching it. His sermons, therefore, dealt carefully with every major topic in systematic theology. He proclaimed the faith, as Moses and the prophets and Jesus and the apostles had, in situations framed by his intention to bring men and women to the experience of it.

Neither Wesley's own experience nor those of his hearers formed the basis of that faith, however, though for a century the impulse to modernism among Methodists has fed upon the legend that they did. Rather, Wesley believed that clear reasoning about the plain meanings of Scripture would be illuminated by the Holy Spirit, and so by grace bring knowledge of the truth. From this sprang conviction both for one's own sins and of God's supreme love for sinners, as well as the persuasion that the divine purpose was to renew his obedient children in purity and perfect love. Christian experience reached its full measure, as Jesus had said, in knowing the truth; and the truth would make us free.

John Fletcher became the theologian of early Methodism not because he brought system where none had been, but because he followed Wesley's advice and example of making Scripture the source and criterion of ordered understanding. He steeped himself in the Bible, sometimes studying it on his knees, during the same years he was reading closely the sermons, tracts and poetry of both John and Charles Wesley. Finding them eventually in full agreement, he published Wesleyan doctrine in his own terms, and in theological and polemic essays rather than sermons. But as with John Wesley's doctrinal tracts, the bonding of Fletcher's preaching to his exposition of theology, and of Scripture and reason to his experience of faith, was a daily reality. He brought not novelty of substance but a refreshing variation of style to the proclamation of biblical Wesleyanism. His Checks to Antinomianism began appearing at a moment when, following Whitefield's death, the renewed sharp break with Calvinism endangered evangelical understanding of the Methodist way. Fletcher grasped that danger as an opportunity. His Checks and other writings helped John Wesley both to hold the loyalty of his own followers and for the first time in thirty-five years, to turn the tide of popular sentiment in England toward the doctrine of Christian perfection.1

Saintly, learned, and sufficiently independent of mind to stand between the founder and his occasional opponents within the Methodist movement, Fletcher had already secured Wesley's encouragement to write a series of theological tracts when the latter recommended him in 1768 to be president of a new college in South Wales called Trevecca. There Lady Huntingdon, a wealthy supporter of George Whitefield's wing of Methodism, wished to educate young ministers who would stand above the controversy over Calvinism.2

Fletcher's early writings and his letters to Charles Wesley and others in the 1760s show that he began where John Wesley had begun thirty years before-with the general doctrine of the one God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, who under both the Old and New Covenants manifests Himself in the power of the sanctifying Spirit, especially in the full experience of the new birth. Fletcher employed the same arguments Wesley had used that the Holy Spirit awakens in human beings the dormant spiritual senses, enabling them to perceive and enjoy spiritual reality. He distinguished carefully, as Wesley had much earlier, the "ordinary" manifestations of God's Spirit that are promised to all who seek him-that is, those manifestation which contribute to their holiness and love-from the extra-ordinary gift of languages granted to the apostles on the day of Pentecost and to believers at the house of Cornelius and on Paul's first visit to Ephesus. "That they should be baptized with the Holy Ghost and spiritual fire was not extraordinary," he wrote, "since it is the common blessing, which can alone make a man a Christian, or confirm him in the faith. " And he stressed, as Wesley had, the progressive sanctification through which a person born of the Spirit daily "puts on Christ and becomes a partaker of the divine nature" until "the Lord gives him the rest of faith, the substance of things hoped for."3

In his early writing and preaching, however, Fletcher may not have emphasized, as Wesley had after 1740, the second moment of sanctifying grace, nor have held up the experience of the apostles at Pentecost as a model of it.4 His first preaching at Trevecca College, if I have understood the skimpy evidence correctly, linked the sanctifying work of the Holy Spirit primarily to regeneration. Appalled at the low state in grace or the absence of it in many of the students, he emphasized strongly and encouraged his assistant, the youthful Joseph Benson, to preach the promise of "internal conversion by the power of the Holy Ghost dwelling in the heart by faith." Such a strategy was reasonable. For it planted Trevecca on the high ground where, as Wesley said in his sermon on the death of Whitefield in the fall of 1770, the two great evangelists had stood in full agreement from the beginning. "The original Methodists," Wesley said, taught that all who are truly "born of the Spirit" have "the kingdom of God within them" and that "His indwelling Spirit makes them both holy in heart and 'holy in all manner of conversation.' " But in the winter of 1770-1771, one of Lady Huntingdon's favorite preachers, Walter Shirley, ridiculed Fletcher's preaching of that doctrine as "perfection," and "baited it out of the place."5

Fletcher's handwritten account of the controversy that followed, and of his resignation at Trevecca, was addressed to Lady Huntingdon but possibly never mailed to anyone. It makes plain that preaching about Pentecost there, and perhaps reading John Wesley's sermons and Charles Wesley's hymns, had moved him to identify being baptized with being filled with the Spirit, and so with perfect love. Joseph Benson later recalled that Fletcher's morning sermons at Trevecca generally terminated in his declaration that to be "filled with the Holy Ghost" was "a better qualification for the ministry of the gospel than any classical learning," though the latter might be "useful in its place." He would then invite all who were "athirst for the fulness of the Spirit" to join him in his room, where they often remained until noon, "wrestling like Jacob for the blessing."6

One effect of Shirley's preaching, Fletcher complained, was to persuade the students that Joel's prophecy of an "outpouring of the Spirit" was "entirely fulfilled upon the 120 disciples on the day of Pentecost"; that those who became believers thereafter were to "grow in grace by imperceptible dews"; and that "we can do very well without a remarkable shower of grace and Divine effusion of power, opening in us the well of living water that is to flow to everlasting life." Shirley and the students had thus renounced, Fletcher continued, "the grand point which I apprehended was to be firmly maintained and vigorously pursued in the college," namely, "the doctrine of the baptism of the Holy Ghost, which I am bound in conscience to maintain among all professors." He noted that Lady Huntingdon herself had complained of "a harmless expression" he had used "in a letter hastily written to a friend, 'The fiery baptism will burn up self.' " He said he had meant nothing by it save "to convey the idea of a power that enables us to say, with a tolerable degree of propriety, as St. Paul, 'I live not, but Christ lives in me.' "7

A little light, but not much, is shed on these events by their intersection with John Wesley's brief correspondence with Joseph Benson dealing with Benson's search for inward holiness. "You judge rightly," Wesley wrote on October 5, 1770,

When Benson wrote more insistently of his need of heart purity, Wesley responded December 28,1770, advising him first not to cast away his confidence in his experience of the new birth: "You have faith in Christ: you know the Lord; you can say [with Thomas after Christ's resurrection] my Lord and my God." Turning, then, to Benson's question whether believers may hope for deliverance from the "inbred enemy," Wesley declared that "many great and precious promises of Scripture" assure that they may. He quoted several of the same ones he had made standard at the conference of 1747, including Ezekiel 36:25-29 and Deuteronomy 30:6. "This I term sanctification (which is both an instantaneous and a gradual work), or perfection," Wesley counseled, "being perfected in love" or "filled with love, which still admits of a thousand degrees." He then urged Benson to confirm the students at Trevecca

If Wesley was referring by the word "they" in this passage to John Fletcher and not to the students who heard Benson's preaching during this period, he was thoroughly misinformed; for Fletcher had from the outset of his ministry stressed as earnestly as Wesley ever did the presence, work and witness of the Holy Spirit in regeneration, or "sanctification begun." Wesley may, however, have been getting garbled reports of Fletcher's teaching. In any event, Benson was discharged by Lady Huntingdon in early January and wrote Wesley in some despair asking whether he was acceptable as a Methodist preacher. Wesley responded on March 9, 1771, that he would indeed be acceptable if he could "abstain from speaking of Universal Salvation and Mr. Fletcher's late discovery."10

The modern editor of Wesley's correspondence, John Telford, surmised from this and the letter quoted above that the "late discovery" was Fletcher's doctrine of "receiving the Holy Spirit." His further statement that Wesley thought it "improper to separate the work of sanctification from justification" ignored Wesley's life-long distinction between that initiatory experience and entire sanctification-between receiving and being filled with the Holy Spirit.11 Recently, several New Testament scholars have come to believe that in the Book of the Acts the words referring to being "baptized with," "filled with," and "receiving" the Holy Spirit, are interchangeable. They have imposed this belief upon John Wesley and, on the strength of Telford's surmise, concluded that Wesley's letter to Benson was a repudiation of Fletcher's preaching that the 12 0 disciples of Christ experienced the grace of entire sanctification when they were "filled with the Holy Spirit" on the morning of Pentecost day.l2 This will not square at all with the long record of Wesley's teaching the same thing, nor with his word to Benson, written only seven days later and printed on the same page of Telford's edition of his letters, that

A few weeks earlier, Wesley had written one of his preachers expressing gratitude for Fletcher's conduct during the controversy at Trevecca and used another prophetic form of Pentecostal language:

And the very next day, March 17, he wrote Mary Stokes, referring, quite untypically, to "receiving" the Spirit in wholly sanctifying grace as a different order of experience from receiving Him in regeneration. "The Sun of righteousness will rise upon you in quite another manner than you have hitherto experienced," he wrote. "And who knows how soon? . . . What hinders you from receiving Him now? . . . Only unbelief keeps out the mighty blessing."15 Just so much, or so little, of the alleged disagreement between Wesley and Fletcher can we learn from Wesley's letters to Joseph Benson and others in the winter of 1770-1771.

The actual contribution of John Fletcher to the Wesleyan theology of salvation, especially his persistent use of both the terms baptism and fullness of the Spirit to denote the experience of perfect love, is in fact clear from the direct correspondence between him and the two Wesleys during the next few years, and from his published works. So also is John Wesley's gentle insistence that such usage must not obscure the biblical teaching that the Christian's life in the Spirit begins with the new birth. I believe the evidence shows that when his concern on this point was dispelled, Wesley heartily endorsed Fletcher's Pentecostal exposition of holiness. But let me tell the story, and you can judge the evidence for yourself.

When Fletcher resigned from Trevecca, Wesley asked him to examine the recent charge of Lady Huntingdon's associates that he taught salvation by works, and to consider whether they did not in fact teach an antinomian rejection of good works, by denying that holiness of life must flow from saving faith.16 Fletcher agreed to do so. He was soon ready to acknowledge publicly that he had moved dangerously close to Calvinism for a time And he began at once to write the first of a series of small books defending the Wesleyan doctrine of sanctification by grace, eventually titled Checks to Antinomianism. By midsummer of that same year, 1771, Fletcher had completed the first two of these, attacking what he called the "three pillars of Antinomianism," especially the "shibboleths" of imputed righteousness and "finished salvation"-finished, that is, in Christ, requiring the believer only to trust in His merits and not to perform the works of love that fulfill the law.17 John Wesley, needless to say, was delighted by these essays and recommended them widely.18

By November 1771 at the latest, however, Fletcher's intensive study of both the Bible and some of the earlier works of John and Charles Wesley had crystallized his conviction that the founder's interpretations of Scripture to sustain the doctrine of entire sanctification in his Notes on the New Testament had been incomplete. Fletcher wrote Charles on 24 November,

Instead of continuing with this proposed "treatise on perfection," however, Fletcher wrote another Check, contenting himself for the moment with a brief statement equating "baptism with the Holy Spirit" with being sanctified wholly.20 The essay produced an acrimonious response from his chief Calvinist protagonist, Rowland Hill, and he launched immediately into a fourth one. On 5 July 1772, he wrote Charles Wesley, begging him "to take care, in going once more over the tract on Original Sin, not to let pass anything representing the Law as a covenant of wrath, opposed to the Gospel." The request must have reflected his renewed immersion in such early sermons of John Wesley as "The Law Established Through Faith." For, Fletcher continued,

A month later he described his own state in grace in another letter to Charles, saying,

As with Wesley earlier, so now with Fletcher, the interweaving of honest personal quest with profound study of Scripture gave to his theology of salvation both tenderness and power. In January 1773, Fletcher wrote Charles he was now convinced that unless "the practice of this doctrine does not daily take place, our profession and methodism will dwindle into nothing. Oh for the discipline of the Spirit and the Cross within our own breasts." He was now eager to begin his long-delayed treatise on Christian perfection; but he desired even more. he said.

Six weeks later he wrote Charles, in a postscript to a letter addressed to both the Wesleys, that he would lay aside once more his work on perfection "to face Mr. Hill" and prepare another volume in the long series, called An Equal Check to Pharisaism and Antinomianism.24

In the interval between these two letters, Fletcher had received and gently declined the well-known invitation from John Wesley to become the latter's successor as the leader of the Methodist movement. "Thou art the man, " Wesley urged; "God has given you a measure of loving faith and a single eye to His glory. He has given you some knowledge of men and things, particularly of the whole plan of Methodism. You are blessed with some health, activity, and diligence, together with a degree of learning." And to all these, Wesley noted, "He has lately added, by a way none could have foreseen, favor both with the preachers and the whole people. . . Come while I am able, God assisting, to build you up in faith, to ripen your gifts, and to introduce you to the people."25 Unwilling to take the first negative response for an answer, Wesley visited Fletcher at Madeley for three days the following July and wrote him shortly afterward: "Just now the minds of the people in general are on account of the Checks greatly prejudiced in your favour. Should we not discern the providential time?"26

Fletcher, however, was soon buried in the task of adding to his original design for An Equal Check a "scriptural essay on the astonishing rewardableness of the works of faith, i.e. good works" and a "rational essay upon the doctrine of salvation by Faith."27 The latter, finally titled An Essay on Truth is Fletcher's finest theological work. He wrote Joseph Benson that in preparing it he discovered that "an over-eager attention to the doctrine of the Spirit has made me, in some degree, overlook the medium by which the Spirit works-I mean the word of truth, . . . by which the heavenly fire warms us. I rather expected lightning than a steady fire by means of fuel."28 In this commitment to being "a rational Bible Christian"-or, as he put it later that year, one to whom "sober reason and plain Scripture" were the final authority in "all matters of faith"29 -Fletcher laid out for the first time in public print his maturing conviction that "the doctrine of Christian perfection is entirely founded on the privileges of the Christian dispensation in its fullness" or, as he put it in a letter to Charles Wesley, "with the accomplishment of the Promise of the Father."30

The Essay on Truth was, then, no less scriptural on account of his calling it a "rational essay"; for Fletcher, like John Wesley, found no better and in fact no other way to reason about grace and truth than in biblical terms. Its governing idea was the view of the different dispensations of grace that Wesley had first described-also in specific reference to Pentecost-in two of his early sermons, "Salvation by Faith" and "Christian Perfection," dating from June 1738, and January 1741, respectively. From the former, Fletcher quoted Wesley's distinction of Christian faith, properly so-called, from the faith of a heathen, the faith of pious Jews, and the "faith of initial Christianity." The last, Wesley had said, "the apostles themselves had while our Lord was upon earth," though they did not yet understand or acknowledge "the necessity and merit of his death and the power of his resurrection."31

Turning, then, to Wesley's sermon of 1741 on "Christian Perfection," Fletcher quoted his mentor's statement that "we cannot measure the privileges of real Christians by those formerly given to Jews. Their 'ministration,' or dispensation, we allow 'was glorious-' but ours 'exceeds in glory.'" Whoever would "bring down the Christian dispensation to the Jewish standard" errs greatly, "neither knowing the Scriptures, nor the power of God." Wesley had added that the Holy Spirit, whom Jesus had promised would flow as "rivers of living water" (John 7:38) out of the hearts of those who believed on him, was not given "in his sanctifying graces," even to the Apostles who had been granted power over unclean spirits, until after Jesus was glorified. It was then when "he ascended up on high, and led captivity captive," that he "received" those "gifts for men yea, even for the rebellious, that the Lord might dwell among them." And when the day of Pentecost was fully come, then first it was, that they who "waited for the promise of the Father" were made more than conquerors over sin by the Holy Ghost given unto them.32 Fletcher protested that those who supposed that he and not John Wesley, had "first set forth the doctrine of dispensations' in connection with the experience of perfect love did him "an honour altogether undeserved." Indeed, he added in a footnote, "This good old gospel is far more clearly set forth in Mr. Wesley's sermon called 'Scriptural Christianity,' and in his 'Hymns for Whitsunday,' " than in the Essay on Truth.33

Fletcher's high estimate of the religion of Judaism, like John Wesley's, was thus closely interwoven with the testimony of the Old Covenant to what both men thought were the fundamental doctrines of the Christian religion: free grace and holiness; a faith ever "working by love," in obedience to the law of righteousness, as Abraham's faith had.

Fletcher argued then, from the texts of John 14:1; 15:26; 16:7 and Luke 24:29, for "the three degrees of saving faith, omitted in the Athanasian creed, but expressed in the Apostles' creed." These were faith in the Father, faith in the Son, and faith in the Holy Spirit, conforming to Wesley's faith of a servant, faith of a son, and faith of a father in Christ. Each also conformed to one of three dispensations of grace: of the Jews under the Old Covenant; of the disciples of John and Jesus; and of those who were "made partakers of Christ glorified, either on the day of Pentecost, or after it."35

In the closing paragraphs of the "Essay on Truth" Fletcher described the experience not of the Apostles at Pentecost but of the 3,000 "Jews, devout men out of every nation under heaven" who were converted later that day. Fletcher declared that when Peter preached Christ to them, "they at first believed on him with a true, though not with a luminous faith." No sooner had they "thus passed from faith in the Father to an explicit faith in the Son, but they cried out, What shall we do? And Peter directed them to make, by baptism, an open, solemn profession of their faith in Christ, and to believe the great promise concerning the Holy Ghost." At that point, Fletcher read his understanding into the text so as to affirm that the experience of the converts wound up being the same as that of the Christian believers who were filled with the Holy Spirit that day. "Upon their heartily believing the gladdening promise relating to pardon and the Comforter," he wrote, "and no doubt upon their fervently praying that it might be fulfilled in them, 'they were all filled with the Spirit,' all their hearts overflowed with 'righteousness, peace, and joy in the Holy Ghost.' "36

John Wesley visited Madeley for three days at the end of July 1774, and preached what Fletcher thought were "four excellent sermons" to crowded audiences. A Methodist preacher named Collins came from nearby Gloucester to ask the two of them whether Fletcher had written things in the Essay on Truth that were "subversive of the old Methodist doctrine." Fletcher wrote Charles of the discussion:

Clearly, the discussion had revolved around Fletcher's amplification of Acts 2:38, quoted in the preceding paragraph. Clearly, also, John Wesley, not John Fletcher, was the one insisting on a clear distinction between the experience of the apostles at Pentecost and that of their converts-between being "filled" with the Spirit and so being made perfect in love, and "receiving" the Spirit in the initiation by repentance and faith into the new life in Christ.

Wesley's own words, however, unite with Fletcher's to counter the myth that the founder disowned the Essay on Truth or thought the difference a large one. Wesley himself published the first complete edition of the Equal Check that summer; and in it, beneath Fletcher's signature to the preface, the following words appear: "N. B.-I have considerably shortened the following tracts; and marked the most useful of them with a *.-J. W. The early editions of Fletcher's Works published in both England and America preserved this note and the asterisks to which it referred. The latter are scattered liberally throughout the two appendices to the Essay on Truth, where Fletcher spelled out in detail his exposition of the Scriptures relating to Pentecost. The following January, Wesley wrote one of the saintly women of Methodism that "Mr. Fletcher has given us a wonderful view of the different dispensations which we are under. I believe that difficult subject was never placed in so clear a light as before."38

Argument, after all, was hardly in order between men who were each still searching deeply for the experience of heart purity they were so persistently and effectively preaching to others.39 In the midst of a letter thanking Charles for his "friendly yet severe criticisms" of the Essay on Truth, Fletcher had written,

Possibly in this period also he wrote the letter to Charles, the page of which containing the date, address and signature is long lost. In its opening lines Fletcher reverted to the issue of instantaneous versus gradual sanctification. of which he had written earlier. He wrote:

Then, in a passage whose response from the Wesleys has been lost to history, Fletcher made a memorable suggestion:

Despite this appeal, and perhaps strengthened by John Wesley's occasional use for disappointed seekers of the text in the Epistle of James, "Let patience have her perfect work," the three men continued to preach and write as well as to seek the experience of heart purity. John preached more effectively than ever-often during these years of growing favor in parish churches, but far more often in the open because the churches could not contain the people. The largest crowds ever seen in many towns and cities of England came to hear him.42

Certainly Fletcher could not lay down his pen. During the summer and early fall of 1774 he wrote the second part of the Equal Check, which he called his Scripture Scales. He then spent the winter of 1774-1775 writing the last volume of his Checks-the long anticipated "treatise on perfection." Wesley passed through or near Madeley on March 15, 1775, preaching his way through the West Midlands towns en route to Liverpool where he would take ship for his annual visit to Ireland. He carried Fletcher's completed manuscript along with him, probably returning it with his letter written from Northwich a week later. He complimented the earlier tract-probably "as convincing as anything you have written," Wesley wrote-then turned to the present one, saying:

That signal was sufficient. During the following weeks, Fletcher reworked the manuscript of what became the Last Check so as to harmonize even this "little" difference. The published version allowed the three thousand converted at Pentecost to stand as unambiguous examples of the new birth, as Wesley, in his last Oxford sermon, "Scriptural Christianity," and always thereafter had construed them to be: they had received the Holy Spirit, but not yet in the fullness of perfecting love.44 Fletcher needed to say that clearly, whatever else he affirmed about their being under "the dispensation of the Holy Ghost," or he would threaten what to Wesley was the foundation of evangelical doctrine-the transforming work of the Holy Spirit in the experience of "sanctification begun." The volume's next-to-last section, titled "An Address to Imperfect Believers," spelled out across several paragraphs the exposition Wesley had affirmed but did not set forth in detail in his last Oxford sermon. Those who had been converted at Pentecost received the fullness of the Spirit at some later occasion, many of them, no doubt, during the outpouring of the Spirit that followed the return of Peter and John from their first appearance before the Sanhedrin, as recorded in Acts 4:31. For the rest, that section reinforced in great detail Wesley's teaching in his sermon "Scripture Way of Salvation" published in 1765, that logic, Scripture, and the experience of his people affirmed it God's preferred plan to "destroy sin by the breath of His mouth, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye," with Fletcher's belief that the "faith which fully apprehends the sanctifying promise of the Father and the power of the Spirit of Christ" forces the "lingering man of sin instantaneously to breathe out his last."45

Satisfied with his revisions, Fletcher sent the manuscript off to Charles Wesley in London, in late May, imploring his corrections.

To suppose that the words "none but you" were meant to exclude John Wesley from editing the text suggests Fletcher was an ungrateful and secretive man, which he was not; and it conflicts with what actually happened. Wesley wrote Fletcher August 18, "I have now received all your papers, and here and there made some small corrections. . . . I do not perceive that you have granted too much, or that there is any difference between us. The Address to the Perfect I approve of most, and think it will have a good effect." He also renewed his earlier appeal to Fletcher to become his successor: "When you do not write, you must travel. Sit still till I die, and you may sit still forever."47

And what did the Last Check, thus fully endorsed by both Charles and John Wesley and immediately published by the latter, affirm about the biblical promise of entire sanctification? The very points that in recent years have been called Fletcher's aberration in Wesleyan doctrine. And those points were nowhere spelled out in the work more carefully, and with more detailed reference to the writings of Wesley, than in the long section which declared the experience of the 120 disciples at Pentecost to be the fulfillment of the "promise of the Father," through the faithfulness of the Son, to purify by baptizing in the fullness of the Spirit the hearts of those who in faith and love had become His obedient children.48

The law of the Lord, Fletcher reiterated at the beginning of that section-to love Him with all our heart, soul, and strength, and our neighbors as ourselves-was central to the religion of both the Old and the New Testaments. The promises of the God of the covenants that he cited then were those John Wesley had for nearly forty years declared to constitute the central theme of Scripture. Taken together, they comprised the hermeneutic of holiness that Fletcher and both the Wesleys thought were not imposed upon the Bible, but integral to every part of it. God would enable His people by faith to keep the law by circumcising their hearts, writing the Torah there, filling them with His Spirit, and cleansing them from inward and "inbred" sin. He had promised to renew them in His own image, pouring out His Spirit in "baptisms of fire which burn up the chaff of sin," thus fulfilling His oath to Abraham that his spiritual children would "serve him without fear, in holiness and righteousness" all the days of their lives. Those who "hunger and thirst after righteousness" would be filled, Jesus had said; "if any man thirst, let him come to me and drink." Fletcher paraphrased the succeeding words of the latter text (John 7:37-38) in different and more explicit terms than John Wesley had on several occasions used:

And he quoted Wesley's Plain Account affirming the "larger measure of the Holy Spirit given under the Gospel than under the Jewish dispensation" and advising preachers always to "rest the doctrine of Christian perfection on this Scriptural foundation."49

Fletcher also stressed the importance of John the Baptist's declaration that the Messiah would baptize "with the Holy Ghost and with fire." He noted that all four evangelists had recited it, and that Jesus repeated it just before His ascension into heaven, calling it "the promise of the Father." This promise Peter declared was fulfilled at Pentecost and was extended for all time to "as many as the Lord our God should call." It was "undoubtedly the greatest," Fletcher said, of all the "exceeding great and precious promises," which the Second Epistle of Peter declares are "given unto us" that we might be "partakers of the Divine nature." He cited Wesley's Notes on the New Testament concerning John 14:15, 23, where the founder had declared that the promise of the abiding Comforter, the Spirit of truth, "implies such a large manifestation of the Divine presence and love, that the former, in justification, is as nothing in comparison to it." And he stressed that the prayer of Jesus for the sanctification of His own in John 17:17, 23, was also answered at Pentecost, in an event whose additional purpose "was to give the world an idea of the New Jerusalem coming down from heaven, a specimen of the power which introduces believers into the state of Christian perfection."50

Careful to avoid the imprecision of which Wesley had complained in his earlier language, Fletcher turned to the latter's last Oxford sermon, and made fully explicit what the founder had said on the text of Acts 4:31 thirty-one years earlier. Not only were the 120 disciples filled with the Spirit on Pentecost day, but thousands of others were "wonderfully converted and clearly justified." Some time after, "another glorious baptism, or capital outpouring of the Spirit," carried these new believers "farther into the kingdom of grace which perfects holiness in one," he wrote. "And therefore we find that the account which Luke gives of them after this second, capital manifestation of the Holy Spirit in a great degree answered to our Lord's prayer for their perfection." Fletcher added, however, that the whole "multitude of them that believed" were likely not all at that moment perfected in love, for God "does not usually remove the plague of undwelling sin" till individuals have "discovered and lamented" it. Rather, "those chiefly, who before were strong in the grace of their dispensation, arose then into sinless fathers."51

The first four chapters of Acts teach clearly, Fletcher concluded, that "a peculiar power of the Spirit is bestowed upon believers under the Gospel of Christ"; and that "when our faith shall fully embrace the promise of full sanctification, or of a complete 'circumcision of the heart' in the Spirit," the Holy Ghost would "help us to love one another without sinful self seeking; and as soon as we do so, 'God dwelleth in us and His love is perfected in us.' " The outpouring, and in that general sense, a baptism, of the Spirit was in these and other instances in the Acts a corporate experience; the particular work of grace wrought in each person's heart in those stirring moments-whether the work of awakening to the faith of a servant, or of regeneration, or of perfect love-was conditioned by his or her readiness for it.52

Using the phrase "baptism of the Spirit" in this more general sense of any outpouring of divine blessing, whether upon a group or an individual, Fletcher continued thus:

It was a classic Wesleyan point: the actual and demonstrable realization of perfect love, not merely a "blessing" designated as such, was the sure testimony that a believer had been filled with the Spirit. "Before we can rank among perfect Christians," Fletcher declared,

The echoes of Wesley's emphasis upon substance, regardless of circumstance, ring true here- little wonder that Fletcher sustained the point by reference to Wesley's distinction in the Plain Account between how God deals with the generality of those that are justified, and how he may "cut short his work" in righteousness, "in whatever degree he pleases, and do the usual work of many years in a moment."54 The burden of Fletcher's argument in the following paragraphs, however, was to show "how unscriptural and irrational it is to suppose that, when God fully baptizes a soul with His sanctifying Spirit and with the celestial fire of His love, He cannot in an instant destroy the man of sin" and "melt the heart of stone into a heart of flesh."55

Notes

1Both Wesley and Fletcher rejoiced in their varying styles, and repudiated suggestions made at the time that they differed on any matter of substance. Compare John Wesley, Northwich, 22 March 1775, to John Fletcher, in John Wesley, Letters . . . (John Telford, ed.; 7 vols., London, 1931), 6:146; and John Fletcher, The Last Check to Antinomianism . . . (London, 1775) in his Works (N. Y., 1877-78; reprinted,4 vols.; Salem, Ohio, 1974), 2:647, comparing Wesley's mode of describing the faith which brings heart purity with his own.

2Luke Tyerman, Wesley 's Designated Successor: The Life, Letters and Literary Labours of the Rev. John William Fletcher, Vicar of Madeley, Shropshire (London, 1882), 84, 130-60, passim; John Wesley, London, 28 Feb., 1766, to John Fletcher, in Wesley, Letters, 3-4; and John Wesley Journal, 21 and 22 July, 1764, in John Wesley, Works . . . (14 vols.; London 1872, reprinted, Kansas City, Missouri, 1979), 3:190-91.

3John Fletcher, Six Letters on the Spiritual Manifestation of the Son of God (London, [n. d.] published posthumously, [c. 1790]), 21, 29 (for the quotations); generally, pp. 6, 7, 18; and, on Pentecost, 40, 41. Tyerman, Fletcher pp. 124-38, summarized this work, and concluded on the basis of evidence not now available, that Fletcher wrote these letters in 1767-69. For other matters in the paragraph, see John Fletcher, A Letter . . . to the Rev. Mr. Prothero, In Defence of Experimental Religion [signed Madeley, July 25, 1761], in Fletcher, Works, 4:28, 31-32.

4An exception (if I have correctly understood the rule!) is John Fletcher, Madeley, 4 Sept., 1764, to "Mr. Vaughan," in John Fletcher, Posthumous Pieces . . . (ed. Melville Horne, London, 1791), pp. 118-19, which closely echoes John Wesley's language and use of Scriptural texts concerning both regeneration and entire sanctification.

5John Fletcher, Madeley, 18 March 1771, to John Wesley, ms. in Colman Collection, Methodist Archives and Research Center, John Rylands Library, The University of Manchester [hereinafter cited as "MARC"]. this letter is also quoted in Tyerman, Fletcher, p. 177. Tyerman's versions of letters I have seen in the original manuscripts often have small and occasionally significant omissions, and occasionally small additions, not indicated in his text.] See also John Wesley, "On the Death of the Rev. Mr. George Whitefield" [preached in London, November 18, 1770], Works, 6:178-79.

6Quoted in John Wesley, A Short Account of the Life and Death of Relterend John Fletcher (London, 1786) in Works, 11:296. Cf. John Fletcher, "Sermon Outlines," V, on Acts ;:5, in Works, 4:195-96, possibly from his early preaching at Trevecca, which seems to show he then made a "baptism of the Holy Spirit" the agency of both regeneration and of the fullness of the Spirit.

7Tyerman, Fletcher, pp. 180-86, first published this document. The last sentence quoted refers to a text John Wesley consistently used to refer to the experience and life of Christian perfection.

8John Wesley, Bristol, 5 Oct., 1770, to Joseph Benson [at Trevecca], in Letters, 5:202.

9John Wesley, London, 28 Dec., 1770 to Joseph Benson, in Letters, 5:214-15.

10John Fletcher, Madeley, 7 January 1771, to Lady Huntingdon, and the same place and date, to Joseph Benson, in Tyerman, Fletcher, pp. 175-76; John Wesley, Bristol, 9 March 1771, to Joseph Benson, in Letters, 5:228.

11Telford's speculative note i9 in Wesley, Letters, 5:228- it contains also the misstatement that "Wesley held that it was improper to separate the work of sanctification from justification," which is correct only of his understanding of the new birth; it contradicts Wesley's life-long distinction between that initiatory experience and entire sanctification-between receiving, and receiving the fullness of, the Holy Spirit. The awkward confusion persisted in Telford's comment on John Wesley, 11 Oct., 1771, to Joseph Benson, ibid, 5:281.

12See Robert W. Lyon, "Baptism and Spirit-Baptism in the New Testament " Wesleyan Theological Journal, 14 (Spring 1979): 17-18. Alex R. G. Deasley, "Entire Sanctification and the Baptism with the Holy Spirit: Perspectives on the Biblical View of the Relationship," ibid., 14:27-30, 33, 38, contains wording that now appears not to reflect his estimate of the possibly different meaning of "fullness." Contrast George Allen Turner, "The Baptism of the Holy Spirit in the Wesleyan Tradition," ibid., 14:67-71.

13John Wesley, Chester, 16 March 1771, to Joseph Benson, in Letters, 5:228-29. The statement accurately summarizes the order of salvation Wesley had laid out in January 1741, from 1 John 5, in his first sermon on "Christian Perfection," Works, 6:6,16, and passim. See also Wesley's equation of being "full of His Spirit" with being "perfected in love, " in Plain Account of Christian Perfection [first published in 1766], Works, 11:404, [drawn from the conference of 1759 and first published in his Thoughts on Christian Perfection, (London, 1760)]; his repeated emphasis on the instantaneous character of the experience of that grace in the same, 11:393, 398 401-03, 410-11, 442; and John Wesley, Explanatory Notes Upon the New; Testament (London, 1976), note to John 14:17-23.

l4John Wesley, London, 21 Feb., 1771 to Walter Churchey, in Letters, 5:223.

15John Wesley, Chester, 17 March 1771, to Mary Stokes, in Letters, 5:230.

l6The trouble with Lady Huntingdon's party was greatly magnified by Wesley's strong statements in the minutes of the Conference of 1770 on the necessity and reward, as distinct from the saving merit, of good works. See the long account in Tyerman, Fletcher, pp.173 ff.; John Wesley, London,19 June 1771, to the Countess of Huntingdon, and Dublin, 10 July 1771, to "Several Preachers and Friends," in Letters, 5:258-59, 262-64.

l7See [John Fletcher, Madeley, c. June 1771] unsigned letter to "Messieurs Wesley," in ms. "Fletcher Volume," p. 39, MARC; and the renunciation in John Fletcher, The First Part of an Equal Check to Pharisaism and Antinomianism . . . [London, 1774], in Works, 1:427.

18John Wesley, London, 6 October 1771, to Philathea Briggs, Letters, 5:280-81, John Wesley, Some Remarks on Mr. Hill's "Review of All the Doctrines Taught by Mr. John Wesley" (London, 1772) in Works, 10:375, 412-13.

19John Fletcher, Madeley, 24 Nov., 1771, to Charles Wesley, ms. "Fletcher Volume," p. 38, MARC. (This letter, like most of Fletcher's to Charles in this period, heartily thanked him for pruning and correcting his manuscripts before they went to the printer.) Cf. John and Charles Wesley, Hymns of Petitzon and Thanksgiving for the Promise of the Father . . . London, 1746), in The Poetocal Works of John and Charles Wesley . . . (coll. And arr., G. Osborn; 13 vols., London, 1869), 4:171-72, 178-79, 181-83, 190-93. On Charles Wesley's role in editing the Checks to Antznomianism, see Thomas Jackson, Life of Charles Wesley . . . (N. Y., 1844 [I have not seen the 1st edition, London,1841]),660-61. John Wesley, Some Remarks on Mr. Hill's "Review . . .," in Works, 10:438, said of the notion that he had the prerogative to correct all of Fletcher's books, "This is a mistake: of some I have, of others I have not."

20John Fletcher, Third Check to Antinomianism . . . [London, 1772], Works, 1:160.

2lJohn Fletcher, Madeley, 5 July, 1772, to Charles Wesley, ms. In MARC. Cf. John Wesley's sermons, "The Original, Nature, Property, and Use of the Law," and "The Law Established By Faith," in Works, 5:442, 450-51.

22John Fletcher, Madeley, 5 August, [1772l, to Charles Wesley, in ms. "Fletcher Volume," p. 45, MARC.

23[John Fletcher, Madeley, 16 Jan., 1773, to Charles Wesley], in ms. "Fletcher Volume," p. 46, MARC. The address page is missing from this letter, but its contents continue the subjects of his preceding correspondence with Charles.

24John Fletcher, Madeley, 28 Feb., 1773, to Charles Wesley, (appended to a letter to "J. or C. Wesley"), in ms. "Fletcher Volume," p. 47, MARC.

25John Wesley, Shoreham, [15] Jan., 1773, to John Fletcher, in Letters, 6:11.

26John Wesley, Lewisham, 21 July 1773, to John Fletcher, in Letters, 6:33-34; Wesley, Journal, July 9 and 11, 1773, in Works, 3:501-02.

27John Fletcher, Madeley, 20 Feb., 1774, to Charles Wesley, ms. In MARC. Cf. John Wesley, Journal, 21 and 22 March, 1774, in Works, 4:9, for his sermon on good works preached the day after he had taken "sweet counsel" with Fletcher; and John Fletcher, First Part of an Equal Check, preface, in Works, 1:427-29.

28John Fletcher, Madeley, March 20, 1774, to Joseph Benson, quoted in Tyerman, Fletcher, p. 310.

29John Fletcher, Zelotes and Honestus Reconciled, or An Equal Check to Pharisaism Continued Being the First Part of the Scripture Scales to Weigh the Gold of Gospel Truth . . . [London, 1775l, preface, in Works, 2:12.

30John Fletcher, Madeley, 14 August 1774, to Charles Wesley, in MARC; Fletcher, Equal Check, in Works, 1:589. The language of the two quotations is a paraphrase of that in John Wesley's sermon, "Christian Perfection," preached 4 January 1741, in Works, 6:11 (secs. 12-13).

31John Fletcher, "Essay on Truth," in Equal Check, Works, 1:588-89, John Wesley's sermon, "Salvation by Faith," Works, 5:9. Cf. John Wesley's sermons, "The Spirit of Bondage and Adoption," and "Christian Perfection," dating from 1740 and 1741, in Works, 5:108 (sec. iii, 8), and 6:10 (sec. 11).

32Fletcher, "Essay on Truth," in Works, 1:589-90; and John Wesley, Christian Perfection," Works, 6:8-9 (sec. 8),10 (sec. 11).

33Fletcher, "Essay on Truth," Works, 1:591n. Cf. Wesley, sermon, "Scriptural Christianity," Works, 5:48; and John and Charles Wesley, Hymns of Petition and Thanksgiving for the Promise of the Father, in their Poetical Words, 4:163-207. John Allen Knight, The Holiness Pilgrimage: Reflections on the Life of Holiness (Kansas City, Mo., 1973), pp. 63-75, summarizes Fletcher's "dispensational theology," partly on the basis of his Ph.D. dissertation on Fletcher done at Vanderbilt University; but the same author's "John Fletcher's Influence on the Development of Wesleyan Theology in America," The Wesleyan Theological Journal, 13 (Spring 1978): 27, asserts mistakenly that John Wesley did not connect Christian perfection with Pentecost.

34Fletcher, "Essay on Truth," in Words, 3:590n. Fletcher's apparent telescoping at this point of the faith of "pious Jews" and of Jesus' disciples before Pentecost led to confusions that Wesley's four dispensations had avoided.

35Ibid., 1:591-92. Cf. 1:533-34, 539, 566, 575, on the salvation of "righteous heathens" and "pious Jews"; and, on Cornelius, 1:579-80.

36Ibid., 1:592-93. Fletcher also used here Peter's account in Acts chapter 11 of the experience of the Holy Spirit in the household of Cornelius as a similar example of this "coming of Christ's kingdom with power" and of His disciples being "made perfect in one," expanding considerably on Wesley's cryptic use of Acts 15:10 as descriptive of heart purity in the sermon "Christian Perfection," Works, 6:17 (sec. 26).

37John Fletcher, Madeley, 14 August 1774, to Charles Wesley, ms. In "Fletcher Volume," p. 50, MARC. In the letter Fletcher confesses to a degree of uncertainty about only one point in the essay-making "the dispensation of the Holy Ghost (contradistinguished from the dispensation[s] of the Father and the Son) to be the grand characteristic of Christian Perfection."

38See Fletcher, Words, (2nd American edition; 6 vols.; N.Y., 1809), 3:150-52; Richard Green, The Words of John and Charles Wesley: A Bibliography (2nd. ed., London, 1906), entry No. 304, p. 177, for the quotation from the first edition; and John Wesley, London, 17 January 1775, to Elizabeth Ritchie, in Letters, 6:137.

39John Wesley, Journal, 1 Aug., 1774, in Words, 4:25, contains one of many references during this period to persons who believed God had "delivered them from the root of sin" and whose testimony seemed to him so "simple, clear, and scriptural" that he "saw no reason to doubt it." Cf. the same, entries for 28 Jan., and 24 Oct., 1774, and for 1 Jan., 14 Mar., 4 Aug., and 15 Oct., 1775, 4:7, 32, 39, 40, 51, 57. And see also the three letters for Nov. 20, 26, 27, 1775 in Wesley, Letters, 6:190-91.

40John Fletcher, Madeley, 4 July, 1774, to Charles Wesley, in ms. "Fletcher Volume," p. 49, MARC.

41[John Fletcher], n.p., n.d., to [Charles Wesley], in ms. "Fletcher Volume," p. 51, MARC.

42See the Journal for March and April, 1774, in Works, Vol. 4, and almost any month following, for evidence of a great turning of the tide of popular attention and respect. The texts of his sermons in these and the following months show many new ones.

43John Wesley, Northwich 22 March 1775, to John Fletcher, in Letters, 6:146; John Wesley, Journal, ;4 and 17 March, 1775, in Works, 4:40-41. Cf. Fletcher, Zelotes and Honestus, [the Scripture Scales], Works, 2:9-260.

44Cf. John Fletcher, The Last Check to Antinomianism: A Polemical Essay on the Twin Doctrines of Christian Imperfection and a Death Purgatory (London, 1775), Works 2:631, with the quotation above, at n. 35, from the "Essay in Truth." The real difference between the two men had been, though small, precisely the opposite of what a perhaps hasty reading of these documents has prompted several to conclude it was. The sequence of events set forth here was not clear to me when I wrote the article printed in The Preacher's Magazine, 55 (Fall 1979): 58, affirming the Last Check to have been already published before Wesley wrote Fletcher the letter of March 22. 1775.

45Fletcher, Works, 2:647, omits a line after the words "fully apprehends" in the quotation above. [It is restored here from the 2nd American edition of his Works, (6 vols., N.Y. 1809) 6:259-61.] Cf. John Wesley, sermon, "Scripture Way of Salvation," 30 March 1764, in Works, 6:53, and John Wesley, Westminster, 15 Nov., 1775, to Mary Bosanquet [who became John Fletcher's wife six years later], in Letters, 6:189, stressing the instantaneous character of inward, as over against outward, holiness.

46John Fletcher, Madeley, 21 May 1775, to Charles Wesley, in ms. "Fletcher Volume," p. 51, MARC.

47John Wesley, Brecon, 18 Aug., 1775, to John Fletcher, Letters, 6:174-75. Wes1ey also noted in the letter that the recent conference had followed Fletcher's advice to be "more exact than ever in examining the preachers both as to grace and gifts."

48Fletcher, Last Check, in Works 2:627-57. Cf. 2:523-26.

49Ibid., 2:627-29, the quotations being from p.629 (the brackets and the words they contain are in the original, and are presumably Fletcher's); John Wesley, A Plain Account of Christian Perfection, As Taught by the Reverend Mr. John Wesley, from the Year 1725, to the Year 1777 (London, 1777; first printed, London, 1766), in Works, 6:408. Cf., above, the quotation from Wesley's sermon, "Christian Perfection" [1741] at my footnote 31.

50Fletcher, Last Check, in Works, 2:629-31.

51Ibid., 2:631. This passage is the one which, I believe, Fletcher had edited to conform to Wesley's views, thus closing the "small difference" between them.

52Ibid., 2:632.

53Ibid., 2:632-33.

54Ibid., 2:633.

55Ibid., 2:634-639, the quotation being on p. 636.