Receive afflictions as the best guides to perfection.
Remember always the presence of God.
Rejoice always in the will of God.
Direct all to the glory of God."
The little book from which these extracts are taken was Fletcher's companion in his hours of private prayer and communion with God. It was written, not for others, but for himself. For a century past it has been in safe and reverent keeping, and is now as he left it. Its pages are worn by his touch. With these hymns and meditations he nourished his soul in secret. With these rules he loved to bind his free Christian spirit. Like other saintly men, he found that the impulses, even of the regenerate life, may not be left to themselves with entire confidence in their sufficient working. He sought to strengthen them by meditation, to sustain them by spiritual exercises and discipline; he furnished them with tests and standards, and made self-examination definite and precise. He sought perfection at once in supreme love to God, and in the minutest details of character and conduct. Let this be borne in mind in connexion with the fact that Fletcher was a leader of the Evangelical Revival, and a founder and father of Methodism. Evangelical religion has been charged with indifference to painstaking spiritual culture. Its doctrine of salvation by faith has been thought to carry with it self-confidence, familiar ways with God, and easy dealing with one's own soul. It is supposed to compensate for its insistence upon conversion, by sanctioning subsequent laxity in the matter of prayer and fasting. It is charged with spiritual shallowness, and asked why, with all its innumerable activities, it fails to produce the deeper and more disciplined devoutness of which Thomas à Kempis in the Roman, and Andrewes and Keble in the Anglican, communities are great examples.
A proper discussion of this question would require, amongst other things, an examination of the terms in which it is stated. They would be found to contain, with some truth, assumptions utterly false and misleading. Amongst these is the assumption that sanctity is not such, unless it have a certain form, diverging not too widely from an accepted type. The Roman controversialist objects to the Church of England that it does not exhibit notes of sanctity, "that it has no saints." As Dr. Mozley has said, "He refuses, in a certain case, to see and recognise the Christian type, because it does not come before him in the Latin shape, and with the accompaniments of intellectual grace and refinement, which it has incorporated on its European area."[2] By a very slight alteration in the wording of this sentence, it would describe with equal accuracy the attitude of those who cannot recognise sanctity which does not come before them in the Anglican shape; and by a second and a third alteration, it would describe the inability, here and there existing, to discern any sanctity but that of an accepted type or favoured school. Much of the disparagement of "Evangelical" piety is plainly of this kind; and the truth needs to be spoken with regard to all these narrow and sectarian gauges of Christian character. Amid the "diversities of ministrations and diversities of workings," there is no essential distinction as to the so called "note of sanctity"; Eastern or Western, Anglican or Puritan, holiness is always and essentially the same, rebuking every attempt to fasten it to a particular type, or ignore it apart from a particular succession.
Fletcher was an Evangelical of Evangelicals, teaching conversion, the witness of the Spirit, and the entire sanctification of believers. He profoundly influenced the theology and general religious spirit and character of Methodism. What then is the bearing of his spiritual life and the influence of his example upon these latter? It is this: that while holiness is, in its truest, deepest aspect, the gift of God,—it is God who sanctifies as surely as it is God who justifies,—yet, alike in the pursuit and possession of holiness, the Christian is called to work together with God, in watchfulness and prayer, in self-examination and self-denial, in reading and meditation, "exercising himself unto godliness" in the many ways which Scripture enjoins and which insight and experience will suggest.
If at any time the Methodists, or Evangelical Christians generally, should let slip either of these truths; if holiness be thought of, on the one hand, as a human attainment and not a Divine gift, or, on the other, as a gift of God having no relation to personal discipline and culture,—they will at least be breaking with their best traditions, and have against them both the teaching and the example of their fathers.
This little manual of devotion, written by his own hand, and worn by long and frequent use, reveals much of the way in which Fletcher's inmost life was cultivated. Knowing that life as it was manifested in his character and conduct, we regard with deep interest the means by which it was nurtured in secret. The lovely growth of goodness had at the root of it the patient discipline here portrayed. We might have guessed as much, but here we see that it was so.