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Experience as Proof—See [Tests, Personal].
EXPERIENCE DECISIVE
A physician once remarked to S. H. Hadley, after having listened to his earnest appeals to drunkards to come to Jesus, “You would not talk to those men like that if you had ever seen inside a drunkard’s stomach.” “But I had a drunkard’s stomach,” quickly responded Mr. Hadley, “and Jesus saved me.”
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Experience, Spiritual—See [Spiritual Perturbation].
EXPERIENCE TESTING THEOLOGY
As for Wesley, an unrelenting thoroughness marked at every stage his temper in religion. He would have no uncertainties, no easy and soft illusions. Religion as a divine gift, as a human experience, was something definite. No intermediate stage was thinkable. And with a wise—but almost unconscious—instinct he put his theology to the one final test. He cast it into the alembic of experience. He tried it by the challenge of life; of its power to color and shape life. He spent the next thirteen years in that process, trying his creed with infinite courage, with transparent sincerity, and often with toil and suffering, by the rough acid of life, till at last he reached that conception of Christ and His gospel which lifted his spirit up to dazzling heights of gladness and power.—W. H. Fitchett, “Wesley and His Century.”
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