"_Which is the way to Christian perfection? Shall we go to it by internal stillness, agreeably to the direction of Moses and David ... or shall we press after it by an internal wrestling according to the commands of Christ?..._ The way to perfection is by the due combination of prevenient, assisting free grace, and of submissive, assisted free will.... 'God worketh in you to will and to do,' says St. Paul. Here he describes the passive office of faith, which submits to, and acquiesces in, every divine dispensation and operation. 'Therefore work out your own salvation with fear and trembling,' and, of consequence, with haste, diligence, ardour, and faithfulness.... Would ye then wait aright for Christian perfection? Impartially admit the two Gospel axioms, and faithfully reduce them to practice. In order to this, let them meet in your hearts, as the two legs of a pair of compasses meet in the rivet which makes them one compound instrument.... When your heart quietly rests in God by faith, as it steadily acts the part of a passive receiver, it resembles the leg of the compasses which rests in the centre of a circle; and then the poet's expressions, 'restless, resigned' ("_Restless, resigned, for God I wait; for God my vehement soul stands still_."--Wesley), describes its fixedness in God. But when your heart swiftly moves towards God by faith, as it acts the part of a diligent worker; when your ardent soul follows after God, as a thirsty deer does after the water-brooks, it may be compared to the leg of the compasses which traces the circumference of a circle; and then these words of the poet, 'restless' and 'vehement,' properly belong to it. "Is Christian perfection to be instantaneously brought down to us? or are we gradually to grow up to it? Shall we be made perfect in love by an habit of holiness suddenly infused into us, or by acts of feeble faith and feeble love so frequently repeated as to become strong, habitual, and evangelically natural to us?" Such are the difficulties with which Fletcher deals, patiently and fully turning them inside out, comparing and contrasting, defining and enlarging, leading the reader step by step to the conclusion that Christian perfection is essentially the perfection of _love_, love, "the highest gift of God, humble, gentle, patient love," shed abroad in the heart of the believer by the perpetual anointing of the Holy Spirit. As he finds his climax in Wesley's words, let us read them in the sense of his own quotation:--