The chief cause of anxiety, however, arose from Mrs. Hutton’s description of her two lodgers. She relates that, when the two Wesleys returned from Georgia, she received and treated them with the utmost love and tenderness; but John was now “turned a wild enthusiast.” While her husband was reading to a number of people in his study a sermon of Bishop Blackall’s, John Wesley stood up and told the company that, five days ago, he was not a Christian. Mr. Hutton was thunderstruck, and said, “Have a care, Mr. Wesley, how you despise the benefits received by the two sacraments;” but Wesley repeated his declaration, upon which Mrs. Hutton answered, “If you have not been a Christian ever since I knew you, you have been a great hypocrite, for you made us all believe that you were one.” To this Wesley replied that, “When we renounce everything but faith and get into Christ, then, and not till then, have we any reason to believe that we are Christians.” Mrs. Hutton, in writing an account of all this to Samuel Wesley, adds that her two children had so high an opinion of Wesley’s sanctity and judgment that they were in great danger of being drawn into his “wild notions;” that Wesley had “abridged the life of one Halyburton, a Presbyterian teacher in Scotland,” and that her son had designed to print it, but she and her husband had forbidden him to promote such “rank fanaticism;” and that all his converts were “directed to get an assurance of their sins being pardoned,” and to expect this in “an instant.” She acknowledges that the two Wesleys “are men of great parts and learning;” but they were now under a “strange delusion;” and she entreats their brother Samuel to stop this “wildfire,” if he can. Samuel Wesley’s reply is dated, “Tiverton, June 17, 1738.” He writes:— “I am sufficiently sensible of yours and Mr. Hutton’s kindness to my brothers, and shall always acknowledge it. Falling into enthusiasm is being lost with a witness; and, if you are troubled for two of your children, you may be sure I am so for two whom I may, in some sense, call _mine_. What Jack means by his not being a Christian till last month, I understand not. Had he never been in covenant with God? Then, as Mr. Hutton observed, baptism was nothing. Had he totally apostatized from it? I dare say not; and yet he must either be unbaptized, or an apostate, to make his words true. “If renouncing everything but faith means rejecting all merit of our own good works, what Protestant does not do that? Even Bellarmine on his death-bed is said to have renounced all merits but those of Christ. But if this renouncing regards good works in any other sense, as being unnecessary, it is wretchedly wicked.