Wesley elicited the religious experience of Michael Linner, the oldest member of the church, which was to the effect that Michael believed to the saving of his soul two years before he received the full assurance of faith; though he admitted that the more usual method is for the Holy Spirit “to give, in one and the same moment, the forgiveness of sins, and a full assurance of that forgiveness.” David Nitschmann, one of the four public teachers of the Herrnhuth community, told Wesley that, for years after he was delivered from the bondage of sin, he was troubled with doubts and fears. Martin Döber stated: “It is common for persons to receive justification through faith in the blood of Christ before they receive the full assurance of faith, which God many times withholds till He has tried whether they will work together with Him in the use of the first gift.” Augustine Neusser said he could not tell the hour or day when he first received the full assurance that his sins were pardoned; for it was not given at once, but grew within him by degrees. David Schneider’s experience was substantially the same; but it is right to add, that the experience of others was of a brighter kind, and confirmative of the scriptural doctrine that, when sins are forgiven, the Spirit, at the same moment, gives the assurance of it. Wesley eagerly listened to the recital of these religious experiences at Herrnhuth, and became bewildered; and hence those puzzling declarations concerning his own religious state, even down to the beginning of 1739, which have been already given. The truth is, both Wesley and the Moravians seemed to confound the doctrine of the Spirit’s witness with the doctrine of sanctification. Because they were not, for a season, wholly sanctified, they declare that they had not the witness of the Spirit or the full assurance of faith. The following, for instance, is Arvid Gradin’s description of that witness or assurance: “Repose in the blood of Christ; a firm confidence in God, and persuasion of His favour; serene peace and steadfast tranquillity of mind, with a deliverance from every fleshly desire, and from every outward and inward sin.” This is a beautiful description of what the Methodists mean by entire sanctification; but Wesley, taught by the Herrnhuth Moravians, confounded it, for a time, with what he called “the witness of the Spirit,—full assurance of faith;” the result being the use of language, in reference to himself, quite sufficient to perplex the modern Methodist, who, without paying attention to these Moravian facts, contents himself with merely comparing the lucid language of Wesley’s sermons with the confused and confusing language of those parts of Wesley’s journal to which we are now adverting.