“These disorders resembled, in some of their features, the demoniacal possessions mentioned in the gospel history. The bodily agitations were perhaps as extreme in the one class of instances as in the other; nevertheless, there is no real analogy between the two. The demoniacs were _found_ in this state by Christ where He went preaching; they did not _become such_ while listening to Him. Besides, in no one instance recorded in the Gospels or Acts, did demoniacal possession, or any bodily agitations resembling it, come on as the initial stage of conversion. How then are we to dispose of such cases? Perhaps not at all to our satisfaction, except so far as this, that they serve to render so much the more unambiguous the distinction between themselves and those genuine affections which the apostolic writers describe and exemplify.” What says Wesley himself? With due deference to the great names quoted, we respect his testimony more than theirs: first, because he was, in sobriety of feeling, in depth of learning, and in clearness of judgment, at least their equal; and secondly, because his opinion was pronounced after being an eye-witness, whilst theirs is founded entirely upon the representations of others, and their own ideas of how things ought to be. 1. The cases were real, not pretended, and often ended in genuine conversion. “You deny,” writes Wesley at the time, “You deny that God does now work these effects; at least, that He works them in this manner. I affirm both; because I have heard these things with my own ears, and have seen them with my own eyes. I have seen very many persons changed, in a moment, from the spirit of fear, horror, despair, to the spirit of love, joy, and peace; and from sinful desire, till then reigning over them, to the pure desire of doing the will of God. I know several persons, in whom this great change was wrought in a dream, or during a strong representation to the eye of their mind, of Christ either on the cross, or in glory. This is the fact; let any judge of it as they please.”[305] 2. Why were these things permitted? Wesley says: “Perhaps it might be because of the hardness of our hearts, unready to receive anything unless we see it with our eyes and hear it with our ears, that God, in tender condescension to our weakness, suffered so many outward signs of the very time when He wrought this inward change to be continually seen and heard among us. But although they saw ‘signs and wonders’ (for so I must term them), yet many would not believe. They could not indeed deny the facts; but they could explain them away.”[306]