“You have so well satisfied me as to the tenets of Thomas à Kempis, that I have ventured to trouble you again on a more dubious subject. Dr. Taylor, in his ‘Holy Living and Dying,’ says, ‘Whether God has forgiven us or no, we know not; therefore, be sorrowful for ever having sinned.’ This seems to contradict his own words in the next section, where he says that ‘by the Lord’s supper all the members are united to one another, and to Christ the Head. The Holy Ghost confers on us the graces necessary for, and our souls receive the seed of, an immortal life.’ Now surely these graces are of not so little force as that we cannot perceive whether we have them or not. If we dwell in Christ, and Christ in us (which He will not do unless we are regenerate), certainly we must be sensible of it. If we can never have any certainty of our being in a state of salvation, good reason it is that every moment should be spent, not in joy, but in fear and trembling; and then, undoubtedly, in this life we are of all men the most miserable. God deliver us from such a fearful expectation as this!”[30] We thus find young Wesley carefully reading Thomas à Kempis and Jeremy Taylor, and groping after two of the great doctrines which afterwards distinguished his ministry: God’s love to _all_, and the privilege of living in a state of conscious salvation. These and other topics puzzled him, and yet he seemed to have an almost instinctive knowledge of what is truth. We have seen his mother’s sentiments concerning Kempis. His father, on the 14th of July following, observes that though Kempis has gone to an extreme in teaching the doctrine of self-mortification, yet, considering the age in which he wrote, there was no need to be surprised at this. And then he adds: “Making some grains of allowance, he may be read to great advantage. Notwithstanding all his superstition and enthusiasm, it is almost impossible to peruse him seriously, without admiring, and in some measure imitating, his heroic strains of humility and piety and devotion.” The books of Kempis and Taylor seem to have been the first on practical divinity that Wesley read, and, to the day of his death, were held in high esteem. Kempis’s “Pattern” was one of the first books that Wesley published; and an extract from Taylor’s work forms a part of his “Christian Library.” In his estimation, Taylor was a man of the sublimest piety, and one of the greatest geniuses on earth;[31] and Kempis is always spoken of in terms of high respect. What were the results of Wesley’s reading?