Coughlan was one of those in London, who professed to receive the blessing of Christian perfection; but, like many others, imbibed fantastic notions respecting it. Soon after the conference of 1768, Wesley wrote to him as follows. “DEAR LAURENCE,--By a various train of providences you have been led to the very place where God intended you should be; and you have reason to praise Him, that He has not suffered your labour there to be in vain. In a short time, how little will it signify, whether we had lived in the Summer Islands, or beneath ‘The rage of Arctos and eternal frost!’ “How soon will this dream of life be at an end! And when we are once landed in eternity, it will be all one, whether we spent our time on earth in a palace, or had not where to lay our head. “You never learned, either from my conversation, or preaching, or writings, that ‘holiness consisted in a glow of joy.’ I constantly told you quite the contrary: I told you it was the love of God and our neighbour; the image of God stamped on the heart; the life of God in the soul of man; the mind that was in Christ, enabling us to walk as Christ also walked. If Mr. Maxfield, or you, took it to be anything else, it was your own fault, not mine; and, whenever you waked out of that dream, you ought not to have laid the blame of it upon me. Perhaps you thought you had received what you had not. But pray do not measure all men by yourself; do not imagine you are the universal standard. If you deceived yourself, you should not infer that all others do. Many think they are justified, and are not; but we cannot infer, that none are justified. So neither, if many think they are ‘perfected in love,’ and are not, will it follow that none are so. Blessed be God, though we set a hundred enthusiasts aside, we are still ‘encompassed with a cloud of witnesses,’ who have testified, and do testify, in life and in death, that perfection which I have taught these forty years! This perfection cannot be a delusion, unless the Bible be a delusion too; I mean, loving God with all our hearts, and our neighbour as ourselves. I pin down all its opposers to this definition of it. No evasion! No shifting the question! Where is the delusion of this? Either you received this love, or you did not. If you did, dare you call it a delusion? If you received anything else, it does not at all affect the question. O Laurence, if sister Coughlan and you ever did enjoy this, humble yourselves before God for casting it away; if you did not, God grant you may! “Yours, etc., “JOHN WESLEY.”[34]