For five years, Whitefield had been a sincere and earnest penitent. Like all the other Oxford Methodists, he sought salvation, not by simple, heartfelt faith in Christ, but by self-denial, ardent piety, and the practice of good works. No wonder that he was destitute of the joy arising from a firm and full assurance of acceptance with God. The man relying on his own piety and beneficence must necessarily live a joyless, anxious, and almost miserable life; because he knows and feels that much in his past career has been absolutely wicked; and because, however sincere his present piety, and however commendable his good works, he knows that, at the best, they are exceedingly imperfect, and, so far from meriting the Divine favour, and atoning for the iniquities of other days, actually need the forgiveness of a long-suffering God. No man of this description can be happy. But it is far otherwise with the penitent, who, while diligently using all the means of grace, and to the utmost of his power endeavouring to serve both God and man, obeys Scripture teaching by firmly believing that the death of Christ was a full atonement for _his sins, even his_, and by trusting solely and exclusively in that astounding but scripturally revealed fact for acceptance with God, both in this world and in that which is to come. Let a man attain to such a faith as this, or rather let him be blessed with such a blessing (for faith is a Divine gift as well as a human act), and he cannot fail to be filled, as Whitefield was, with "joy unspeakable and full of glory." Even his love to God, also, becomes what it had never been before, inasmuch as he now, in the death of Christ, sees God's love manifested to himself as it is manifested nowhere else. Love kindles love, and the man serves his Maker, not merely because it is his duty, but because he cannot help it, love making his duty his delight. With such a belief concerning the death of Christ, and such a trust in it, his faith in God, in Providence, in the blessed Bible as a whole, is of necessity higher, holier, stronger, broader, firmer than it ever could be without such a belief and trust; and the same may also be said respecting hope, and all the other Divine gifts and Christian virtues possessed and exercised by the genuinely converted man. It was not until the year 1735 that Whitefield attained to such a state as this; and three more years elapsed before his friends and religious preceptors, John and Charles Wesley, were brought to the same self-renunciating crisis, and were enabled by the Holy Spirit to trust simply and solely in the blood of Christ for personal, present, and endless salvation.