It does not come within our plan or purpose to give a detailed exposition of Christian perfection, but simply to call the reader's attention to the truth as the central doctrine in Mr. Wesley's system of religious faith. With him it was deliverance from _inbred_, as well as _actual_, sin. It was not sin _repressed_, but sin exterminated, deliverance from sin. His standing definition was the following: "Sanctification, in a proper sense, is an instantaneous deliverance from all sin, and includes an instantaneous power, then given, always to cleave to God. Yet this sanctification does not include a power never to think a useless thought, nor ever speak a useless word. I myself believe that such a perfection is inconsistent with living in a corruptible body; for this makes it impossible always to think aright. While we breathe we shall more or less mistake. If, therefore, Christian perfection includes this, we must not expect it until after death." He says again that "the perfection he believes in is 'love dwelling alone in the heart.'" It is "deliverance from evil desires and evil tempers" as well as from "evil words and works." "I want you to be all love. This is the perfection I believe and teach. And this perfection is consistent with a thousand nervous disorders, which that high-strained perfection is not. Indeed, my judgment is (in this case particularly) to overdo is to undo; and that to set perfection too high (so high as no man that we ever heard or read of attained) is the most effectual (because unsuspected) way of driving it out of the world."[F] "Nor did I ever say or mean any more by perfection than the loving God with all our heart, and serving him with all our strength; for it might be attended with worse consequences than you seem to be aware of. If there be a mistake, it is far more dangerous on the one side than on the other. If I set the mark too high, I drive men into needless fears; if you set it too low, you drive them into hell fire."[G] It is not for us to defend these views, but simply to record them, as the theological faith of the founder of Methodism, and that which the Methodist Church in all the world has professed to believe and teach. VIII. THE RESURRECTION OF THE DEAD. Mr. Wesley taught the doctrine of the general resurrection of the human body. "The plain notion of a resurrection," he says, "requires that the selfsame body that died should rise again. Nothing can be said to be raised again but that body that died. If God gives to our souls a new body, this cannot be called a resurrection of the body, because the word plainly implies the fresh production of what was before."[H]