“I was also grieved that when he tried his well-meant zeal (though it was not, in my judgment, zeal according to knowledge) to explode the baptism of the Holy Ghost, and laugh it out of the College, after having dressed it in a fool’s coat and called it Perfection, most of the students had tamely allowed him that Joel’s prophecy was entirely fulfilled upon the hundred and twenty disciples on the day of Pentecost, that believers are to grow in grace by imperceptible dews, and that we can do very well without a remarkable shower of grace and Divine effusion of power, opening in us the well of living water that is to flow to everlasting life. “As it appeared to me they had, in a good degree, given up their little expectation of this Gospel blessing, and renounced the grand point which I apprehended was to be firmly maintained and vigorously pursued in the College, I did not feel the same liberty with them in prayer, and found that, as matters were and appeared likely to continue, my convictions and desires would rather be damped than cherished among them. “Nor, indeed, did I see, upon this new plan, any advantage this College was to have more than the academy at Abergavenny, itinerancy excepted; so that I feared many would get into the habit of preaching by rote, and of talking of the power without heartily waiting for it, which made me give up my hopes that those who have not gifts should ever be useful preachers, as a day of Pentecost and power from on high can alone supply the want of them. “My lady, likewise, appeared to me so excessively afraid of Perfection, that she seemed to take umbrage at a harmless expression I had used in a letter hastily written to a friend, ‘_The fiery baptism will burn up self_,’—an expression which I had caught from Mr. Harris, who frequently uses it, though no one will accuse him of befriending Mr. Wesley’s doctrine of Perfection. Whatsoever he means by it, I mean nothing but to convey the idea of a power that enables us to say, with a tolerable degree of propriety, as St. Paul, ‘I live not, but Christ lives in me;’ and I saw that, if I was faithful to my light, misapprehensions of the like kind, and well or ill grounded fears, would perpetually arise.