Aurelius Augustine 400 AD
"So I have good reason for my strong hope in him who sits at your right hand and makes intercession for us. If I didn't have that hope I would be desperate. But I believe that in him you heal all my weaknesses, and they are many and great...but your medicine is even greater. It would be easy to think that your Word is too remote for any communication with man. It would be easy to despair, had not the Word become flesh to dwell in our midst."
Watchman Nee @1940 AD
"For years, maybe, you have tried fruitlessly to exercise control over yourself, and perhaps this is still your experience: but when once you see the truth you will recognize that you are indeed powerless to do anything, but that in setting you aside altogether God has done it all. Such discovering brings human striving and self-effort to an end."
((Watchman Nee, The Normal Christian Life (Fort Washington PA; Christian Literature Crusade. 1961) 35-37))
George Whitefield 1740 AD
"...the man that received Christ continued praising and speaking of Him until near midnight. My own soul was so full that I retired and wept before the lord, and had a deep sense of my own vileness, and the sovereignty and greatness of God's everlasting love. Most of the people spent the remainder of the night in prayer and praising God."
Jonathan Edwards 1737 AD
"...such as to keep me a greater part of the time in a flood of tears, and weeping aloud. I felt an ardency of soul to be, what I know not otherwise how to express, emptied and aniihilated; to lie in the dust, and to be full of Christ alone; to love Him with a holy and pure love; to trust in Him; to live upon Him; to serve Him and to be perfectly sanctified and made pure, with a divine and heavenly purity."
