John Wesley — "Though I am an old man, I am but a little child; for I am just beginning to lear…"
Though I am an old man, I am but a little child; for I am just beginning to learn the alphabet of salvation.
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More from John Wesley
"I am a creature of a day, passing through life as an arrow through the air. I am a spirit come from God, and returning to God; just hovering a few moments over a great gulf, till, on a sudden, I drop …"
"It is not the being in a place, but the being in a state, that makes us happy."
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About John Wesley (1703-1791)
English Anglican cleric and founder of Methodism, whose open-air preaching and class-meeting structure created the largest 18th-century evangelical revival. Closely associated with Charles Wesley (his hymn-writing brother) and George Whitefield (early co-revivalist, later doctrinal opponent). For an intellectual contrast, see George Whitefield, Calvinist evangelical revivalist — Whitefield's predestinarian Calvinism vs Wesley's free-grace Arminian theology split the early Methodist movement permanently in the 1739-41 break. The founding evangelical Calvinist-Arminian schism — the two parallel evangelical traditions American Christianity descends from.
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Understanding this quote
What it means
Despite a lifetime of accumulated knowledge and experience, true wisdom reveals how little we actually understand. The speaker acknowledges that genuine spiritual understanding is so vast and deep that even a long life of devoted study leaves one feeling like a beginner. Humility grows alongside knowledge — the more one learns, the more one recognizes the infinite scope of what remains unknown.
Relevance to John Wesley
Wesley founded Methodism after decades of rigorous theological study at Oxford and over 50 years of itinerant preaching across Britain. He rode 250,000 miles and wrote hundreds of works, yet remained intensely focused on personal sanctification and 'going on to perfection.' This quote reflects his doctrine of entire sanctification — salvation as an ongoing transformative journey, not a completed transaction, consistent with his lifelong spiritual self-examination.
The era
The 18th-century Methodist revival emerged amid Enlightenment rationalism that prized human reason and scientific progress. Wesley countered intellectual pride with evangelical humility, insisting that head knowledge meant nothing without heart transformation. In an era of confident reason and colonial expansion, this quote challenged the prevailing spirit of mastery and certainty, grounding spiritual authority in perpetual dependence on grace rather than accumulated doctrinal expertise.
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