As the other chapters of this collection attest, the language of spiritual sensation has a wide range of expressions and a variety of possible references. John Wesley explicitly recognizes this idiom in patristic, medieval, Reformation and early modern sources. Consider Wesley's sprawling anthology, A Christian Library, which includes writings from dozens of authors employing this language. Among others, he includes the pseudo-Macarian Homilies, Pascal's Pensées and many examples from seventeenth-century Puritan and Anglican authors, including John Smith, Henry Scougal, William Beveridge, Richard Baxter and John Owen. The language of spiritual sensation serves diverse theologies in these various sources; in some cases such language refers to the act of the mind contemplating spiritual truths or grasping the true sense of the scriptures; in some cases it refers to intention, love or affect in the soul that longs for God; in some cases it seems to refer to a capacity distinct from natural reason or affect. Elsewhere Wesley cites Origen and Augustine on the spiritual senses, but he also comments on his contemporary Francis Hutcheson, who proposes a separate moral sense and aesthetic sense. He translates Moravian hymns that are soaked in the language of spiritual sensation and he publishes his own abridgement of Jonathan Edwards’s Treatise Concerning Religious Affections. The diversity of this partial list of the tradition of spiritual sensation with which he had contact underlines the need to understand Wesley on his own terms. Nevertheless, it is clear that his understanding of spiritual sensation is shaped by this tradition.

In an important early theological essay, his Earnest Appeal to Men of Reason and Religion, Wesley sets out an explicit account of a theological category of spiritual sensation:

We may observe here several typical features of Wesley's use of this language. First, he freely refers to spiritual senses by an analogy with the five natural senses (and names the sense of touch with the verb ‘feel’). Second, this quotation is quite characteristic of Wesley's constant use of biblical sentences as the material for his language of spiritual sensation. Third, what is known through the spiritual senses comprises specifically theo- logical truth, which here includes the knowledge of God, of redemption in Christ, of personal salvation and of the work of the Spirit in the believer. Fourth, since ‘every true believer in God “seeth him who is invisible”’, the experience belongs not only to a mature stage of faith, but to every stage of faith. Fifth, the spiritual senses are not to be identified with ‘any of our natural senses or faculties’. Sixth, the particular object of the spiritual senses is identified both as ‘him who is invisible’ and as ‘the love of God shed abroad in [the believer's] heart’.