These were the words Hester Ann (Roe) Rogers chose to describe her mystical union with God as recorded in her best-selling Account of the Experience of Hester Ann Rogers, first published in 1794 and reprinted on both sides of the Atlantic throughout the nineteenth century. Hester Ann Roe was born on January 31, 1756 in Macclesfield, Cheshire to a clergyman in the Church of England. In 1773, the young Hester Roe heard a Methodist named David Simpson preach at Macclesfield and was eventually converted, writing, ‘My sins are gone, my soul was happy; and I longed to depart and be with Jesus. I was truly a new creature, and seemed to be in a new world!’ Despite opposition from her family, Rogers began rigorously seeking what John Wesley termed ‘Christian perfection’, or the elimination of all intentional sin, which he believed to be attainable in this life. To this end, she began to engage in a rigorous program of prayer and fasting which bordered on holy anorexia and, on multiple occasions, brought her dangerously close to death. Eventually, however, she achieves a sense of this perfection, which she vividly describes in the passage quoted in the epigraph to this chapter. In this passage Rogers not only echoes the language of mysticism – describing her experience in terms of emptiness before God and an erotic filling and overflowing of this emptiness by the presence of God – but also frames this experience in explicitly Wesleyan terms, emphasizing that ‘inbred sin’ no longer comes between her and God. The language is explicitly immediate and enthusiastic – she feels her sins forgiven and that she has become one with God, and she knows that she has been called to share this experience with others, first interpersonally and eventually in print. In addition, there is a barely concealed eroticism and conflation of sexual desire with spiritual desire just beneath the surface of Rogers's text.