Brain, Meet Heart

In chapter 7 of Palmer's Way of Holiness just after the acceptance of grace narrative, Palmer feels called to evangelistic mission.  In deciding whether she can "profess this blessing" even to crowds of thousands, she says that her prior mindset had been that "Satan had suggested that she would ever be vacillating in her experience; one day professing the blessing, and another not; that she was so constitutionally prone to reason, it would require an extraordinary miracle to sustain her amid the array of unpropitious circumstances, which, like a mighty phalanx, crowded before the vision of her mind".  Two things about this particular passage:  one, that we continue the Wesleyan (and, really, Lutheran) plot device of uncertainty regarding assurance; and two, that there is a fight between faith and reason that I don't know we've seen as yet.

One:  the vacillation Palmer mentions is part and parcel of every good Wesleyan narrative, but here it seems to be both more external (Satan as speaking character) and completely awful.  Was there a greater need for certainty by Palmer's time that doubt wasn't something people were comfortable wrestling with as Wesley did?  And was there a sense that Wesley (or any of his published followers) had ever gotten to a place where they stopped wrestling?

Two:  asking for a miracle is a rather gutsy thing to do, to be sure, but Palmer seems aghast at the fact that she is "constitutionally prone to reason."  Was the folksy aspect of Methodism the thing that made reason a hindrance to faith or was the general tone of American religion at this point?  And what do miracles have to do with reason?  She goes on later to say that yes, a miracle would indeed be needed and God was standing by to provide one; was there not a sense that the standing by part was the miracle or were only concrete actions slotted into the miracle category?  (Did "miracle" have pretty much the same parameters then as now?)