So if virtue is the cure for sin, what use is Christianity then? It seems to me that there are virtuous pagans, some surpassing Christians.
One must positively accept the grace of the Holy Spirit to receive salvific faith in Christ and begin the process of Theosis, or deification, or as John Wesley called it, Entire Sanctification. We are called to be perfect even as the Father is perfect and the process of this perfection corresponds to the means of salvation, and occurs entirely as a result of synergy between the Holy Spirit and those who have been mystically grafted on to the Body of Christ.
This salvific faith comes with more Grace and the means to receive yet more of God’s uncreated Grace, which enables us to do yet more to conquer the passions and avoid sinful inclinations, substituting virtue for wickedness. We have to overcome our pride, our temper, our carnal appetites for food and sex, and subordinate the natural passions that drive these things so they no longer hold us in a state of total bondage, but rather, are put to the service of God through the practice of those virtues which without the grace of the Holy Spirit we would be unable to obtain.
Regarding Paganism, the error in your statement is to suppose that God does not bless everyone with His grace; some people get part of the message without accepting the whole program, and this is still good, because we should actively pray for their salvation, since God is love, and godliness is universally available to humans, similiar to the principle of General Revelation, which is an extremely useful Roman Catholic doctrine which explains how it is various non-Christian religions like Zoroastrianism, Taoism, Hinduism, Shintoism, Buddhism, even Islam, can promote the virtuous behaviors and also on occasion have correct insights about God without the specific revelations available to the ancient Hebrew religion and its contemporary continuation which is Christianity. For example, the ancient Egyptians, as pointed out by the Orthodox apologist Archpriest Andrew Stephen Damick in his deservedly popular Orthodoxy and Heterodoxy, had the correct idea of a God-man, but simply mistakenly identified Pharoah as that person, rather than Christ, who is the true Theanthropos, uniting our humanity with His divinity to remake us in the image of God.
And the process by which we are remade through faith in Christ is Theosis, or as John Wesley called it, Entire Sanctification.
It is a great pity that there are so very few Methodist churches which actually teach what John Wesley taught and even fewer which practice Christianity according to his neo-Patristic instructions. If a Methodist church taught Theosis and prayed the litany on the fast days of Wednesday and Friday, and stressed high-frequency but not casual communion on Sunday, I would join it.
Essentially what John Wesley was doing was setting up something like the Orthodox Church within the Church of England. Indeed he was even unable to deny having been ordained a bishop by the Greek Orthodox Erasmus of Arcadia. Unfortunately the Methodists in England did not stay within the Church of England but left; it should be noted that the schism between Methodists and Episcopalians in the United States is arguably accidental and the result of both groups having been cut off by the Church of England in terms of access to the episcopate and thus new clergy, but independently dealing with the problem without reference to each other.
