Wesley Corpus

as devotion), " that we love God, not only with the highest and best, but with the whole of our affection that we love him not only with every capacity, passion, and faculty, with the understanding, will, and affections, but with every degree of every power, with all the lati tude of our will, with all the whole possibility of our souls ; that we devote to him, not only the highest degree of our love, but every degree of it ; in one word, that God be not only the principal, but the only object of our love." (Norris's Sermons, vol. iii. p. 7.) Not that the Almighty is so to be the only object of our love, as to exclude his creatures from a subordinate share of it. " The Lord rejoiceth in his works :" consequently man, made after his likeness, not only may, but ought to imitate him therein, and with pleasure to own that they are very good ;" nay, the love of God constraineth those in whose hearts it is shed abroad to love what bears his image, and we cannot suppose any love forbidden by God which necessarily flows from the love of him. And even that love of the creatures which does not flow from the love of God, if it lead