Wesley Corpus

A week or two ago I pleased myself mightily with the hopes of sending you a full and satisfactory solution of your great question; having at last procured the celebrated treatise of Archbishop King, De Origine Mali. [William King (1650-1729), Archbishop of Dublin 1703. De Origine Mali was published in 1702. It was translated by Dr. Edmund Law. See Journal, viii. 119n; and letters of Dec. 19, 1729, and Jan.1731.] But on looking farther into it, I was strangely disappointed; finding it the least satisfactory account of any given by any author whom I ever read in my life. He contradicts almost every man that ever writ on the subject, and builds an hypothesis on the ruins of theirs which he takes to be entirely new, though, if I do not much mistake, part of it is at least two thousand years old. The purport of this is, ' That natural evils flow naturally and necessarily from the essence of matter, so that God Himself could not have prevented them, unless by not creating matter at all.' Now this new supposition seems extremely like the old one of the Stoics, who I fancy always affirmed, totidem verbis, that ' All natural evils were owing not to God's want of will, but to His want of power to redress them as necessarily flowing from the nature of matter.' I breakfasted to-day with a great admirer of the Septuagint, who was much surprised to hear that any one should charge them with want of integrity, and seemed to think that charge could not be made out. Nay, he went so far as even to assert that he took this Greek to be more faultless than our present Hebrew copies. I wished I had had one or two of the places you mention at hand, and I would have given him them to chew upon. One pretty large dissertation I have by me still; I propose to read and transcribe it against I go up to London to the Westminster Great Day, [The Westminster Feast and Play on Jan. 28. See letter of Jan. 27, 1731, to Mrs. Pendarves.] which I am afraid will be as soon as my brother will want it.