Wesley Corpus

Among the latter I was surprised to find a demonstration of the manner how God is present to all beings (page 57), how He begat the Son from all eternity (page 77), and how the Holy Ghost proceeds from the Father and the Son (page 85). Quanto satius est fateri nescire quae nescias, quam ista effutientern nauseare, et ipsurn tibi displicere! [‘How much more laudable would it be to acknowledge you do not know what you do not know, than to follow that blunderer whom you must surely despise!’ See Cicero’s De Natura Deorum, i. 30.] How much better to keep to his own conclusion (page 95), ‘Reason proves that this mystery is possible’! Revelation assures us that it is true; Heaven alone can show us how it is. There are several propositions in his second book which I cannot assent to, particularly with regard to the divine foreknowledge. I can by no means acquiesce in the twenty-second proposition, ‘That it is a matter of free choice in God to think of finite ideas.’ I cannot reconcile this with the assertion of the Apostle, ‘Known unto God are all His works p’ a, from eternity.’ And if any one ask, ‘How is God's foreknowledge consistent with our freedom’ I plainly answer, I cannot tell. In the third book (page 209) I read, ‘The desire of God, purely as beatifying, as the source of infinite pleasure, is a necessary consequence of the natural love we have for happiness.’ I deny it absolutely. My natural love for happiness was as strong thirty years ago as at this instant. Yet I had then no more desire of God, as the source of any pleasure at all, than I had of the devil or of hell. So totally false is that, ‘That the soul inevitably loves what it judges to be the best.’ Equally false is his next corollary -- that ‘if ever fallen spirits see and feel that moral evil is a source of eternal misery, they cannot continue to will it deliberately' (ibid.). I can now show living proofs of the contrary. But I take knowledge, both from this and many other of his assertions, that Mr. R. never rightly understood the height and depth of that corruption which is in man, as well as diabolical nature.