Wesley Corpus

Page 343: ‘No creature can suffer but what has merited punishment.’ This is not true: for the man Christ Jesus was a creature. But He suffered; yet He had not merited punishment, unless our sins were imputed to Him. But if so, Adam's sin might be imputed to us; and on that account even an infant may suffer. Now, if these things are so, if a creature may suffer for the sin of another imputed to him, then the whole frame of reasoning for the pre-existence of souls, raised from the contrary supposition, falls to the ground. Page 347: ‘There are but three opinions concerning the transmission of original sin.’ That is, there are but three ways of accounting how it is transmitted. I care not if there were none. The fact I know, both by Scripture and by experience. I know it is transmitted; but how it is transmitted I nether know nor desire to know. Page 353: ‘By this insensibility and spiritual lethargy in which all souls remain, ere they awake into mortal bodies, the habits of evil in some are totally extinguished.’ Then it seems there is a third possible way of curing moral evil. And why may not all souls be cured this way without any pain or suffering at all ‘If any impurity remains in them, it is destroyed in a middle state after death’ (ibid.). I read nothing of either of these purgations in the Bible. But it appears to me, from the whole tenor of his writings, that the Chevalier's notions are about one quarter scriptural, one quarter Popish, and two quarters Mystic. Page 360: ‘God dissipated the chaos introduced into the solar system by the fall of angels.’ Does sacred Writ affirm this Where is it written, except in Jacob Behmen Page 366: ‘Physical evil is the only means of curing moral evil.’ This is absolutely contrary both to Scripture, experience, and his own words (page 353). And ‘this great principle,’ as he terms it, is one of those fundamental mistakes which run through the whole Mystic divinity. Almost all that is asserted in the following pages may likewise be confuted by simply denying it. Page 373: ‘Hence we see the necessity of sufferings and expiatory pains in order to purify lapsed beings, the intrinsic efficacy of physical to cure moral evil.’