Wesley Corpus

How shall we reconcile this with the Mosaic account - ‘And God said, Let the earth bring forth cattle, and creeping thing, and beast. And God made the beast of the earth; and God saw that it was good.’ (Gen. i. 24-5.) Does anything here intimate that beasts or serpents literally crept out of the womb of sin And what have serpents in particular to do with covetousness, or indeed with envy, unless in poetic fables 4. Of the fall of man. ‘Adam had lost much of his perfection before Eve was taken out of him. “It is not good,” said God, “that man should be alone.” This shows that Adam had now made that not to be good which God saw to be good when He created him.’ (Spirit of Prayer, p. 74.) Nay, does it show either more or less than this--that it was not conducive to the wise ends God had in view for man to remain single ‘God then divided the human nature into a male and female creature: otherwise man would have brought forth his own likeness out of himself, in the same manner as he had a birth from God. But Adam let in an adulterous love of the world: by this his virginity was lost, and he had no longer a power of bringing forth a birth from himself.’ (Page 75.) We have no shadow of proof for all this. ‘This state of inability is called his failing into a deep sleep’ (page 76). How does this agree with, ‘The Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam’ (Gen. ii. 21) ‘God took his Eve out of him, as a lesser evil, to avoid a greater. For it was a less folly to love the female part of himself than to love things lower than himself.’ (Page 77.)