Wesley Corpus

To-morrow night I expect to be in company with the gentleman [The young gentleman of Christ Church who said, 'Here is a new sect of Methodists sprung up.'] who did us the honor to take the first notice of our little Society. I have terrible reasons to think he is as slenderly provided with humanity as with sense and learning. However, I must not slip this opportunity, because he is at present in some distress, occasioned by his being obliged to dispute in the schools on Monday, though he is not furnished with such arguments as he wants. I intend, if he has not procured them before, to help him to some arguments, that I may at least get that prejudice away from him that ' we are friends-to none but what are as queer as ourselves.' 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.'