Wesley Corpus

I doubt it will not pass. Cannot God permit Satan to exert his power wherever it pleaseth him Hitherto, then, we have not a grain of sound proof. Yet you pronounce with all peremptoriness, ‘The grounds of true religion cannot be truly known but by going so far back as this fall of angels’ (pages 37-8). Cannot! Positively cannot! How few men in England, in Europe, can or do go back so far! And are there none but these, no not one, who knows the grounds of true religion ‘It was their revolt which brought wrath and fire and thickness and darkness into nature’ (ibid.). If it was sin that brought fire into the world (which is hard to prove), did it bring darkness and thickness too But if it did, what harm is there in either Is not thickness as good in its place as thinness And as to darkness, you say yourself, ‘It has not only no evil in it, but is the only ground of all possible good.’ Touching creation in general you aver,-- ‘A creation out of nothing is no better sense than a creation into nothing’ (page 60). ‘A creation into nothing' is a contradiction in terms. Can you say a creation out of nothing is so It is, indeed, tautology; since the single term 'creation' is equivalent with production out of nothing. ‘That all things were created out of nothing has not the least tittle of Scripture to support it’ (page 55). Is it not supported (as all the Christian Church has thought hitherto) by the very first verse of Genesis ‘Nay, it is a fiction big with the grossest absurdities. It is full of horrid consequences. It separates everything from God. It leaves no relation between God and the creature. For ‘(mark the proof!)’ if it is created out of nothing, it cannot have something of God in it.’ (Page 58.) The consequence is not clear. Till this is made good, can any of those propositions be allowed ‘Nature is the first birth of God.’ Did God create it or not If not, how came it out of Him If He did, did He create it out of something or nothing ‘St. Paul says, All things are of, or out of, God.’ And what does this prove but that God is the cause of all things