Wesley Corpus

Why could not God do this Because ‘body and spirit are not two separate things, but are only the inward and outward condition of one and the same being. Every creature must have its own body, and cannot be without it. For its body is that’ (Who would have thought it!) ‘which makes it manifest to itself. It cannot know either that it is or what it is but by its own body!' (Page 32.) What a heap of bold assertions is here to curb Omnipotence! And not one of them has a tittle of proof, unless one can prove the other! But we have more still: ‘The body of any creature has nothing of its own, but is solely the outward manifestation of that which is inwardly in the soul. Every animal has nothing in its outward form or shape but that which is the form and growth of its spirit. As no number can be anything else but that which the units contained in it make it to be, so no body can be anything else but the coagulation or sum total of those properties of nature that are coagulated in it.’ (Page 33.) Astonishing! What a discovery is this, that a body is only a curdled spirit! that our bodies are only the sum total of our spiritual properties! and that the form of every man's body is only the form of his spirit made visible! ‘Every spirit manifests its own nature by that body which proceeds from it as its own birth’ (Part II. p. 17). Does the body, then, grow out of the spirit as the hair and nails grow out of the body, and this in consequence of the ‘powers of nature’ distinct from the power and will of God To abridge God of His power, after creation as well as before it, you affirm, farther,--