Wesley Corpus

18. It remains then, all that has been advanced to the con trary notwithstanding, that the only true and rational way of accounting for the general wickedness of mankind, in all ages and nations, is pointed out in those words: “In Adam all die.” In and through their first parent, all his posterity died in a spi ritual sense; and they remain wholly “dead in trespasses and sins,” till the second Adam makes them alive. By this “one man sin entered into the world, and passed upon all men:” And through the infection which they derive from him, all men are and ever were, by nature, entirely “alienated from the life of God; without hope, without God in the world.” (1.) Your Appendix to the first part of your book is wholly employed in answering two questions: “One is, How is it con sistent with justice, that all men should die by the disobedience of one man? The other, How shall we account for all men’s rising again, by the obedience of another man, Jesus Christ?” (Page 65.) You may determine the former question as you please, since it does not touch the main point in debate. I shall therefore take no farther pains about it, than to make a short extract of what Dr. Jennings speaks on the head: “(2.) As to the first question, Dr. Taylor gets rid of all diffi culty that may arise from the consideration of God’s justice, by ascribing it wholly to his goodness, that ‘death passed upon all men.” “Death, he tells us, ‘is upon the whole a benefit.’ It is certain that believers in Christ receive benefit by it. But this gentleman will have death to be an ‘original benefit, and that to all mankind; merely intended to increase the vanity of all earthly things, and to abate their force to delude us.” He afterward displays the benefit of shortening human life to its present standard: ‘That death being nearer to our view, might be a powerful motive to regard less the things of a transitory world. But does the “nearer view of death,’ in fact, produce this effect? Does not the common observation of all ages prove the contrary? Has not covetousness been the peculiar vice of old age?