Wesley Corpus

There was the less need of our Lord’s speaking much on this head, because it was so fully declared in the Old Testament, and was not questioned by any of those false teachers against whom he was chiefly concerned to warn his disciples. You add: “It has been delivered as a fundamental truth, that no man will come to Christ, the Second Adam, who is not first throughly convinced of the several things he lost in the first Adam.” (Taylor's Doctrine, &c., p. 243.) This is a fundamental truth; none will come to Christ as a Redeemer until he is throughly convinced he wants a Redeemer. No man will ever come to him as a Saviour, till he knows and feels himself a lost sinner. None will come to the “Physician” but “they that are sick,” and are throughly sensible of it; that are deeply convinced of their sinful tempers, as well as sinful words and actions. And these tempers, they well know, were antecedent to their choice, and came into the world with them. So far “every man who comes to Christ is first convinced of the several things he lost by Adam;” though he may not clearly know the source of that corruption whch he sees and feels in his own heart and life. “But why does our Lord never mention Adam, or the corrup tion of our nature through him?” He does mention this corruption, and he presupposes it in all his public discourses. He does not mention it largely and explicitly, for the reasons above recited. “But the Apostles are wholly silent on this head, in their sermons recorded in the Acts, and in their Epistles too.” (Pages 243, 244.) Are they wholly silent in their Epistles? This is a violent mistake. And as to their sermons, it may be observed, 1. That we have not one whole sermon of any one Apostle recorded in the Acts; nor, it may be, the twentieth part of one. 2. That it was not needful for them to prove what none of their hearers denied: No, not even the Heathens; even these allowed the corruption of human nature.