Wesley Corpus

Yet, so far I can see, certain and incontestable. Such, I fear, is the case of those of the human race who cover at present the far greatest part of the globe.” (Page 416.) “Then I ran back in my thoughts four or five thousand years, and said within myself, What multitudes, in every age of the world, have been born in these deplorable circumstances! They are inured from their birth to barbarous customs and impious practices; they have an image of the life of brutes and devils wrought in them by their early education; they have had the seeds of wretched wickedness sown, planted, and cul tivated in them, by the savage instructions of those that went efore them; and their own imitation of such horrible ex amples has confirmed the mischief, long before they knew or heard of the true God, if they have heard of Him to this day. Scarce any of them have admitted one thoughtful inquiry, whether they follow the rules of reason, or whether they are in the way of happiness and peace, any more than their parents before them. As they are born in this gross darkness, so they grow up in the vile idolatries, and all the shameful abomina tions, of their country; and go on to death in the same course. Nor have they light enough, either from without or within, to make them ask seriously, ‘Is there not a lie in my right hand? Am I not in the way of destruction?’” (Page 417.) “St. Peter says indeed, that ‘in every nation he that feareth God and worketh righteousness is accepted of him;’ but if there were very few (among the Jews) who feared God, very few in those learned nations of the Gentiles; how much fewer, may we suppose, are in those barbarous countries, which have no knowledge either divine or human l’’ (Page 419.) “But would this have been the case of those unhappy na tions, both of the parents and their children, in a hundred long successions, had they been such a race of creatures as they came out of the hand of the Creator? If those children had been guiltless in the eye of God, could this have been their portion?