Wesley Corpus

So St. Paul desires Philemon to impute any wrong he had received from Onesimus to himself; that is, not the evil action, but the damage he had sustained. “Indeed, when sin or righteousness are said to be imputed to any man, on account of what himself hath done, the words usually denote both the good or evil actions themselves, and the legal result of them. But when the sin or righteousness of one person is said to be imputed to another, then, generally, those words mean only the result thereof; that is, a liableness to punishment on the one hand, and to reward on the other. “But let us say what we will to confine the sense of the imputation of sin and righteousness to the legal result, --the reward or punishment of good or evil actions; let us ever so explicitly deny the imputation of the actions themselves to others; still Dr. Taylor will level almost all his arguments against the imputation of the actions themselves, and then triumph in having demolished what we never built, and refuting what we never asserted.” (Page 444.) “3. The Scripture does not, that I remember, anywhere say, in express words, that the sin of Adam is imputed to his children; or, that the sins of believers are imputed to Christ; or, that the righteousness of Christ is imputed to believers: But the true meaning of all these expressions is sufficiently found in several places of Scripture.” (Page 446.) “Yet since these express words and phrases, of the imputa tion of Adam’s sin to us, of our sins to Christ, and of Christ's righteousness to us, are not plainly written in Scripture, we should not impose it on every Christian, to use these very expressions. Let every one take his liberty, either of con fining himself to strictly scriptural language, or of manifest ing his sense of these plain scriptural doctrines, in words and phrases of his own.” (Page 447.) “But if the words were expressly written in the Bible, they could not reasonably be interpreted in any other sense, than this which I have explained by so many examples, both in Scripture, history, and in common life.