Wesley Corpus

The old calumny is thrown upon him again: ‘He is mad; why hear ye him?’ ‘The spirit of bondage is accounted by many mere distraction and melan choly: Men thus blaspheming God’s work, because they themselves are beside themselves, and cannot judge of those matters. “(ii) Consider the entertainment he meets with, when he comes to teach men outwardly by his word. “1st. His written word, the Bible, is slighted. Many lay by their Bibles with their Sunday clothes. Alas! the dust about your Bibles is a witness of the enmity of your hearts against Christ as a Prophet. And of those who read them oftener, how few are there that read them as the word of the Lord to their souls in particular, so as to keep up communion with God therein Hence they are strangers to the solid comfort of the Scriptures; and if at any time they are dejected, it is something else, and not the word of God, which revives their drooping spirits. “2d. Christ's word preached is despised. Men can, with out remorse, make to themselves one silent Sabbath after another. And, alas! when they ‘tread his courts, how little reverence and awe of God appears on their spirits! Many stand like brazen walls before the word, on whom it makes no breach at all. Nay, not a few are growing worse and worse, notwithstanding ‘precept upon precept.” What tears of blood are sufficient to lament this ! Remember, we are but the ‘voice of one crying. The Speaker is in heaven: Yet ye refuse Him that speaketh, and prefer the prince of darkness before the Prince of Peace. A dismal darkness overspread the world by Adam’s fall, more terrible than if the sun and moon had been extinguished. And it must have covered us eternally, had not ‘the grace of God appeared’ to dispel it. But we fly from it, and, like the wild beasts, lay ourselves down in our dens. Such is the enmity of the hearts. of men against Christ in his prophetic office. “(2.) The natural man is an enemy to Christ in his priestly office. He is appointed of the Father ‘a Priest for ever,’ that, by his sacrifice and intercession alone, sinners may have access to, and peace with, God. But ‘Christ crucified’ is. ever a stumbling-block and foolishness to the unregenerate part of mankind.