Wesley Corpus

Paul caught up to that very paradise from which Adam was expelled. (So he might, and all the later Fathers with him, without being either the better or the worse.) Fourthly: That he believed the story concerning the Septuagint Version; nay, and that the Scriptures were destroyed in the Babylonish captivity, but restored again after seventy years by Esdras, inspired for that purpose. “In this also ’’ (you say, but do not prove) “he was followed by all the principal Fathers that succeeded him; although there is no better foundation for it, than that fabulous relation in the Second Book of Esdras.” You add, Fifthly, that “he believed the sons of God who came in to the daughters of men were evil angels.” And all the early Fathers, you are very ready to believe, “were drawn into the same error, by the authority of the apocryphal Book of Enoch, cited by St. Jude.” (Page 44.) 12. It is not only out of your good-will to St. Jude, or 34 r/ETTER. To Irenaeus, you gather up these fragments of error, that nothing be lost, but also to the whole body of the ancient Christians. For “all those absurdities,” you say, “were taught by the Fathers of those ages,” (naturally implying, by all the Fathers,) “as doctrines of the universal Church, derived immediately from the Apostles; and thought so necessary, that those who held the contrary were hardly considered as real Christians.” Here I must beg you to prove as well as assert, (1.) That all these absurdities of the millennium in the grossest sense of it, of the age of Christ, of paradise, of the destruction of the Scriptures, of the Septuagint Version, and of evil angels mixing with women, were taught by all the Fathers of those ages: (2.) That all those Fathers taught these as doctrines of the universal Church, derived immedi ately from the Apostles: And, (3.) That they all denied those to be real Christians who held the contrary. 13. You next cite two far-fetched interpretations of Scrip ture, and a weak saying out of the writings of Irenaeus. But all three prove no more, than that in these instances he did not speak with strictness of judgment; not, that he was incapable of knowing what he saw with his own eyes, or of truly relating it to others.