Wesley Corpus

God alone. To him only can the polluted of heart say, “Lord, if thou wilt, thou canst make me clean.” But what, if he answer, “I will not, because I will not : Be thou unclean still?” Will God doom that man to the bottomless pit, because of that unclean ness which he could not save himself from, and which God could have saved him from, but would not? Verily, were an earthly King to execute such justice as this upon his helpless subjects, it might well be expected that the vengeance of the Lord would soon sweep him from the face of the earth. 34. Perhaps you will say, They are not condemned for actual but for original sin. What do you mean by this term? The inward corruption of our nature? If so, it has been spoken of before. Or do you mean, the sin which Adam committed in paradise? That this is imputed to all men, I allow; yea, that by reason hereof “the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now.” But that any will be damned for this alone, I allow not, till you show me where it is written. Bring me plain proof from Scripture, and I submit; but till then I utterly deny it. 35. Should you not rather say, that unbelief is the damning sin? and that those who are condemned in that day will be therefore condemned, “because they believed not on the name of the only-begotten Son of God?” But could they believe? Was not this faith both the gift and the work of God in the soul? And was it not a gift which he had eternally decreed never to give them ? Was it not a work which he was of old unchangeably determined never to work in their souls P Shall these men be condemned, because God would not work; because they did not receive what God would not give? Could they “ungrasp the hold of his right hand, or force omnipotence?” 36. There is, over and above, a peculiar difficulty here. You say, Christ did not die for these men. But if so, there was an impossibility, in the very nature of the thing, that they should ever savingly believe.