Wesley Corpus

Are any of these “diametrically opposite to my present tenets?” No more than those of Dr. Preston’s. I as willingly as ever subscribe to these also. Is Dr. Owen’s tract, “Of the Remainder of Indwelling Sin in Believers,” “diametrically opposite to my present tenets?” So far from it, that a few years since I published a sermon on the very same subject. I hope there is no room to charge me with “quirk, quibble, artifice, evasion,” on this head; (though I believe as much as on any other;) I use only plain, manly reasoning; and such logic I am not ashamed to avow before the whole learned world. 15. But “I will go farther still,” says Mr. H. : “Let Mr. W. only bring me twenty lines together, out of the writings of those four eminent Divines, as they stand in the ‘Chris tian Library;’ and I will engage to prove that he has twenty times contradicted them in some of his other publications.” (Page 19.) Agreed: I bring him the following twenty lines with which Dr. Preston begins his treatise called “The New Covenant:”-- “These words of God to Abraham contain a precept of sincerity, or perfect walking with God: ‘Walk before me, and be thou perfect:’ And also the motive thereunto, God’s all-sufficiency: “I am God all-sufficient. As if he should say, ‘If there were any defect in me, if thou didst need or couldest desire anything that were not to be had in me, and thou mightest have it elsewhere, perhaps thy heart might be imperfect in walking towards me. Thou mightest then step out from me, to take in advantages elsewhere. But seeing I am all-sufficient; since I have enough in me to fulfil all thy desires; since I am every way an adequate object, so that all thy soul can wish for thou mayest have in me; why then shouldest thou not consecrate thyself to me? Why then shouldest thou be uneven in thy ways, serving me sometimes, and sometimes the creature? For there is nothing in the creature, but thou may est find in me.’ ‘I am all-sufficient; therefore, walk before me, and be thou perfect!’” (Christian Library, Vol.