Wesley Corpus

But I believe it may be ten, twenty, or forty years before. I believe it is usually many years after justification; but that it may be within five years or five months after it, I know no conclusive argument to the contrary. If it must be many years after justification, I would be glad to know how many. Pretium quotus arroget annus * * And how many days or months, or even years, can any one allow to be between perfection and death? How far from justification must it be; and how near to death? LoNDoN, Jan. 27, 1767. *This quotation from Horace is thus translated by Boscawen : “How many years give sanction to our lines?”-EDIT. 1. THE words, as literally translated as the English tongue will bear, run thus: “May the whole of you, the spirit, and the soul, and the body, be preserved blameless.” What does St. Paul here mean by dividing man into three parts, “the spirit, and the soul, and the body?” This creates what has been thought an insurmountable difficulty by those who argue thus: “How is it possible to contradistinguish the soul both from the spirit and from the body? For it must be either material or immaterial, matter or not matter: There is no medium. But if it be matter, does it not co-incide with the body? If it be not matter, does it not co-incide with the spirit 7” But perhaps a way may be found of untieing this knot, of unraveling this difficulty, by simply declaring the (at least probable) meaning of these three terms. May not the spirit mean (so it has been understood by the Christians in all ages) the highest principle in man, the immortal spirit made in the image of God, endued (as all spirits are, so far as we can conceive) with self-motion, understanding, will, and liberty? Is not the body that portion of organized matter which every man receives in the womb, with which he is born into the world, and which he carries with him to the grave? At present it is connected with flesh and blood. But these are not the body. They are only the temporary clothing of the body, which it wholly puts off in the grave.