Wesley Corpus

Will you resolve it into the prevalence of custom, and say, “Men are guided more by example than reason?” It is true: They run after one another like a flock of sheep, (as Seneca remarked long ago) non qua eundum est, sed qua itur: “Not where they ought to go, but where others go.” But I gain no ground by this; I am equally at a loss to account for this custom. How is it (seeing men are rea sonable creatures, and nothing is so agreeable to reason as virtue) that the custom of all ages and nations is not on the side of virtue rather than vice? If you say, “This is owing to bad education, which propagates ill customs;” I own, education has an amazing force, far beyond what is com monly imagined. I own, too, that as bad education is found among Christians as ever obtained among the Heathens. But I am no nearer still; I am not advanced a hair's breadth toward the conclusion. For how am I to account for the almost universal prevalence of this bad education? I want to know when this prevailed first; and how it came to pre vail. How came wise and good men (for such they must have been before bad education commenced) not to train up their children in wisdom and goodness; in the way wherein they had been brought up themselves? They had then no ill precedent before them: How came they to make such a precedent? And how came all the wisdom of after-ages never to correct that precedent? You must suppose it to have been of ancient date. Profane history gives us a large account of universal wickedness, that is, universal bad education, for above two thousand years last past. Sacred history adds the account of above two thousand more: In the very beginning of which (more than four thousand years ago) “all flesh had corrupted their ways before the Lord!” or, to speak agreeably to this hypothesis, were very corruptly educated. Now, how is this to be accounted for, that, in so long a tract of time, no one nation under the sun has been able, by whole some laws, or by any other method, to remove this grievous evil; so that, their children being well educated, the scale might at length turn on the side of reason and virtue?