Wesley Corpus

This is not “what God sees fit it should be.” “It is his power alone that forms it.” Yes, that forms us men; but not that forms us sinful men. “To say, The nature he gives is the object of his wrath, is little less than blasphemy.” As he gave it, it is not the object of his wrath; but it is, as it is defiled with sin. “Far was it from the Apostle to depreciate our nature.” True, our original nature; but never did man more deeply depreciate our present corrupt nature. “His intent is to show the Ephesians they were children of wrath, through the sins in which they walked.” Yea, and through “the desires of the flesh and the mind,” mentioned immediately before; “through the vanity of their mind;” through “the blindness of their hearts, past feeling, alienated from the life of God.” Is he “not here speaking of their nature, but of the vicious course of life they had led?” (Page 111.) “He well understood the worth of the human nature;”--he did, both in its original and in its present state;--“and elsewhere shows it was endowed, even in the Heathens, with light and power sufficient to know God, and obey his will.” In what Heathens, in Europe, Asia, Africa, or America, is nature now endowed with this light and power? I have never found it in any Heathen yet; and I have con versed with many, of various nations. On the contrary, I have found one and all deeply ignorant of the very end of their existence. All of them have confirmed what a heathen Meeko (or Chief) told me many years ago: “He that sitteth in heaven knoweth why he made man; but we know nothing.” “But St. Paul says, “When the Gentiles which have not the law, do by nature the things contained in the law, they are a law to themselves. This supposes, they might have done them “by nature, or their natural powers.” But how does it appear, that, “by nature,” here means, By their mere “natural powers?” It is certain they had not the written law; but had they no supernatural assistance?