Wesley Corpus

“How much more abominable and filthy,” in the strictest sense, “is man;” every man born into the world: “Who drinketh iniquity like water;” (Job xv. 16, &c.;) iniquity of every kind; so readily, so naturally, as being so thoroughly agree able to the “desires of his “flesh and of his “mind I’’ You conclude the head thus: “Man, in his present weak and fleshly state, cannot be clean before God.” Certainly as clean as the moon and stars at least; if he be as he was first created. He was “made but a little lower than the angels;” consequently, he was then far higher and more pure than these, or the sun itself, or any other part of the material creation. You go on: “Why cannot a man be clean before God? because he is conceived and born in sin? No such thing. But because, if the purest creatures are not pure in compari son of God, much less a being subject to so many infirmities as a mortal man.” Infirmities 1 What then, do innocent in firmities make a man unclean before God? Do labour, pain, bodily weakness, or mortality, make us“filthy and abominable?” Surely not. Neither could they make a man pure from sin, less pure than the moon and stars. Nor can we conceive Adam, as he came out of the hands of God, to have been, in any sense, less clean than these. All these texts, therefore, must refer to that sinful impurity which every man brings into the world. You add : “Which is a demonstration to me that Job and his friends were wholly strangers to this doctrine.” A demon stration of a peculiar kind | I think neither mathematical nor logical. 16. The last proof is, “‘That which is born of the flesh is flesh; and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit.” (John iii.6.)” (Page 144.) “Here, by ‘flesh, Dr. Taylor understands nothing else but the mere parts and powers of a man; and by “being born of the flesh, the being ‘born of a woman,’ with the constitution and natural powers of a man.” (Jennings's Vindication, p.