Wesley Corpus

12.) All are esteemed in some sort guilty before God, though they “did not sin after the similitude of Adam’s transgression. They did not commit actual personal sin against a known law, as Adam did.” (Page 104.) “This may more fully appear from the following parti culars: “1. It is plainly taught us in Scripture, that God at first created one man and woman, called Adam and Eve; and from them is derived the whole race of mankind. God “hath made of one blood, as the Apostle observes, ‘all nations of men, to dwell on all the face of the earth.’” (Page 159.) “2. God created man at first in a holy and happy state,--in his own likeness, and in his favour. “And God said, Let us make man in our own image, after our own likeness.’ (Gen. i. 26.) And that none of the brute creation might molest him, but all of them be for his service, he said, ‘Let them have dominion over the fish, and the fowl, and the cattle.’ ‘So God created man in his own image.’ And what this image consisted in, beside his spiritual and immortal nature, and his dominion over other creatures, we are told by St. Paul, where he speaks of ‘the new man, which, says he, “after God,” that is, after the likeness of God, ‘is created in righteousness and true holiness.” (Eph. iv. 24.) So Solomon assures us, God “made man upright.” And Moses says, when God had finished all his creation, “God saw everything that he had made, and, behold, it was very good.’ It was all according to his idea and his will, and well-pleasing in his sight. Man, the last of his creatures, as well as all the rest, ‘was very good;’ was holy and happy.” (Pages 160, 161.) “3. God originally appointed that Adam, when innocent, should produce an offspring in his own holy image; and, on the other hand, that if he sinned, he should propagate his kind in his own sinful image. The former is allowed. The latter may be gathered from Gen. v.