Wesley Corpus

v. 1-3, 5: “In the day that God cre ated man, in the likeness of God made he him:--And Adam lived an hundred and thirty years’ after his loss of the image of God, ‘and begat a son in his own likeness, after his image;’ that is, his own sinful and mortal image. “It is not to be supposed, that Moses, in this brief history of the first generations of men, should so particularly repeat ‘the image and likeness of God in which Adam was created, unless he had designed to set the comparison in a fair light, 378 The DOCTRINE OF between Adam’s begetting a son in his own sinful and mortal *mage, whereas he himself was created in God’s holy and immortal image.” (Page 162.) “4. God was pleased to put the man whom he had made upon a trial of his obedience for a season. He placed him in a garden of Eden, (or pleasure,) and gave him a free use of all the creatures; only forbidding him to eat of the fruit of one tree,--‘the tree of the kncwledge of good and evil.” “For in the day,” said he, ‘that thou eatest of it, thou shalt surely die.’ In which threatening were doubtless included all evils,--death spiritual, temporal, and eternal.” (Page 163.) “5. As Adam was under a law whose sanction threatened death upon disobedience, so doubtless God favoured him with a covenant of life, and a promise of life and immortality upon his obedience.” (Page 164) “6. Adam broke the law of his maker, lost his image and his favour, forfeited the hope of immortality, and exposed him self to the wrath of God, and all the punishment which he had threatened; in consequence of which he was now painfully afraid of Him in whom he before delighted, and foolishly endeavoured to ‘hide himself from the presence of the Lord.’” (Page 168.) “7. Adam, after his sin, propagated his kind according to the law of nature;--not in the moral image or likeness of God; not “in righteousness and true holiness;' but in his own sinful likeness; with irregular passions, corrupt appetites and inclina tions. To this degeneracy Job manifestly refers in those expressions: ‘What is man, that he should be clean? or the son of man, that he should be righteous? Who can bring a clean thing out of an unclean?