Wesley Corpus

Who can bring a clean thing out of an unclean? Not one.’ And David says the same thing: ‘Behold, I was shapen in iniquity; and in sin did my mother conceive me.’” (Pages 170, 171.) “This is not an hyperbolical aggravation of David’s early sins, and propensity to evil from his childhood. But the text is strong and plain in asserting sin someway to belong to his very conception, and to be conveyed from his natural parents; which is a different idea from his actual sins, or pro pensity to sin in his infancy. It shows the cause both of this propensity, and of his actual sins, which operated before he was born. So that if original pravity be not so conveyed and derived as is here asserted, the words are not an exaggeration of what is, but a downright fiction of what is not. “8. As Adam produced his offspring, like himself, destitute of the image of God, so he produced them destitute of the favour of God, under the same condemnation with himself. So Job: ‘Man that is born of a woman is of few days, and full of trouble;’ (xiv. 1;) that is, his short life, and his troubles, proceed from his very birth; his propagation from sinful and mortal parents: Otherwise, God would not have appointed his noblest creature in this world to have been ‘born to trouble:” Yet this is the case; ‘man is born to trouble as the sparks fly upward;’ (Job v. 7;) naturally; for it is owing to his birth and his natural derivation from a sinful stock. We are a miserable race, springing from a corrupted and dying root, prone to sin, and liable to sorrows and sufferings.” (Pages 174, 175.) “In proof of this sentence of condemnation and death coming upon all mankind for the sin of Adam, we need only read from the twelfth verse of the fifth chapter of St. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans; on which I observe,” (page 176,)-- “1. Here Adam and Christ are set up as distinct heads or representatives of their several families. Adam was the head of all mankind, who became sinful and mortal through his sin; Christ was the head of all believers, who obtain pardon and life through his righteousness.