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Sermon 44: Original Sin

https://wesleyworks.ecdsdev.org/sermons/Sermon044

02:170 An Introductory Comment

One of the prime targets in orthodox Christianity for the deists and other apostles of enlightenment was the doctrine of original sin and total depravity. It was a cherished conviction of theirs that men, once freed from their superstitious errors, would recover their innate moral virtue: viz., the power to will the good and to do it (cf. Carl Becker, The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers, and Peter Gay, The Enlightenment). The early Wesley was never more than lightly touched by these attacks, save for a passing flirtation with the newly fashionable cult of ‘the noble savage’. His view of mankind’s primal ruin is delineated in his very early sermon on Gen. 1:27,

No. 141, ‘The Image of God’.

and this is presupposed elsewhere in his comments on anthropology.

But when a new optimism about man’s innate virtue, with a corresponding denial of the Pauline and Augustinian notions of ‘the Fall’ and ‘original sin’, began to be urged by professed Christians, Wesley was quick to sense a radical challenge and to react on behalf of his people. To him, Article IX, ‘Of Original or Birth Sin’, had always seemed unexceptionable: ‘…Man is very far gone from original righteousness and is of his own nature inclined to evil…. And this infection of nature doth remain…whereby the lust of the flesh, called in Greek, φρόνημα σαρκός, is not subject to the Law of God.’

The issue had come into focus for him in 1740, when Dr. John Taylor, an eminent Dissenting minister in Norwich and a Hebrew scholar of growing fame, published an influential treatise, The Scripture Doctrine of Original Sin: Proposed to Free and Candid Examination (cf. Alexander Gordon’s comment on it in the DNB: ‘The effect of [this book] in combating the [orthodox] view of human nature was widespread and lasting. Its influence in Scotland is signalised by Robert Bums, Epistle to John Goudie; in New England, according to Jonathan Edwards, “no one book did so much towards rooting out the underlying ideas of the Westminster Confession”.’). It had been quickly answered by two other Dissenting ministers, Samuel Hebden, in an 02:171 appendix to Man’s Original Righteousness (1741), and in The Doctrine of Original Sin…Vindicated (1741), and by Dr. David Jennings, A Vindication of the Scripture Doctrine of Original Sin (1740). Wesley joined the fray in 1757 with the longest treatise that he ever wrote (in four disjointed parts), The Doctrine of Original Sin: According to Scripture, Reason, and Experience (pp. 522).

See Bibliog, No. 222; and Vol. 12 of this edn.

Its first part is most nearly Wesley’s own answer to Taylor; in the others he borrows heavily from Jennings, Hebden, Isaac Watts, Thomas Boston, and others.

Meanwhile, he had been preaching on Gen. 6:5 (once in 1751; again in 1754 and 1757; and six times in 1758). Even so, he realized that oral preaching would not suffice in the circumstances and that his full length volume was more than most of his people would read. Accordingly, in 1759, he reformulated his own summary of Part I of The Doctrine of Original Sin in sermon form and published it separately in 1759. In 1760 he placed it at the head of the added fourth volume 0f SOSO. In 1766 he asked his preachers in Conference, ‘Have the sermons on Wandering Thoughts, In-being Sin [i.e., this present sermon; cf. Samuel Johnson’s definition of ‘inbeing’], The Lord Our Righteousness, and The Scripture Way of Salvation, been carefully dispersed?’ and, to a negative answer, directed them to ‘do it now’.

Minutes, 1766, Q. [27].

In his mind, therefore, and in the logic of his soteriology, this sermon was a major doctrinal statement in which he sought to compound the Latin tradition of total depravity with the Eastern Orthodox view of sin as disease (III.3) and of salvation as θεραπεία ψυχῆς.

Cf. the origins of this idea of θεραπεία, in Robert E. Cushman, Therapeia: Plato’s Conception of Philosophy (Chapel Hill, N.C., Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1958), chs. II, VI, X-XI.

Thus, it still stands as a sufficient answer to all simple-minded references to Wesley as a Pelagian.

For other references to ‘original’, ‘inbred’, ‘inbeing’ sin, cf. Nos. 5, ‘Justification by Faith’, I.5-9; 6, ‘The Righteousness of Faith’, II.6; 7, ‘The Way to the Kingdom’, II.1-7; 14, The Repentance of Believers, I.20; 21, ‘Sermon on the Mount, I’, I.13; 47, ‘Heaviness through Manifold Temptations’, III.9; and Notes on Rom. 7:9. For a stemma illustrating the transmission of the text through the thirteen extant editions issued in Wesley’s lifetime, together with a list of variant readings, see Appendix, Vol. 4; see also Bibliog, No. 236.

02:172 Original Sin Genesis 6:5

And God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.

11. How widely different is this from the fair pictures of human nature which men have drawn in all ages! The writings of many of the ancients abound with gay descriptions of the dignity of man; whom some of them paint as having all virtue and happiness in his composition, or at least entirely in his power, without being beholden to any other being; yea, as self-sufficient, able to live on his own stock, and little inferior to God himself.

Virgil and Ovid could have been read in this way (cf. The Doctrine of Original Sin, Pt I, II.9); and so also Plato and Aristotle. Plato’s vision of the nobility and transcendence of the human spirit had become a Renaissance commonplace, as one may see in Thomas More’s Utopia (1551), or in James Harrington’s Common-Wealth of Oceana (1656). Cf. No. 128, ‘The Deceitfulness of the Human Heart’, §§1-2.

22. Nor have heathens alone, men who were guided in their researches by little more than the dim light of reason, but many likewise of them that bear the name of Christ, and to whom are entrusted the oracles of God,

Cf. No. 5, ‘Justification by Faith’, §2 and n.

spoke as magnificently concerning the nature of man, as if it were all innocence and perfection. Accounts of this kind have particularly abounded in the present century; and perhaps in no part of the world more than in our own country. Here not a few persons of strong understanding, as well as extensive learning, have employed their utmost abilities to show what they termed ‘the fair side of human nature’. And it must be acknowledged that if their accounts of him be just, man is still but ‘a little lower than the angels’, or (as the words may be more literally rendered), ‘a little less than God’.

Ps. 8:5; Heb. 2:7, 9. Only in Ps. 8:5 is the Hebrewelohim (אלהים) translated ‘angels’ in the AV; elsewhere it is translated ‘God’ (and in the Geneva Bible even Ps. 8:5 reads ‘God’). As noted above, the innate virtue of man had been celebrated by the deists generally and by Shaftesbury, Bolingbroke, and Pope in particular. Bolingbroke, Works (1777), V. 351, had appealed to those who sought enlightenment: ‘Let us be convinced, however, in opposition to atheists and divines, that the general state of mankind in the present scheme of providence is a state not only tolerable but happy.’ The same point had been made in Pope’s Essay on Man (as in III.232):

Man, like his Maker, saw that all was right;

To virtue, in the paths of pleasure, trod,

And owned a Father when he owned a God.

See also James Burgh, The Dignity of Human Nature (1754), a volume read by Wesley.

33. Is it any wonder that these accounts are very readily received 02:073by the generality of men? For who is not easily persuaded to think favourably of himself? Accordingly writers of this kind are almost universally read, admired, applauded. And innumerable are the converts they have made, not only in the gay but the learned world. So that it is now quite unfashionable to talk otherwise, to say anything to the disparagement of human nature; which is generally allowed, notwithstanding a few infirmities, to be very innocent and wise and virtuous.

44. But in the meantime, what must we do with our Bibles? For they will never agree with this. These accounts, however pleasing to flesh and blood, are utterly irreconcilable with the scriptural. The Scripture avers that ‘by one man’s disobedience all men were constituted sinners’;

Cf. Rom. 5:19 (Notes).

that ‘in Adam all died’,

1 Cor. 15:22.

spiritually died, lost the life and the image of God; that fallen, sinful Adam then ‘begat a son in his own likeness’;

Gen. 5:3.

nor was it possible he should beget him in any other, for ‘who can bring a clean thing out of an unclean?’

Job 14:4.

That consequently we, as well as other men, ‘were by nature’

Eph. 2:3.

‘dead in trespasses and sins’,

Eph. 2:1.

‘without hope, without God in the world’,

Eph. 2:12.

and therefore ‘children of wrath’;

Eph. 2:3; 6:4.

that every man may say, ‘I was shapen in wickedness, and in sin did my mother conceive me;’

Cf. Ps. 51:5 (BCP).

that ‘there is no difference, in that all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God,’

Rom. 3:22-23.

of that glorious image of God wherein man was originally created. And hence, when ‘the Lord looked down from heaven upon the children of men, he saw they were all gone out of the way, they were altogether become abominable, there was none righteous, no not one’, none that truly ‘sought after God’.

Cf. Ps. 14:3-4 (BCP).

Just agreeable, this, to what is declared by the Holy Ghost in the words above recited: ‘God saw’, when he looked down from heaven before, ‘that the wickedness of man was great in the earth’; so great that ‘every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually’.

Gen. 6:5.

02:174This is God’s account of man: from which I shall take occasion, first, to show what men were before the flood; secondly, to inquire whether they are not the same now; and, thirdly, to add some inferences.

1I. 1. I am, first, by opening the words of the text, to show what men were before the flood. And we may fully depend on the account here given. For God saw it, and he cannot be deceived. He ‘saw that the wickedness of man was great’. Not of this or that man; not of a few men only; not barely of the greater part, but of man in general, of men universally. The word includes the whole human race, every partaker of human nature. And it is not easy for us to compute their numbers, to tell how many thousands and millions they were. The earth then retained much of its primeval beauty and original fruitfulness. The face of the globe was not rent and torn as it is now; and spring and summer went hand in hand. ’Tis therefore probable it afforded sustenance for far more inhabitants than it is now capable of sustaining. And these must be immensely multiplied while men begat sons and daughters for seven or eight hundred years together.

There had been a lively debate about the perfections of the antediluvian earth and the causes of the Flood; cf. Chambers’s Cyclopaedia (‘Deluge’), for a summary of popular wisdom on this point. Thomas Burnet, in his Sacred Theory of the Earth, had speculated that the hitherto smooth earth’s outer crust had cracked and had opened up the pent-up floods beneath. This theory had then been attacked by Erasmus Warren and John Keill, but William Whiston sought to advance the debate with his own New Theory of the Earth (read by Newton in manuscript and praised by Locke). Whiston’s theory had included the hypothesis of the earth’s collision with a huge comet.

For Wesley’s review of Burnet’s theory, cf. JWJ, Jan. 17, 1770: ‘He is doubtless one of our first-rate writers, both as to sense and style; his language is remarkably clear, unaffected, nervous, and elegant. And as to his theory, none can deny that it is ingenious, and consistent with itself. And it is highly probable (1) that the earth arose out of the chaos in some such manner as he describes; (2) that the antediluvian earth was without high or abrupt mountains, and without sea, being one uniform crust, enclosing the great abyss; (3) that the flood was caused by the breaking of this crust, and its sinking into the abyss of waters; and (4) that the present state of the earth, both internal and external, shows it to be the ruins of the former earth.’

Yet among all this inconceivable number only Noah ‘found favour with God’.

Cf. Gen. 6:8; Luke 1:30.

He alone (perhaps including part of his household) was an exception from the universal wickedness, which by the just judgment of God in a short time after brought on universal destruction. All the rest were partakers in the same guilt, as they were in the same punishment.

22. ‘God saw all the imaginations of the thoughts of his heart’—of his soul, his inward man, the spirit within him, the 02:175principle of all his inward and outward motions. He ‘saw all the imaginations’. It is not possible to find a word of a more extensive signification. It includes whatever is formed, made, fabricated within; all that is or passes in the soul: every inclination, affection, passion, appetite; every temper, design, thought. It must of consequence include every word and action, as naturally flowing from the fountains, and being either good or evil according to the fountain from which they severally flow.

33. Now God ‘saw that all’ this, the whole thereof, ‘was evil’, contrary to moral rectitude; contrary to the nature of God, which necessarily includes all good; contrary to the divine will, the eternal standard of good and evil; contrary to the pure, holy image of God, wherein man was originally created, and wherein he stood when God, surveying the works of his hands, saw them all to be ‘very good’;

Gen. 1:31.

contrary to justice, mercy, and truth, and to the essential relations which each man bore to his Creator and his fellow creatures.

44. But was there not good mingled with the evil? Was there not light intermixed with the darkness? No, none at all: ‘God saw that the whole imagination of the heart’ of man ‘was only evil.’ It cannot indeed be denied but many of them, perhaps all, had good motions put into their hearts. For the spirit of God did then also ‘strive with man’,

Gen. 6:3.

if haply he might repent; more especially during that gracious reprieve, the hundred and twenty years while the ark was preparing. But still ‘in his flesh dwelt no good thing:’

Cf. Rom. 7:18.

all his nature was purely evil. It was wholly consistent with itself, and unmixed with anything of any opposite nature.

55. However, it may still be matter of inquiry, ‘Was there no intermission of this evil? Were there no lucid intervals, wherein something good might be found in the heart of man?’ We are not here to consider what the grace of God might occasionally work in his soul.

I.e., prevenient grace, from which Wesley could infer that God’s saving grace might find ‘occasions’ for action outside the scope of his ordinary dispensations (cf. No. 43, The Scripture Way of Salvation, I.2 and n.); for a comment on this doctrine of ‘occasional’ grace, cf. Michael Hurley, ‘Salvation Today and Wesley Today’ in The Place of Wesley in the Christian Tradition, Kenneth E. Rowe, ed., pp. 94-116. See also No. 91, ‘On Charity’, I.2 and n.

And abstracting

I.e., ‘disregarding’; cf. OED. Later edns. of the Sermons (1768 and thereafter) misread this as ‘abstracted from’; see also below, No. 47, ‘Heaviness through Manifold Temptations’, III.1.

from this, we have no reason to 02:176believe there was any intermission of that evil. For God, who ‘saw the whole imagination of the thoughts of his heart to be only evil’, saw likewise that it was always the same, that it ‘was only evil continually’—every year, every day, every hour, every moment. He never deviated into good.

II. Such is the authentic account of the whole race of mankind, which he who knoweth what is in man, who searcheth the heart and trieth the reins,

See Rev. 2:23; cf. also, Jer. 17:10.

hath left upon record for our instruction. Such were all men before God brought the flood upon the earth. We are, secondly, to inquire whether they are the same now.

11. And this is certain, the Scripture gives us no reason to think any otherwise of them. On the contrary, all the above-cited passages of Scripture refer to those who lived after the flood. It was above a thousand years after that God declared by David concerning the children of men, ‘They are all gone out of the way’ of truth and holiness; ‘there is none righteous, no, not one.’

Cf. Ps. 14:4 (BCP).

And to this bear all the prophets witness in their several generations. So Isaiah concerning God’s peculiar people (and certainly the heathens were in no better condition): ‘The whole head is sick, and the whole heart faint. From the sole of the foot even unto the head there is no soundness, but wounds and bruises and putrifying sores.’

Isa. 1:5-6.

The same account is given by all the apostles, yea, by the whole tenor of the oracles of God. From all these we learn concerning man in his natural state,

Cf. No. 9, ‘The Spirit of Bondage and of Adoption’, §5 and n.

unassisted by the grace of God, that ‘all the imaginations of the thoughts of his heart’ are still ‘evil, only evil’, and that ‘continually’.

22. And this account of the present state of man is confirmed by daily experience. It is true the natural man discerns it not. And this is not to be wondered at. So long as a man born blind continues so, he is scarce sensible of his want. Much less, could we suppose a place where all were born without sight, would they be sensible of the want of it. In like manner, so long as men remain in their natural blindness of understanding they are not sensible of their spiritual wants, and of this in particular.

Cf. No. 10, ‘The Witness of the Spirit, I’, I.12 and n.

But as soon as God opens the eyes of their understanding they see the 02:177state they were in before; they are then deeply convinced that ‘every man living’, themselves especially, are by nature ‘altogether vanity’;

Ps. 39:6 (BCP).

that is, folly and ignorance, sin and wickedness.

Cf. Thomas Hobbes’s famous epigram: ‘No arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short’ (Leviathan, Pt. I, ch. xiii).

33. We see, when God opens our eyes, that we were before ἄθεοι ἐν [τῷ] κόσμῳ—‘without God’, or rather, ‘atheists in the world’.

Eph. 2:12. Cf. also Nos. 79, ‘On Dissipation’, §7; 130, ‘On Living without God’, §1. Cf. also Wesley’s Notes, and the Geneva Bible, where the marginal note is to ‘atheists’.

We had by nature no knowledge of God, no acquaintance with him. It is true, as soon as we came to the use of reason we learned ‘the invisible things of God, even his eternal power and godhead’, from ‘the things that are made’.

Cf. Rom. 1:20.

From the things that are seen we inferred the existence of an eternal, powerful being that is not seen. But still, although we acknowledged his being, we had no acquaintance with him. As we know there is an emperor of China, whom yet we do not know, so we knew there was a King of all the earth; but yet we knew him not. Indeed we could not, by any of our natural faculties. By none of these could we attain the knowledge of God. We could no more perceive him by our natural understanding than we could see him with our eyes. For ‘no one knoweth the Father but the Son, and he to whom the Son willeth to reveal him. And no one knoweth the Son but the Father, and he to whom the Father revealeth him.’

Cf. Matt. 11:27.

44. We read of an ancient king who, being desirous to know what was the natural language of men, in order to bring the matter to a certain issue made the following experiment: he ordered two infants, as soon as they were born, to be conveyed to a place prepared for them, where they were brought up without any instruction at all, and without ever hearing an human voice. And what was the event? Why, that when they were at length brought out of their confinement, they spake no language at all, they uttered inarticulate sounds, like those of other animals.

Cf. Herodotus, History, ii.2 (Loeb, 117:275-76); note how blithely Wesley has altered the story’s original point to his own purposes. The ancient king was Psammetichus of Egypt, and the reported experiment was much as Wesley has it. But, ‘when the shepherd [caretaker]…opened the door…both the children ran to him stretching out their hands and calling, “Bekos”…. On command he brought the children into the king’s presence. Psammetichus heard them himself and inquired to what language this word “Bekos” might belong. He was told it was a Phrygian word signifying “bread” [or food]. Reasoning from this fact, the Egyptians confessed that the Phrygians were older [in their culture] than they.’

Were 02:178 two infants in like manner to be brought up from the womb without being instructed in any religion, there is little room to doubt but (unless the grace of God interposed) the event would be just the same. They would have no religion at all: they would know no more of God than the beasts of the field, than the ‘wild ass’s colt’.

Job 11:12. But see below, No. 106, ‘On Faith, Heb. 11:6’, I.4, for the story of Hai Ebn Yokton, and for a very different inference as to our natural knowledge of God.

Such is natural religion, abstracted from traditional, and from the influences of God’s spirit!

55. And having no knowledge, we can have no love of God: we cannot love him we know not. Most men talk indeed of loving God, and perhaps imagine that they do. At least few will acknowledge they do not love him. But the fact is too plain to be denied. No man loves God by nature, no more than he does a stone, or the earth he treads upon. What we love, we delight in: but no man has naturally any delight in God. In our natural state we cannot conceive how anyone should delight in him. We take no pleasure in him at all; he is utterly tasteless to us. To love God! It is far above, out of our sight. We cannot naturally attain unto it.

See Ps. 139:5.

66. We have by nature not only no love, but no fear of God. It is allowed, indeed, that most men have, sooner or later, a kind of senseless, irrational fear, properly called ‘superstition’; though the blundering Epicureans gave it the name of ‘religion’.

Cf. Lucretius, De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things), I.101, ‘Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum’ (‘So potent was religion in persuading men to evil deeds’).

Yet even this is not natural, but acquired; chiefly by conversation or from example. By nature ‘God is not in all our thoughts.’

Cf. Ps. 10:4.

We leave him to manage his own affairs, to sit quietly, as we imagine, in heaven, and leave us on earth to manage ours. So that we have no more of the fear of God before our eyes

See Rom. 3:18.

than of the love of God in our hearts.

See Rom. 5:5. Again, cf. the later Wesley’s assertion (in No. 85, ‘On Working Out Our Own Salvation’, III.4) that ‘there is no man that is in a state of mere nature, …no man, unless he has quenched the Spirit, that is wholly void of the grace of God.’

77. Thus are all men ‘atheists in the world’.

Eph. 2:12; see above, II.3.

But atheism itself 02:179does not screen us from idolatry. In his natural state every man born into the world is a rank idolater.

Cf. Thomas Manton, Works (1681), IV.41: ‘Every man is naturally an idolater, and he makes the creature his God;’ also, Stephen Charnock, Works (1684), I.4: ‘that secret atheism which is in the heart of every man by nature’. Cf. also No. 23, ‘Sermon on the Mount, III’, I.11 and n.

Perhaps indeed we may not be such in the vulgar sense of the word. We do not, like the idolatrous heathens, worship molten or graven images. We do not bow down to the stock of a tree, to the work of our own hands. We do not pray to the angels or saints in heaven, any more than to the saints that are upon earth. But what then? We ‘have set up our idols in our heart’;

Cf. Ezek. 14:3, 4, 7.

and to these we bow down, and worship them. We worship ourselves when we pay that honour to ourselves which is due to God only. Therefore all pride is idolatry; it is ascribing to ourselves what is due to God alone. And although pride was not made for man, yet where is the man that is born without it? But hereby we rob God of his unalienable right, and idolatrously usurp his glory.

88. But pride is not the only sort of idolatry which we are all by nature guilty of. Satan has stamped his own image on our heart in self-will also. ‘I will’, said he, before he was cast out of heaven, ‘I will sit upon the sides of the north.’

Cf. Isa. 14:13.

I will do my own will and pleasure, independently on that of my Creator. The same does every man born into the world say, and that in a thousand instances. Nay, and avow it, too, without ever blushing upon the account, without either fear or shame. Ask the man, ‘Why did you do this?’ He answers, ‘Because I had a mind to it.’ What is this but, ‘Because it was my will;’ that is, in effect, because the devil and I are agreed; because Satan and I govern our actions by one and the same principle. The will of God meantime is not in his thoughts, is not considered in the least degree; although it be the supreme rule of every intelligent creature, whether in heaven or earth, resulting from the essential, unalterable relation which all creatures bear to their Creator.

99. So far we bear the image of the devil, and tread in his steps. But at the next step we leave Satan behind, we run into an idolatry whereof he is not guilty: I mean love of the world, which is now as natural to every man as to love his own will. What is more natural to us than to seek happiness in the creature instead of the 02:180Creator? To seek that satisfaction in the works of his hands which can be found in God only? What more natural than the desire of the flesh?

See 1 John 2:16; see below, II.10, 11; cf. also No. 7, ‘The Way to the Kingdom’, II.2 and n.

That is, of the pleasure of sense in every kind? Men indeed talk magnificently of despising these low pleasures, particularly men of learning and education. They affect to sit loose

A colloquialism in Wesley’s time, as may be seen in Addison, The Spectator, No. 119 (July 17, 1711), and earlier in Francis Atterbury, Sermons (Pref., p. xi.). Cf. Nos. 88, ‘On Dress’, §12; and 108, ‘On Riches’, II.12. Charles Wesley used it in Hymns and Sacred Poems (1749), II.286 (Poet. Wks., V.429): ‘Sit loose to all below.’

to the gratification of those appetites wherein they stand on a level with the beasts that perish. But it is mere affectation; for every man is conscious to himself that in this respect he is by nature a very beast. Sensual appetites, even those of the lowest kind, have, more or less, the dominion over him. They lead him captive, they drag him to and fro, in spite of his boasted reason. The man, with all his good breeding and other accomplishments, has no pre-eminence over the goat. Nay, it is much to be doubted whether the beast has not the pre-eminence over him! Certainly he has, if we may hearken to one of their modern oracles, who very decently tells us:

Once in a season, beasts too taste of love:

Only the beast of reason is its slave,

And in that folly drudges all the year.

Cf. Thomas Otway, The Orphan; or the Unhappy Marriage, Act V, sc. 1:

Once in a season they [deer] taste of love:

Only the beast of reason is its slave,

And in that folly drudges all the year.

Wesley had read Otway’s Orphan while at Oxford (it was even performed in Charleston in 1736 during his time in nearby Georgia). This is all the more remarkable in view of his denunciations of the English theatre (following after William Law and Jeremy Collier, et al.). Clearly, this did not deter him from reading widely in English drama, from Shakespeare to Douglas Home, or from putting his recollections to his own uses. Cf. No. 89, ‘The More Excellent Way’, V.4 and n.

A considerable difference indeed, it must be allowed, there is between man and man, arising (beside that wrought by preventing grace) from difference of constitution and of education. But notwithstanding this, who that is not utterly ignorant of himself can here cast the first stone at another?

See John 8:7.

Who can abide the test of our blessed Lord’s comment on the seventh 02:181commandment: ‘He that looketh upon a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart’?

Cf. Matt. 5:28.

So that one knows not which to wonder at most, the ignorance or the insolence of those men who speak with such disdain of them that are overcome by desires which every man has felt in his own breast! The desire of every pleasure of sense, innocent or not, being natural to every child of man.

1010. And so is ‘the desire of the eye’,

1 John 2:16; see above, II.9 and n.

the desire of the pleasures of the imagination.

Addison wrote at least nine essays in The Spectator on ‘The Pleasures of the Imagination’ (Nos. 411-14, 416-18, 420, 421). Bishop Berkeley also used the phrase in an issue of The Guardian, No. 49 (May 7, 1713). Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ‘Of the Passions’, Pt. I, ch. vi, speaks of ‘the pleasures of the mind’. See also Cicero, De Senectute, xiv. 50.

The phrase was a favourite of Wesley’s, as in Nos. 68, ‘The Wisdom of God’s Counsels’, §16; 73, ‘Of Hell’, I.1; 81, ‘In What Sense we are to Leave the World’, §11; 84, The Important Question, I.3; 90, ‘An Israelite Indeed’, I.1; and Notes on 1 John 2:16. Cf. also Nos. 78, ‘Spiritual Idolatry’, I.12 (where he says history gratifies the imagination and pleases us by touching our passions); 107, ‘On God’s Vineyard’, V.3; 108, ‘On Riches’, II.3; and 125, ‘On a Single Eye’, II.1.

These arise either from great, or beautiful, or uncommon objects—if the two former do not coincide with the latter; for perhaps it would appear upon a diligent inquiry that neither grand nor beautiful objects please any longer than they are new; that when the novelty of them is over, the greatest part, at least, of the pleasure they give is over; and in the same proportion as they become familiar they become flat and insipid. But let us experience this ever so often, the same desire will remain still. The inbred thirst continues fibred in the soul. Nay, the more it is indulged, the more it increases, and incites us to follow after another and yet another object; although we leave every one with an abortive hope and a deluded expectation. Yea,

The hoary fool, who many days

Has struggled with continued sorrow,

Renews his hope, and fondly lays

The desperate bet upon tomorrow!

Tomorrow comes! ’Tis noon! Tis night!

This day like all the former flies:

Yet on he goes, to seek delight

Tomorrow, till tonight he dies!

Cf. Matthew Prior, ‘To the Honourable Charles Montague’, st. 4, 5, orig., ‘blindly lays’ and ‘on he runs’. Wesley printed this in AM (1779), II.153, as ‘The Pursuit of Happiness’—without credit to Prior.

1102:18211. A third symptom of this fatal disease, the love of the world, which is so deeply rooted in our nature, is ‘the pride of life’,

1 John 2:16; see above, II.9 and n.

the desire of praise, of ‘the honour that cometh of men’.

Cf. John 5:41, 44.

This the greatest admirers of human nature allow to be strictly natural—as natural as the sight or hearing, or any other of the external senses. And are they ashamed of it, even men of letters, men of refined and improved understanding? So far from it that they glory therein; they applaud themselves for their love of applause! Yea, eminent Christians, so called, make no difficulty of adopting the saying of the old, vain heathen, Animi dissoluti est et nequam negligere quid de se homines sentiant:

A paraphrase of Cicero, De Officiis (On Moral Obligations), I.xxviii.99: ‘Nam neglegere, quid de se quisque sentiat, non solum arrogantis est, sed etiam omnino dissoluti’ (‘For to disregard what others think of you is not only arrogant but actually unprincipled’). Thus, Wesley makes Cicero’s point but in his own Latin.

‘Not to regard what men think of us is the mark of a wicked and abandoned mind.’ So that to go calm and unmoved ‘through honour and dishonour, through evil report and good report’

2 Cor. 6:8 (Notes).

, is with them a sign of one that is indeed ‘not fit to live; away with such a fellow from the earth.’

Cf. Acts 22:22.

But would one imagine that these men had ever heard of Jesus Christ or his apostles? Or that they knew who it was that said, ‘How can ye believe, who receive honour one of another, and seek not that honour which cometh of God only?’

Cf. John 5:44.

But if this be really so; if it be impossible to believe, and consequently to please God, so long as we ‘receive (or seek) honour one of another, and seek not the honour which cometh of God only’; then in what a condition are all mankind! The Christians as well as the heathens! Since they all seek ‘honour one of another’! Since it is as natural for them so to do, themselves being the judges, as it is to see the light which strikes upon their eye, or to hear the sound which enters their ear; yea, since they account it the sign of a virtuous mind to seek the praise of men, and of a vicious one to be content with ‘the honour which cometh of God only’!

1III. 1. I proceed to draw a few inferences from what has been said. And, first, from hence we may learn one grand, fundamental difference between Christianity, considered as a system of doctrines, and the most refined heathenism. Many of the ancient 02:183heathens have largely described the vices of particular men. They have spoken much against their covetousness or cruelty, their luxury or prodigality. Some have dared to say that ‘no man is born without vices of one kind or another.’

Horace, Satires, I.iii.68, ‘vitiis nemo sine nascitur’. Cf. The Doctrine of Original Sin (1757), p. 217 (II.vi.1, Vol. 12 in this edn.), where the same passage is quoted, along with supporting testimony from Horace and Seneca.

But still, as none of them were apprised of the fall of man, so none of them knew his total corruption. They knew not that all men were empty of all good, and filled with all manner of evil. They were wholly ignorant of the entire depravation of the whole human nature, of every man born into the world, in every faculty of his soul, not so much by those particular vices which reign in particular persons as by the general flood of atheism and idolatry, of pride, self-will, and love of the world. This, therefore, is the first, grand, distinguishing point between heathenism and Christianity. The one acknowledges that many men are infected with many vices, and even born with a proneness to them; but supposes withal that in some the natural good much overbalances the evil. The other declares that all men are ‘conceived in sin’, and ‘shapen in wickedness’;

Cf. Ps. 51:5 (BCP).

that hence there is in every man a ‘carnal mind which is enmity against God, which is not, cannot be, subject to his law’,

Cf. Rom. 8:7.

and which so infects the whole soul that ‘there dwelleth in him, in his flesh’, in his natural state, ‘no good thing;’

Cf. Rom. 7:18.

but ‘all the imagination of the thoughts of his heart is evil’, ‘only evil’, and that ‘continually.’

22. Hence we may, secondly, learn that all who deny this—call it ‘original sin’ or by any other title—are but heathens still in the fundamental point which differences heathenism from Christianity. They may indeed allow that men have many vices; that some are born with us; and that consequently we are not born altogether so wise or so virtuous as we should be; there being few that will roundly affirm we are born with as much propensity to good as to evil, and that every man is by nature as virtuous and wise as Adam was at his creation. But here is the shibboleth:

Cf. Judg. 12:4-6, and also OED for examples of this term (meaning ‘a catchword’). Wesley had denied that good works was a Methodist shibboleth in his Second Letter to Dr. Free (1758); he would also warn his own people against making perfection a shibboleth of their own; see Farther Thoughts on Christian Perfection (1763), Q.-A. 34, included in A Plain Account of Christian Perfection.

Is man by nature filled with all manner of evil? Is he void of all good? 02:184Is he wholly fallen? Is his soul totally corrupted? Or, to come back to the text, is ‘every imagination of the thoughts of his heart evil continually’? Allow this, and you are so far a Christian. Deny it, and you are but an heathen still.

33. We may learn from hence, in the third place, what is the proper nature of religion, of the religion of Jesus Christ. It is θεραπεία ψυχῆς,

Cf. Plato, Laches, 185e; Gorgias, 513d; Republic, 585d; see also Cushman, Therapeia, pp. 295-301, for an extended comment on this therapeutic concept of salvation, which Wesley preferred above all juridical and forensic metaphors. E.g., in the ‘Preface’ to The Doctrine of Original Sin, §4, he had said: ‘…nor can the Christian philosophy…be more properly defined than in Plato’s word: It is θεραπεία Ψυχῆς, “the only true method of healing a distempered soul”.’

God’s method of healing a soul which is thus diseased. Hereby the great Physician of souls applies medicine to heal this sickness; to restore human nature, totally corrupted in all its faculties. God heals all our atheism by the knowledge of himself, and of Jesus Christ whom he hath sent; by giving us faith, a divine evidence and conviction of God and of the things of God—in particular of this important truth: Christ loved me, and gave himself for me.

Gal. 2:20.

By repentance and lowliness of heart the deadly disease of pride is healed; that of self-will by resignation, a meek and thankful submission to the will of God. And for the love of the world in all its branches the love of God is the sovereign remedy. Now this is properly religion, ‘faith thus working by love’,

Cf. Gal. 5:6.

working the genuine, meek humility, entire deadness to the world, with a loving, thankful acquiescence in and conformity to the whole will and Word of God.

44. Indeed if man were not thus fallen there would be no need of all this. There would be no occasion for this work in the heart, this ‘renewal in the spirit of our mind’.

Cf. Eph. 4:23.

The ‘superfluity of godliness’ would then be a more proper expression than the ‘superfluity of naughtiness’.

Jas. 1:21.

For an outside religion without any godliness at all would suffice to all rational intents and purposes. It does accordingly suffice, in the judgment of those who deny this corruption of our nature. They make very little more of religion than the famous Mr. Hobbes did of reason. According to him, reason is only ‘a well-ordered train of words’:

Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), author of Leviathan (1651); see Wesley’s other references to him in No. 70, ‘The Case of Reason Impartially Considered’, §1, II 4. The quotation is not from Hobbes directly but from John Norris, Reflections Upon the Conduct of Human Life, p. 44: ‘Thus Mr. Hobbes makes reason to be nothing but “Sequela Nominum”, a well-ordered train of words.’ (Wesley published an extract of Norris’s Reflections in 1734; see Bibliog, No. 3.) Hobbes’s own text is in Leviathan, I.iv.12: ‘The general use of speech is to transfer our mental discourse into verbal, or the train of our thoughts into a train of words;’ see also IV.xlvi-xlvii.370, 379, 383.

according to them, religion is only a well-ordered train of words and actions. And 02:185they speak consistently with themselves; for if the inside be not ‘full of wickedness’, if this be clean already, what remains but to ‘cleanse the outside of the cup’?

Cf. Luke 11:39.

Outward reformation, if their supposition be just, is indeed the one thing needful.

55. But ye have not so learned the oracles of God. Ye know that he who seeth what is in man gives a far different account both of nature and grace, of our fall and our recovery. Ye know that the great end of religion is to renew our hearts in the image of God, to repair that total loss of righteousness and true holiness which we sustained by the sin of our first parent.

The recovery of the defaced image of God is the axial theme of Wesley’s soteriology; cf. Nos. 12, ‘The Witness of Our Own Spirit’, §16; 45, ‘The New Birth’, III.1; 85, ‘On Working Out Our Own Salvation’, §2; 129, ‘Heavenly Treasure in Earthen Vessels’, I.2; see also Nos. 1, Salvation by Faith, §1 and n.; and 5, ‘Justification by Faith’, I.4 and n.

Ye know that all religion which does not answer this end, all that stops short of this, the renewal of our soul in the image of God, after the likeness of him that created it, is no other than a poor farce and a mere mockery of God, to the destruction of our own soul. O beware of all those teachers of lies who would palm this upon you for Christianity! Regard them not, though they should come unto you with ‘all the deceivableness of unrighteousness’,

2 Thess. 2:10.

with all smoothness of language, all decency, yea, beauty and elegance of expression, all professions of earnest goodwill to you, and reverence for the Holy Scriptures. Keep to the plain, old ‘faith, once delivered to the saints’

Jude 3.

, and delivered by the Spirit of God to your hearts. Know your disease! Know your cure! Ye were born in sin; therefore ‘ye must be born again’

John 3:7.

, ‘born of God’.

1 John 3:9; cf. John 3:8.

By nature ye are wholly corrupted; by grace ye shall be wholly renewed. ‘In Adam ye all died;’ in the second Adam, ‘in Christ, ye all are made alive.’

Cf. 1 Cor. 15:22.

You ‘that were dead in sins hath he quickened’.

Cf. Eph. 2:5.

He hath already given you a principle of life, even ‘faith in him who loved you, and gave himself for you’!

Cf. Gal 2:20.

Now ‘go on’

Heb. 6:1.

‘from faith to faith’

Rom. 1:17.

, until your whole sickness be healed, and all that ‘mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus’!

Phil. 2:5.

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