Susanna Wesley by Wesley Susanna; Wallace Charles Jr.;

Author:Wesley, Susanna; Wallace, Charles Jr.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 1997-04-08T04:00:00+00:00

[90. The understanding—and all other human faculties—are corrupted by the fall]

Even[ing]

The understanding, which is the eye of the mind, the perceptive faculty by which we discern intellectual and spiritual objects, as we do sensible and material things by our bodily eyes,52 is naturally eclipsed, for which reason we want a clear perception of immaterial substances and so become guilty of ignorance and an indisposition to contemplate and know truth, which is the proper object of the understanding.

God is truth! And he is the native centre of uncorrupted spirits: And had not sin entered the world, the mind had as naturally and constantly aspired towards him as flames ascend or as heavy bodies press towards their centre.53 But now as a thick mist or a dark cloud often intercepts the beams of the sun and prevents our seeing it, though it shines with equal glory, so notwithstanding that “God is light, and in him is no darkness at all,” 54 yet by reason of the great depravity of human nature, we are as it were enveloped in a dark cloud of ignorance, [so] that we cannot discern the truth of his essential, infinite perfections.

From dark, confused, imperfect perceptions55 of the divine Nature, arises the erroneous and mistaken judgments and false determinations that we form concerning him and all things of a spiritual nature.

Our thoughts for the most part are roving and desultory, we can rarely fix them on invisible objects, and, though we essay never so often to raise them to spiritual things, yet they naturally scatter and divide, and if we do by chance fix them a while, ’tis odds but we think amiss, for error is more agreeable to vitiated nature than truth.

And from hence it is that the will is so obstinately averse from goodness and takes so strong a bent towards evil. That we mistake in our notions of good and take evil for good and good for evil. That we prefer natural before moral good, the good of the body before the good of the soul, and what’s still worse, the present satisfactions of the sensual appetites before the real good of either soul or body. The enjoying sensual pleasure for a short and uncertain time, before …56

And as all the superior powers were shaken and the noble faculties corrupted, so likewise are all the inferiour powers, all the passions of the soul, become irregular and disorderly. We love what we should hate, hate what we should love, we desire what we should fly from, and fly from what we should pursue, etc. We delight in what we should be displeased with and find a displicency57 in those things with which we should be most delighted. In fine, the whole order of nature is inverted by the fall; and man, which was created after the image of God, that had a perfection of intellectual and moral goodness and was constituted by God, himself Lord of all the inanimate and brute creation, is now become a slave

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