The English Church in the Eighteenth CenturyAbbey, Charles J. (Charles John)
History
The English Church in the Eighteenth Century
Abbey, Charles J. (Charles John)
Church of England -- History -- 18th century
removed out of them by the goodness of God.'[570] Christianity, he said,
is the one true religion of nature, because man's corrupt state
'absolutely requires two things as its only salvation. First, the Divine
life must be revived in the soul of man. Secondly, there must be a
resurrection of the body in a better state after death.'[571] That
religion only can be sufficient to the want of his nature which can
provide this salvation. God's redeeming love, said Law, will not suffer
the sinner to have rest or peace until, in time or in eternity,
righteousness is restored and purification completed.[572] He expressed
in the strongest language his belief that 'every act of what is called
Divine vengeance, recorded in Scripture, may and ought, with the
greatest strictness of truth, to be called an act of the Divine love. If
Sodom flames and smokes with stinking brimstone, it is the love of God
that kindled it, only to extinguish a more horrible fire. It was one and
the same infinite love, when it preserved Noah in the ark, when it
turned Sodom into a burning lake, and overwhelmed Pharaoh in the Red
Sea.'[573] If God did not chastise sin, that lenience would argue that
He was not all love and goodness towards man. And so far from its being
a lessening of the just 'terrors of the Lord,' to say that His
punishments, however severe, are inflicted not in vengeance but in love,
such wholesome terrors are placed on more certain ground. Every work of
piety is turned into a work of love; but from the licentious all false
and idle hopes are taken away, and they must know that there is 'nothing
to trust to as a deliverance from misery but the one total abolition of
sin.'[574]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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