the works of john gill vol2 SAMPLE

The Cause of God and Truth
when it belongs to the plain and frequent, clear and copious revelations
of divine justice. CONT….
SAMPLE….To which this author has chiefly replied by referring me
to Dr. Whitby’s Treatise of Original Sin, particularly respecting the
passages of Origen, Macarius the Egyptian, Athanasius, Basil, Cyrill,
and Optatus. Whose replies to these passages, as well as to some others
of Origen and Chrysostom, about which this man elsewhere so much
blusters, are mere shifts and evasions, and chiefly lie in setting other
passages against them.
It will not be denied, nor is it to be wondered at, that there are some
passages in those writers which may seem to militate against this
doctrine; for no controversy being moved about it, they wrote without
guard; but, if it was entirely unknown till the times of Austin, it is much
there should be any thing of it in their writings; wherefore, upon these
considerations, I say again, and which was before my sense, that one
full testimony in favour of it, before the controversy was moved, is of
more weight than ten which may seem to be against it.
But to go on: this author replies to the passages referred to by me,
partly by saying of others of them, as those of Hilary of Poictiers,
Victorinus Afer, and Gregory Nazianzen, that they are nothing to the
purpose; if the reader pleases to take his ipse dixit, his bare word for
it; though the first of these affirms, that sin and unbelief arise from the
transgression of our first parents; that all mankind are to be considered
under the first man, and went astray when he did; and that man is born
under original sin, and the law of it; and the other represents man in a
state of nature, as dead through sin; and the third asserts, that all men
sinned in Adam, fell by his sin out of paradise, were condemned
through his disobedience, and lost the heavenly image. The passages
of the ancients referred to which he has ventured to make some
remarks upon, are those of Justin, Irenæus, Hilary the Deacon,
Ambrose, and Mark the Eremite, which will be attended to.
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