sin--by the first transgression of Adam and Eve. The extent to which the
supposed necessity of upholding this doctrine carried Wesley seems now
almost beyond belief. Basing his theology on the declaration that the
Almighty after creation found the earth and all created things "very
good," he declares, in his sermon on the Cause and Cure of Earthquakes,
that no one who believes the Scriptures can deny that "sin is the moral
cause of earthquakes, whatever their natural cause may be." Again,
he declares that earthquakes are the "effect of that curse which was
brought upon the earth by the original transgression." Bringing into
connection with Genesis the declaration of St. Paul that "the whole
creation groaneth and travaileth together in pain until now," he finds
additional scriptural proof that the earthquakes were the result of
Adam's fall. He declares, in his sermon on God's Approbation of His
Works, that "before the sin of Adam there were no agitations within
the bowels of the earth, no violent convulsions, no concussions of the
earth, no earthquakes, but all was unmoved as the pillars of heaven.
There were then no such things as eruptions of fires; no volcanoes or
burning mountains." Of course, a science which showed that earthquakes
had been in operation for ages before the appearance of man on the
planet, and which showed, also, that those very earthquakes which he
considered as curses resultant upon the Fall were really blessings,
producing the fissures in which we find today those mineral veins so
essential to modern civilization, was entirely beyond his comprehension.
He insists that earthquakes are "God's strange works of judgment, the
proper effect and punishment of sin."

(143) For his statement that "the giving up of witchcraft is in effect
the giving up of the Bible," see Welsey's Journal, 1766-'68.

So, too, as to death and pain. In his sermon on the Fall of Man he
took the ground that death and pain entered the world by Adam's
transgression, insisting that the carnage now going on among animals is
the result of Adam's sin. Speaking of the birds, beasts, and insects, he
says that, before sin entered the world by Adam's fall, "none of these
attempted to devour or in any way hurt one another"; that "the spider
was then as harmless as the fly and did not then lie in wait for blood."
Here, again, Wesley arrayed his early followers against geology, which
reveals, in the fossil remains of carnivorous a