In the same article are the following extracts from the works of Arminius, which, on so good authority, may be received as the views of the Methodist churches on this topic:
“The will of man, with respect to true good, is not only wounded, bruised, crooked and attenuated, but is likewise captivated, destroyed and lost, and has no powers whatever, except such as are excited by grace.
“Adam, by sinning, corrupted himself and all his posterity, and so made them obnoxious to God's wrath.”
“Infants have rejected the grace of the gospel in their parents and forefathers, by which act they have deserved to be deserted by God. For I would like to have proof adduced how all posterity could sin in Adam against law, and yet infants, to whom the gospel is offered in their parents and rejected, have not sinned against the grace of the gospel.”
“For there is a permanent principle in the covenant of God, that children should be comprehended and adjudged in their parents.”
Watson, the leading Arminian theologian, says that in the doctrine of the corruption of our common nature and man's natural incapacity to do good, the Arminians and Calvinists so well agree, “that it is an entire delusion to represent this doctrine, as is often done, as exclusively Calvinistic.”
Various Protestant doctrines.
The following extracts from the creeds of various European bodies of Protestant Christians show the same doctrine. The Synod of Dort was a great council of Protestant divines at the period of the Reformation. It contained representatives from most of the large bodies of Protestants in Europe. The following gives their views on this subject:
Synod of Dort.
“Therefore all men are conceived in sin and born the children of wrath, disqualified for all saving good, propense to evil, dead in sins, the slaves of sin; and without the grace of the regenerating Holy Spirit, they neither are willing nor able to return to God, to correct their depraved nature, or to dispose themselves to the correction of it.”