1810.

  For only that man understands in deed
    Who well remembers what he well can do;
  The faith lives only where the faith doth breed
    Obedience to the works it binds us to. 
  And as the Life of Wisdom hath exprest ­
  ‘If this ye know, then do it and be blest’.

  LORD BROOK.

‘In initio’.

There is one misconception running through the whole of this Pamphlet, the rock on which, and the quarry out of which, the whole reasoning, is built; ­an error therefore which will not indeed destroy its efficacy as a [Greek:  misaetron] or anti-philtre to inflame the scorn of the enemies of Methodism, but which must utterly incapacitate it for the better purpose of convincing the consciences or allaying the fanaticism of the Methodists themselves; this is the uniform and gross mis-statement of the one great point in dispute, by which the Methodists are represented as holding the compatibility of an impure life with a saving faith:  whereas they only assert that the works of righteousness are the consequence, not the price, of Redemption, a gift included in the great gift of salvation; ­and therefore not of merit but of imputation through the free love of the Saviour.

Part I. .

It is enough, it seems, that all the disorderly classes of mankind, prompted as they are by their worst passions to trample on the public welfare, should ‘know’ that they are, what every one else is convinced they are, the pests of society, and the evil is remedied.  They are not to be exhorted to honesty, sobriety, or the observance of any laws, human or divine ­they must not even be entreated to do their best.  “Just as ‘absurd’ would it be,” we are told, “in a physician to send away his patient, when labouring under some desperate disease, with a recommendation to do his utmost towards his own cure, and then to come to him to finish it, as it is in the minister of the ‘Gospel’ to propose to the sinner ‘to do his best’, by way of healing the disease of the soul ­and then to come to the Lord Jesus to perfect his recovery.  The ‘only’ previous qualification is to ‘know’ our misery, and the remedy is prepared.”  See Dr. Hawker’s Works, vol. vi. .

For “know,” let the Barrister substitute “feel;” that is, we know it as we know our life; and then ask himself whether the production of such a state of mind in a sinner would or would not be of greater promise as to his reformation than the repetition of the Ten Commandments with paraphrases on the same. ­But why not both?  The Barrister is at least as wrong in the undervaluing of the one as the pseudo-Evangelists in the exclusion of the other.

Ib. .

Whatever these new Evangelists may teach to the contrary, the present state of public morals and of public happiness would assume a very different appearance if the thieves, swindlers, and highway robbers, would ‘do their best’ towards maintaining themselves by honest labour, instead of perpetually planning new systems of fraud, and new schemes of depredation.

That is, if these thieves had a different will ­not a mere wish, however anxious: ­for this wish “the libertine” doubtless has, as described in , ­but an effective will.  Well, and who doubts this?  The point in dispute is, as to the means of producing this reformation in the will; which, whatever the Barrister may think, Christ at least thought so difficult as to speak of it, not once or twice, but uniformly, as little less than miraculous, as tantamount to a re-creation.  This Barrister may be likened to an ignorant but well-meaning Galenist, who writing against some infamous quack, who lived by puffing and vending pills of mercurial sublimate for all cases of a certain description, should have no stronger argument than to extol ‘sarsaparilla’, and ‘lignum vitae’, or ‘senna’ in contempt of all mercurial preparations.

Ib. .

  Not for the revenues of an Archbishop would he exhort them to a duty
  ‘unknown in Scripture’, of adding their five talents to the five they
  have received, &c.

All this is mere calumny and wilful misstatement of the tenets of Wesley, who never doubted that we are bound to improve our ‘talents’, or, on the other hand, that we are equally bound, having done so, to be equally thankful to the Giver of all things for the power and the will by which we improved the talents, as for the original capital which is the object of the improvement.  The question is not whether Christ will say, ‘Well done thou good and faithful servant’, &c.; ­but whether the servant is to say it of himself.  Now Christ has delivered as positive a precept against our doing this as the promise can be that he will impute it to us, if we do not impute it to our own merits.

Ib. .

The complaints of the profligacy of servants of every class, and of the depravity of the times are in every body’s hearing: ­and these Evangelical tutors ­the dear Mr. Lovegoods of the day ­deserve the best attention of the public for thus instructing the ignorant multitude, who are always ready enough to neglect their moral duties, to despise and insult those by whom they are taught.

All this is no better than infamous slander, unless the Barrister can prove that these depraved servants and thieves are Methodists, or have been wicked in proportion as they were proselyted to Methodism.  O folly!  This is indeed to secure the triumph of these enthusiasts.

Ib.

It must afford him (Rowland Hill) great consolation, amidst the increasing immorality that when their village Curate exhorts them, if they have ‘faith’ in the doctrine of a world to come, to add to it those ‘good works’ in which the sum and substance of religion consist, he has led them to ridicule him, as ’chopping a new-fashioned’ logic.

That this is either false or nugatory, see proved in The Friend.

Ib. .

  Tom Payne himself never laboured harder to root all virtue out of
  society. ­Mandeville nor Voltaire never even laboured so much.

Indeed!

Ib.

  They were content with declaring their disbelief of a future state.

In what part of their works?  Can any wise man read Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees, and not see that it is a keen satire on the inconsistency of Christians, and so intended.

Ib. .

When the populace shall be once brought to a conviction that the Gospel, as they are told, has neither terms nor conditions , that no sins can be too great, no life too impure, ’no offences too many or too aggravated’, to disqualify the perpetrators of them for ­salvation, &c.

Merely insert the words “sincere repentance and amendment of heart and life, and therefore for” salvation, ­and is not this truth, and Gospel truth?  And is it not the meaning of the preacher?  Did any Methodist ever teach that salvation may be attained without sanctification?  This Barrister for ever forgets that the whole point in dispute is not concerning the possibility of an immoral Christian being saved, which the Methodist would deny as strenuously as himself, and perhaps give an austerer sense to the word immoral; but whether morality, or as the Methodists would call it, sanctification, be the price which we pay for the purchase of our salvation with our own money, or a part of the same free gift.  God knows, I am no advocate for Methodism; but for fair statement I am, and most zealously ­even for the love of logic, putting honesty out of sight.

Ib. .

  “In every age,” says the moral divine (Blair), “the practice has
  prevailed of substituting certain appearances of piety in the place of
  the great ‘duties’ of humanity and mercy,” &c.

Will the Barrister rest the decision of the controversy on a comparison of the lives of the Methodists and non-Methodists?  Unless he knows that their “morality has declined, as their piety has become more ardent,” is not his quotation mere labouring ­nay, absolute pioneering ­for the triumphal chariot of his enemies?

Ib. pp. 75-79.

It is but fair to select a specimen of Evangelical preaching from one of its most celebrated and popular champions .

He will preface it with the solemn and woful communication of the Evangelist John, in order to show how exactly they accord, how clearly the doctrines of the one are deduced from the Revelation of the other, and how justly, therefore, it assumes the exclusive title of evangelical.  ’And I saw the dead and the dead were judged out of those things which were written in the books, according to their works.  And the sea gave up the dead and they were judged every man according to his works’.  Rev. x, 13.  Let us recall to mind the urgent caution conveyed in the writings of Paul ’Be not deceived; God is not mocked; for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap’.  And let us further add the confirmation of the Saviour himself: ­’When the Son of Man shall come in his glory, but the righteous into life eternal’.  Matt. xx, ‘ad finem’.  Let us now attend to the Evangelical preacher, (Toplady).  “The Religion of Jesus Christ stands eminently distinguished, and essentially differenced, from every other religion that was ever proposed to human reception, by this remarkable peculiarity; that, look abroad in the world, and you will find that every religion, ‘except one’, puts you upon ’doing something’, in order to recommend yourself to God.  A Mahometan A Papist It is only the religion of Jesus Christ that runs counter to all the rest, by affirming ­that we are ‘saved’ and called with a holy calling, ‘not’ according to our works, but according to the Father’s own purpose and grace, which was ‘not’ sold to us ’on certain conditions to be fulfilled by ourselves’, but was given us in Christ before the world began.”  Toplady’s Works:  Sermon on James i.

‘Si sic omnia’!  All this is just and forcible; and surely nothing can be easier than to confute the Methodist by shewing that his very ‘no-doing’, when he comes to explain it, is not only an act, a work, but even a very severe and perseverant energy of the will.  He is therefore to be arraigned of nonsense and abuse of words rather than of immoral doctrines.

Ib. .

The sacred volume of Holy Writ declares that ‘true’ (pure?) ’religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this, to visit the fatherless and widow in their affliction, and to keep himself unspotted from the world’.  James

This is now at least, whatever might have been the meaning of the word ‘religion’ in the time of the Translators, a false version.  St. James is speaking of persons eminently zealous in those public or private acts of worship, which we call divine service, [Greek:  thraeskeia].  It should be rendered, ‘True worship’, &c.  The passage is a fine burst of rhetoric, and not a mere truism; just as when we say; ­“A cheerful heart is a perpetual thanksgiving, and a state of love and resignation the truest utterance of the Lord’s Prayer.”  St. James opposes Christianity to the outward signs and ceremonial observances of the Jewish and Pagan religions.  But these are the only sure signs, these are the most significant ceremonial observances by which your Christianity is to be made known, ­’to visit the fatherless’, &c.  True religion does not consist ‘quoad essentiam’ in these acts, but in that habitual state of the whole moral being, which manifests itself by these acts ­and which acts are to the religion of Christ that which ablutions, sacrifices and Temple-going were to the Mosaic religion, namely, its genuine [Greek:  thraeskeia].  That which was the religion of Moses is the ceremonial or cult of the religion of Christ.  Moses commanded all good works, even those stated by St. James, as the means of temporal felicity; and this was the Mosaic religion; and to these he added a multitude of symbolical observances; and these formed the Mosaic cult, (’cultus religionis’, [Greek:  thraeskeia]).  Christ commands holiness out of perfect love, that is, Christian religion; and adds to this no other ceremony or symbol than a pure life and active beneficence; which (says St. James) are the ‘true cult’.

Ib. .

  There is no one whose writings are better calculated to do good, (than
  those of Paley) by inculcating the essential duties of common life,
  and the sound truths of practical Christianity.

Indeed!  Paley’s whole system is reducible to this one precept: ­“Obey God, and benefit your neighbour, because you love yourself above all.”  Christ has himself comprised his system in ­“Love your neighbour as yourself, and God above all.”  These “sound truths of practical Christianity” consist in a total subversion, not only of Christianity, but of all morality; ­the very words virtue and vice being but lazy synonymes of prudence and miscalculation, ­and which ought to be expunged from our vocabularies, together with Abraxas and Abracadabra, as charms abused by superstitious or mystic enthusiasts.

Ib. .

Eventually the whole direction of the popular mind, in the affairs of religion, will be gained into the hands of a set of ignorant fanatics of such low origin and vulgar habits as can only serve to degrade religion in the eyes of those to whom its influence is most wanted.  Will such persons venerate or respect it in the hands of a sect composed in the far greater part of bigotted, coarse, illiterate, and low-bred enthusiasts?  Men who have abandoned their lawful callings, in which by industry they might have been useful members of society, to take upon themselves concerns the most sacred, with which nothing but their vanity and their ignorance could have excited them to meddle.

It is not the buffoonery of the reverend joker of the Edinburgh Review; not the convulsed grin of mortification which, sprawling prostrate in the dirt from “the whiff and wind” of the masterly disquisition in the Quarterly Review, the itinerant preacher would pass oft’ for the broad grin of triumph; no, nor even the over-valued distinction of miracles, ­which will prevent him from seeing and shewing the equal applicability of all this to the Apostles and primitive Christians.  We know that Trajan, Pliny, Tacitus, the Antonines, Celsus, Lucian and the like, ­much more the ten thousand philosophers and joke-smiths of Rome, ­did both feel and apply all this to the Galilean Sect; and yet ­’Vicisti, O Galilaee’!

Ib. .

They never fail to refer to the proud Pharisee, whom they term self-’righteous’; and thus, having greatly misrepresented his character, they proceed to declaim on the arrogance of founding any expectation of reward from the performance of our ’moral duties’: ­whereas the plain truth is that the Pharisee was ’not righteous’, but merely arrogated to himself that character; he had neglected all the ‘moral duties’ of life.

Who told the Barrister this?  Not the Gospel, I am sure.

The Evangelical has only to translate these sentences into the true statement of his opinions, in order to baffle this angry and impotent attack; the self-righteousness of all who expect to claim salvation on the plea of their own personal merit.  “Pay to A. B. at sight ­value received by me.” ­To Messrs. Stone and Co.  Bankers, Heaven-Gate.  It is a short step from this to the Popish.  “Pay to A. B. ’or order’.”  Once assume merits, and I defy you to keep out supererogation and the old ‘Monte di Pieta’.

Ib. .

­and from thence occasion is taken to defame all those who strive to prepare themselves, during this their state of trial, for that judgment which they must undergo at that day, when they will receive either reward or punishment, according as they shall be found to have ‘merited’ the one, or ‘deserved’ the other.

Can the Barrister have read the New Testament?  Or does he know it only by quotations?

Ib.

   ­a swarm of new Evangelists who are every where teaching the people
  that no reliance is to be placed on holiness of life as a ground of
  future acceptance.

I am weary of repeating that this is false.  It is only denied that mere acts, not proceeding from faith, are or can be holiness.  As surely (would the Methodist say) as the Holy Ghost proceeds from the Son, so surely does sanctification from redemption, and not vice versa, ­much less from self-sanctifiedness, that ostrich with its head in the sand, and the plucked rump of its merits staring on the divine [Greek:  Atae] ‘venatrix’!

Ib. .

‘He that doeth righteousness is righteous’.  Since then it is plain that each must ‘himself’ be righteous, if he be so at all, what do they mean who thus inveigh against ’self’-righteousness, since Christ himself declares there is no other?

Here again the whole dispute lies in the word “himself.”  In the outward and visible sense both parties agree; but the Methodist calls it “the will in us,” given by grace; the Barrister calls it “our own will,” or “we ourselves.”  But why does not the Barrister reserve a part of his wrath for Dr. Priestley, according to whom a villain has superior claims on the divine justice as an innocent martyr to the grand machinery of Providence; ­for Dr. Priestley, who turns the whole dictionary of human nature into verbs impersonal with a perpetual ‘subauditur’ of ‘Deus’ for their common nominative case; ­which said ‘Deus’, however, is but another ‘automaton’, self-worked indeed, but yet worked, not properly working, for he admits no more freedom or will to God than to man?  The Lutheran leaves the free will whining with a broken back in the ditch; and Dr. Priestley puts the poor animal out of his misery! ­But seriously, is it fair or even decent to appeal to the Legislature against the Methodists for holding the doctrine of the Atonement?  Do we not pray by Act of Parliament twenty times every Sunday ’through the only merits of Jesus Christ’?  Is it not the very nose which (of flesh or wax) this very Legislature insists on as an indispensable qualification for every Christian face?  Is not the lack thereof a felonious deformity, yea, the grimmest feature of the ‘lues confirmata’ of statute heresy?  What says the reverend critic to this?  Will he not rise in wrath against the Barrister, ­he the Pamphagus of Homilitic, Liturgic, and Articular orthodoxy, ­the Garagantua, whose ravenous maw leaves not a single word, syllable, letter, no, not one ‘iota’ unswallowed, if we are to believe his own recent and voluntary manifesto? What says he to this Barrister, and his Hints to the Legislature?

Ib. .

  If the new faith be the only true one, let us embrace it; but let not
  those who vend these ‘new articles’ expect that we should choose them
  with our eyes shut.

Let any man read the Homilies of the Church of England, and if he does not call this either blunt impudence or blank ignorance, I will plead guilty to both!  New articles!!  Would to Heaven some of them at least were!  Why, Wesley himself was scandalized at Luther’s Commentary on the Epistle to the Galatians, and cried off from the Moravians (the strictest Lutherans) on that account.

Ib. .

The catalogue of authors, which this Rev. Gentleman has pleased to specify and recommend, begins with Homer, Hesiod, the Argonautics, AEschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Pindar, Theognis, Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon, Polybius, Diodorus Siculus. .  ’This catalogue,’ says he, ’might be considerably extended, but I study brevity.  It is only necessary for me to add that the recommendation of these books is not to be considered as expressive of my approbation of every particular sentiment they contain.’  It would indeed be grievous injustice if this writer’s reputation should be injured by the occasional unsoundness of opinion in writers whom it is more than probable he may never have read, and for whose sentiments he ought no more to be made answerable than the compiler of Lackington’s Catalogue, from which it is not unlikely that his own was abridged.

Very good.

Ib. -16.

These high-strained pretenders to godliness, who deny the power of the sinner to help himself, take good care always to attribute his ’saving change’ to the blessed effect of some sermon preached by some one or other of ‘their’ Evangelical fraternity.  They always hold ‘themselves’ up to the multitude as the instruments producing all those marvellous conversions which they relate.  No instance is recorded in their Saints’ Calendar of any sinner resolving, in consequence of a reflective and serious perusal of the Scriptures, to lead a new life.  No instance of a daily perusal of the Bible producing a daily progress in virtuous habits.  No, the ‘Gospel’ has no such effect. ­It is always the ‘Gospel Preacher’ who works the miracle, &c.

Excellent and just.  In this way are the Methodists to be attacked: ­even as the Papists were by Baxter, not from their doctrines, but from their practices, and the spirit of their Sect.  There is a fine passage in Lord Bacon concerning a heresy of manner being not less pernicious than heresy of matter.

Ib. .

But their Saints, who would stop their ears if you should mention with admiration the name of a Garrick or a Siddons; ­who think it a sin to support such an ‘infamous profession’ as that through the medium of which a Milton, a Johnson, an Addison, and a Young have laboured to mend the heart, &c.

Whoo!  See Milton’s Preface to the Samson Agonistes.

Ib. .

In the Evangelical Magazine is the following article:  “At ­in Yorkshire, after a handsome collection (for the Missionary Society) a poor man, whose wages are about 28s. per week, brought a donation of 20 guineas.  Our friends hesitated to receive it when he answered ­’Before I knew the grace of our Lord I was a poor drunkard:  I never could save a shilling.  My family were in beggary and rags; but since it has pleased God to renew me by his grace, we have been industrious and frugal:  we have not spent many idle shillings; and we have been enabled to put something into the Bank; and this I freely offer to the blessed cause of our Lord and Saviour.’  This is the second donation of this same poor man to the same amount!” Whatever these Evangelists may think of such conduct, they ought to be ashamed of thus basely taking advantage of this poor ignorant enthusiast, &c.

Is it possible to read this affecting story without finding in it a complete answer to the charge of demoralizing the lower classes?  Does the Barrister really think, that this generous and grateful enthusiast is as likely to be unprovided and poverty-stricken in his old age, as he was prior to his conversion?  Except indeed that at that time his old age was as improbable as his distresses were certain if he did live so long.  This is singing ‘Io Pæan’! for the enemy with a vengeance.

Part II. .

  It behoved him (Dr. Hawker in his Letter to the Barrister) to show in
  what manner a covenant can exist without terms or conditions.

According to the Methodists there is a condition, ­that of faith in the power and promise of Christ, and the virtue of the Cross.  And were it otherwise, the objection is scarcely appropriate except at the Old Bailey, or in the Court of King’s Bench.  The Barrister might have framed a second law-syllogism, as acute as his former.  The laws of England allow no binding covenant in a transfer of goods or chattels without value received.  But there can be no value received by God: ­’Ergo’, there can be no covenant between God and man.  And if Jéhovah should be as courteous as the House of Commons, and acknowledge the jurisdiction of the Courts at Westminster, the pleading might hold perhaps, and the Pentateuch be quashed after an argument before the judges.  Besides, how childish to puff up the empty bladder of an old metaphysical foot-ball on the ‘modus operandi interior’ of Justification into a shew of practical substance; as if it were no less solid than a cannon ball!  Why, drive it with all the vehemence that five toes can exert, it would not kill a louse on the head of Methodism.  Repentance, godly sorrow, abhorrence of sin as sin, and not merely dread from forecast of the consequences, these the Arminian would call means of obtaining salvation, while the Methodist (more philosophically perhaps) names them signs of the work of free grace commencing and the dawning of the sun of redemption.  And pray where is the practical difference?

Ib. .

Jesus answered him thus ­’Verily, I say unto you, unless a man be born of water and of the spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God’. ­The true sense of which is obviously this: ­Except a man be initiated into my religion by Baptism, (which ‘at that time’ was always ‘preceded by a confession of faith’) and unless he manifest his sincere reception of it, by leading that upright and ‘spiritual’ life which it enjoins, ‘he cannot enter the kingdom of heaven’, or be a partaker of that happiness which it belongs to me to confer on those who believe in my name and keep my sayings.

Upon my faith as a Christian, if no more is meant by being born again than this, the speaker must have had the strongest taste in metaphors of any teacher in verse or prose on record, Jacob Behmen himself not excepted.  The very Alchemists lag behind.  Pity, however, that our Barrister has not shown us how this plain and obvious business of Baptism agrees with ver. 8. of the same chapter:  ’The wind bloweth where it listeth’, &c.  Now if this does not express a visitation of the mind by a somewhat not in the own power or fore-thought of the mind itself, what are words meant for?

Ib. .

The true meaning of being ‘born again’, in the sense in which our Saviour uses the phrase, implies nothing more or less, in plain terms, than this: ­to repent; to lead for the future a religious life instead of a life of disobedience; to believe the Holy Scriptures, and to pray for grace and assistance to persevere in our obedience to the end.  All this any man of common sense might explain in a few words.

Pray, then, (for I will take the Barrister’s own commentary,) what does the man of common sense mean by grace?  If he will explain grace in any other way than as the circumstances ‘ab extra’ (which would be mere mockery and in direct contradiction to a score of texts), and yet without mystery, I will undertake for Dr. Hawker and Co. to make the new birth itself as plain as a pikestaff, or a whale’s foal, or Sarah Robarts’s rabbits.

Ib. .

  So that they go on in their sin waiting for a new birth, &c.

“So that they go on in their sin!” ­Who would not suppose it notorious that every Methodist meeting-house was a cage of Newgate larks making up their minds to die game?

Ib.

The following account is extracted from the Methodist Magazine for 1798:  “The Lord astonished ‘Sarah Roberts’ with his mercy, by ’setting her at liberty, while employed’ in the necessary business of ‘washing’ for her family, &c.

N. B. Not the famous rabbit-woman. ­She was Robarts.

Ib. .

A washerwoman has ‘all her sins blotted out’ in the twinkling of an eye, and while reeking with suds is received in the family of the Redeemer’s kingdom.  Surely this is a most abominable profanation of all that is serious, &c.

And where pray is the absurdity of this?  Has Christ declared any antipathy to washerwomen, or the Holy Ghost to warm suds?  Why does not the Barrister try his hand at the “abominable profanation,” in a story of a certain woman with an issue of blood who was made free by touching the hem of a garment, without the previous knowledge of the wearer?

  ’Rode, caper, vitem:  tamen hinc cum stabis ad aras, In tua quod fundi
  cornua possit, erit’.

Ib. .

The leading design of John the Baptist was this: ­to prepare the minds of men for the reception of that pure system of moral truth which the Saviour, by divine authority, was speedily to inculcate, and of those sublime doctrines of a resurrection and a future judgment, which, as powerful motives to the practice of holiness, he was soon to reveal.

What then?  Did not John the Baptist himself teach a pure system of moral truth?  Was John so much more ignorant than Paul before his conversion, and the whole Jewish nation, except a few rich freethinkers, as to be ignorant of the “sublime doctrines of a resurrection and a future judgment?” This, I well know, is the strong-hold of Socinianism; but surely one single unprejudiced perusal of the New Testament, ­not to suppose an acquaintance with Kidder or Lightfoot ­would blow it down, like a house of cards!

Ib. .

  ­their faiths in the efficacy of their own rites, and creeds, and
  ceremonies, and their whole train of ‘substitutions’ for ‘moral duty’,
  was so entire, and in their opinion was such a ‘saving faith’, that
  they could not at all interpret any language that seemed to dispute
  their value, or deny their importance.

Poor strange Jews!  They had, doubtless, what Darwin would call a specific ‘paralysis’ of the auditory nerves to the writings of their own Prophets, which yet were read Sabbath after Sabbath in their public Synagogues.  For neither John nor Christ himself ever did, or indeed could, speak in language more contemptuous of the folly of considering rites as substitutions for moral duty, or in severer words denounce the blasphemy of such an opinion.  Why need I refer to Isaiah or Micah?

Ib. .

  Thus it was that this moral preacher explained and enforced the duty
  of repentance, and thus it was that he prepared the way for the
  greatest and best of teachers, &c.

Well then, if all this was but a preparation for the doctrines of Christ, those doctrines themselves must surely have been something different, and more difficult?  Oh no!  John’s preparation consisted in a complete rehearsal of the ‘Drama didacticum’, which Christ and the Apostles were to exhibit to a full audience! ­Nay, prithee, good Barrister! do not be too rash in charging the Methodists with a monstrous burlesque of the Gospel!

Ib. .

­the logic of the new Evangelists will convince him that it is a contradiction in terms even to ‘suppose’ himself ’capable of doing any thing’ to help ’or bringing any thing to recommend himself to the Divine favour’.

Now, suppose the wisdom of these endless attacks on an old abstruse metaphysical notion to be allowed, yet why in the name of common candour does not the Barrister ring the same ‘tocsin’ against his friend Dr. Priestley’s scheme of Necessity; ­or against his idolized Paley, who explained the will as a sensation, produced by the action of the intellect on the muscles, and the intellect itself as a catenation of ideas, and ideas as configurations of the organized brain?  Would not every syllable apply, yea, and more strongly, more indisputably?  And would his fellow-sectaries thank him, or admit the consequences?  Or has any late Socinian divine discovered, that Do as ye would be done unto, is an interpolated precept?

Ib. .

“Even repentance and faith,” (says Dr. Hawker,) “those most essential qualifications of the mind, for the participation and enjoyment of the blessings of the Gospel, (and which all real disciples of the Lord Jesus cannot but possess,) are ’never supposed as a condition which the sinner performs to entitle him to mercy’, but merely as evidences that he is brought and has obtained mercy.  ’They cannot be the conditions’ of obtaining salvation.”

Ought not this single quotation to have satisfied the Barrister, that no practical difference is deducible from these doctrines?  “Essential qualifications,” says the Methodist: ­“terms and conditions,” says the spiritual higgler.  But if a man begins to reflect on his past life, is he to withstand the inclination?  God forbid! exclaim both.  If he feels a commencing shame and sorrow, is he to check the feeling?  God forbid! cry both in one breath!  But should not remembrancers be thrown in the way of sinners, and the voice of warning sound through every street and every wilderness?  Doubtless, quoth the Rationalist.  We do it, we do it, shout the Methodists.  In every corner of every lane, in the high road, and in the waste, we send forth the voice ­Come to Christ, and repent, and be cleansed!  Aye, quoth the Rationalist, but I say Repent, and become clean, and go to Christ ­Now is not Mr. Rationalist as great a bigot as the Methodists, as he is, ‘me judice’, a worse psychologist?

Part II. .

The former authorities on this subject I had quoted from the Gospel according to St. Luke:  that Gospel most positively and most solemnly declares the ‘repentance’ of sinners to be the ‘condition’ on which ‘alone’ salvation can be obtained.  But the doctors of the new divinity ‘deny’ this:  they tell us distinctly ‘it cannot’ be.  For the future, the Gospel according to Calvin must be received as the truth.  Sinners will certainly prefer it as the more comfortable of the two beyond all comparison.

Mercy! but only to read Calvin’s account of that repentance, without which there is no sign of election, and to call it “the more comfortable of the two?” The very term by which the German New-Birthites express it is enough to give one goose-flesh ­’das Herzknirschen’ ­the very heart crashed between the teeth of a lock-jaw’d agony!

Ib.

  What is ‘faith’?  Is it not a conviction produced in the mind by
  adequate testimony?

No! that is not the meaning of faith in the Gospel, nor indeed anywhere else.  Were it so, the stronger the testimony, the more adequate the faith.  Yet who says, I have faith in the existence of George II., as his present Majesty’s antecessor and grandfather? ­If testimony, then evidence too; ­and who has faith that the two sides of all triangles are greater than the third?  In truth, faith, even in common language, always implies some effort, something of evidence which is not universally adequate or communicable at will to others.  “Well! to be sure he has behaved badly hitherto, but I have faith in him.”  If it were otherwise, how could it be imputed as righteousness?  Can morality exist without choice; ­nay, strengthen in proportion as it becomes more independent of the will?  “A very meritorious man! he has faith in every proposition of Euclid, which he understands.”

Ib. .

“I could as easily create a world (says Dr. Hawker) as create either faith or repentance in my own heart.”  Surely this is a most monstrous confession.  What! is not the Christian religion a ‘revealed’ religion, and have we not the most miraculous attestation of its truth?

Just look at the answer of Christ himself to Nicodemus, ‘John’ ii, 3.  Nicodemus professed a full belief in Christ’s divine mission.  Why?  It was attested by his miracles.  What answered Christ?  “Well said, O believer?” No, not a word of this; but the proof of the folly of such a supposition.  ’Verily, verily, I say unto thee; except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God’, ­that is, he cannot have faith in me.

Ib. .

How can this evangelical preacher declaim on the necessity of seriously searching into the truth of revelation, for the purpose either of producing or confirming our belief of it, when he has already pronounced it to be just as possible to arrive at conviction as to create a world?

Did Dr. Hawker say that it was impossible to produce an assent to the historic credibility of the facts related in the Gospel?  Did he say that it was impossible to become a Socinian by the weighing of outward evidences?  No! but Dr. Hawker says, ­and I say, ­that this is not, cannot be, what Christ means by faith, which, to the misfortune of the Socinians, he always demands as the condition of a miracle, instead of looking forward to it as the natural effect of a miracle.  How came it that Peter saw miracles countless, and yet was without faith till the Holy Ghost descended on him?  Besides, miracles may or may not be adequate evidence for Socinianism; but how could miracles prove the doctrine of Redemption, or the divinity of Christ?  But this is the creed of the Church of England.

It is wearisome to be under the necessity, or at least the constant temptation, of attacking Socinianism, in reviewing a work professedly written against Methodism.  Surely such a work ought to treat of those points of doctrine and practice, which are peculiar to Methodism.  But to publish a ‘diatribe’ against the substance of the Articles and Catechism of the English Church, nay, of the whole Christian world, excepting the Socinians, and to call it “Hints concerning the dangerous and abominable absurdities of Methodism,” is too bad.

Ib. .

But this Calvinistic Evangelist tells us, by way of accounting for the utter impossibility of producing in himself either faith or repentance, that both are of divine origin, and like the light, and the rain, and the dew of heaven, which tarrieth not for man, neither waiteth for the sons of men, are from above, and come down from the Father of lights, from whom alone cometh every good and perfect gift!

Is the Barrister ­are the Socinian divines ­inspired, or infallibly sure that it is a crime for a Christian to understand the words of Christ in their plain and literal sense, when a Socinian chooses to give his paraphrase, ­often, too, as strongly remote from the words, as the old spiritual paraphrases on the Song of Solomon?

Ib. .

According to that Gospel which hath hitherto been the pillar of the Christian world, we are taught that whosoever endeavours to the best of his ability to reform his manners, and amend his life, will have pardon and acceptance.

As interpreted by whom?  By the Socini, or the Barrister? ­Or by Origen, Chrysostom, Jerome, the Gregories, Eusebius, Athanasius? ­By Thomas Aquinas, Bernard, Thomas-a-Kempis? ­By Luther, Melancthon, Zuinglius, Calvin? ­By the Reformers and martyrs of the English Church? ­By Cartwright and the learned Puritans? ­By Knox? ­By George Fox? ­With regard to this point, that mere external evidence is inadequate to the production of a saving faith, and in the majority of other opinions, all these agree with Wesley.  So they all understood the Gospel.  But it is not so!  ‘Ergo’, the Barrister is infallible.

Ib. .

’When the wicked man turneth away from the wickedness which he hath committed, and doeth that which is lawful and right, he shall save his soul alive’.  This gracious declaration the old moral divines of our Church have placed in the front of its Liturgy.

In the name of patience, over and over again, who has ever denied this?  The question is, by what power, his own, or by the free grace of God through Christ, the wicked man is enabled to turn from his wickedness.  And again and again I ask: ­Were not these “old moral divines” the authors and compilers of the Homilies?  If the Barrister does not know this, he is an ignorant man; if knowing it, he has yet never examined the Homilies, he is an unjust man; but if he have, he is a slanderer and a sycophant.

Is it not intolerable to take up three bulky pamphlets against a recent Sect, denounced as most dangerous, and which we all know to be most powerful and of rapid increase, and to find little more than a weak declamatory abuse of certain metaphysical dogmas concerning free will, or free will forfeited, ’de libero vel servo arbitrio’ ­of grace, predestination, and the like; ­dogmas on which, according to Milton, God and the Logos conversed, as soon as man was in existence, they in heaven, and Adam in paradise, and the devils in hell; ­dogmas common to all religions, and to all ages and sects of the Christian religion; ­concerning which Brahmin disputes with Brahmin, Mahometan with Mahometan, and Priestley with Price; ­and all this to be laid on the shoulders of the Methodists collectively:  though it is a notorious fact, that a radical difference on this abstruse subject is the ground of the schism between the Whitfieldite and Wesleyan Methodists; and that the latter coincide in opinion with Erasmus and Arminius, by which latter name they distinguish themselves; and the former with Luther, Calvin, and their great guide, St. Augustine?  This I say is intolerable, ­yea, a crime against sense, candour, and white paper.

Ib. .

“For so very peculiarly directed to the sinner, and to him only (says the evangelical preacher) is the blessed Gospel of the Lord Jesus, that unless you are a sinner, you are not interested in its saving truths.”

Does not Christ himself say the same in the plainest and most unmistakable words?  ’I come not to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.  They that be whole need not a physician, but they that are sick’.  Can he, who has no share in the danger, be interested in the saving?  Pleased from benevolence he may be; but interested he cannot be.  ’Estne aliquid inter salvum et salutem; inter liberum et libertatem?  Salus est pereuntis, vel saltem periditantis:  redemptio, quasi pons divinus, inter servum et libertatem, ­amissam, ideoque optatam’.

Ib. .

  It was reserved for these days of ‘new discovery’ to announce to
  mankind that, unless they are sinners, they are excluded from the
  promised blessings of the Gospel.

Merely read ’that unless they are sick they are precluded from the offered remedies of the Gospel;’ and is not this the dictate of common sense, as well as of Methodism?  But does not Methodism cry aloud that all men are sick ­sick to the very heart?  ’If we say we are without sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us’.  This shallow-pated Barrister makes me downright piggish, and without the stratagem of that famed philosopher in pig-nature almost drives me into the Charon’s hoy of Methodism by his rude and stupid tail-hauling me back from it.

Ib. .

  I can assure these gentlemen that I regard with a reverence as pure
  and awful as can enter into the human mind, that blood which was shed
  upon the Cross.

That is, in the Barrister’s creed, that mysterious flint, which with the subordinate aids of mutton, barley, salt, turnips, and potherbs, makes most wonderful fine flint broth.  Suppose Christ had never shed his blood, yet if he had worked his miracles, raised Lazarus, and taught the same doctrines, would not the result have been the same? ­Or if Christ had never appeared on earth, yet did not Daniel work miracles as stupendous, which surely must give all the authority to his doctrines that miracles can give?  And did he not announce by the Holy Spirit the resurrection to judgment, of glory or of punishment?

Ib. .

  Let them not attempt to escape it by quoting a few disconnected
  phrases in the Epistles, but let them adhere solely and steadfastly to
  that Gospel of which they affect to be the exclusive preachers.

And whence has the Barrister learnt that the Epistles are not equally binding on Christians as the four Gospels?  Surely, of St. Paul’s at least, the authenticity is incomparably clearer than that of the first three Gospels; and if he give up, as doubtless he does, the plenary inspiration of the Gospels, the personal authority of the writers of all the Epistles is greater than two at least of the four Evangelists.  Secondly, the Gospel of John and all the Epistles were purposely written to teach the Christian Faith; whereas the first three Gospels are as evidently intended only as ‘memorabilia’ of the history of the Christian Revelation, as far as the process of Redemption was carried on in the life, death, and resurrection of the divine Founder.  This is the blank, brazen, blushless, or only brass-blushing, impudence of an Old Bailey Barrister, attempting to browbeat out of Court the better and more authentic half of the witnesses against him.  If I wished to understand the laws of England, shall I consult Hume or Blackstone ­him who has written his volumes expressly as comments on those laws, or the historian who mentions them only as far as the laws were connected with the events and characters which he relates or describes?  Nay, it is far worse than this; far Christ himself repeatedly defers the publication of his doctrines till after his death, and gives the reason too, that till he had sent the Holy Ghost, his disciples were not capable of comprehending them.  Does he not attribute to an immediate influence of especial inspiration even Peter’s acknowledgment of his Filiation to God, or Messiahship? ­Was it from the Gospels that Paul learned to know Christ? ­Was the Church sixty years without the awful truths taught exclusively in John’s Gospel?

Part III. .

The ‘nostrum’ of the mountebank will he preferred to the prescription of the regular practitioner.  Why is this?  Because there is something in the authoritative arrogance of the pretender, by which ignorance is overawed.

This is something; and true as far as it goes; that is, however, but a very little way.  The great power of both spiritual and physical mountebanks rests on that irremovable property of human nature, in force of which indefinite instincts and sufferings find no echo, no resting-place, in the definite and comprehensible.  Ignorance unnecessarily enlarges the sphere of these:  but a sphere there is, ­facts of mind and cravings of the soul there are, ­in which the wisest man seeks help from the indefinite, because it is nearer and more like the infinite, of which he is made the image: ­for even we are infinite, even in our finiteness infinite, as the Father in his infinity.  In many caterpillars there is a large empty space in the head, the destined room for the pushing forth of the ‘antennæ’ of its next state of being.

Ib. .

But the anti-moralists aver that they are quoted unfairly; ­that although they disavow, it is true, the necessity, and deny the value, of practical morality and personal holiness, and declare them to be totally irrelevant to our future salvation, yet that I might have found occasional recommendations of moral duty which I have neglected to notice.

The same ‘crambé bis decies cocta’ of one self-same charge grounded on one gross and stupid misconception and mis-statement:  and to which there needs no other answer than this simple fact.  Let the Barrister name any one gross offence against the moral law, for which he would shun a man’s acquaintance, and for that same vice the Methodist would inevitably be excluded publicly from their society; and I am inclined to think that a fair list of the Barrister’s friends and acquaintances would prove that the Calvinistic Methodists are the austerer and more watchful censors of the two.  If this be the truth, as it notoriously is, what but the cataract of stupidity uncouched, or the thickest film of bigot-slime, can prevent a man from seeing that this tenet of justification by faith alone is exclusively a matter between the Calvinist’s own heart and his Maker, who alone knows the true source of his words and actions; but that to his neighbours and fellow-creedsmen, his spotless life and good works are demanded, not, indeed, as the prime efficient causes of his salvation, but as the necessary and only possible signs of that faith, which is the means of that salvation of which Christ’s free grace is the cause, and the sanctifying Spirit the perfecter.  But I fall into the same fault I am arraigning, by so often exposing and confuting the same blunder, which has no claim even at its first enunciation to the compliment of a philosophical answer.  But why, in the name of common sense, all this endless whoop and hubbub against the Calvinistic Methodists?  I had understood that the Arminian Methodists, or Wesleyans, are the more numerous body by far.  Has there been any union lately?  Have the followers of Wesley abjured the doctrines of their founder on this head?

Ib. .

We are told by our new spiritual teachers, that reason is not to be applied to the inquiry into the truth or falsehood of their doctrines; they are spiritually discerned, and carnal reason has no concern with them.

Even under this aversion to reason, as applied to religious grounds, a very important truth lurks:  and the mistake (a very dangerous one I admit,) lies in the confounding two very different faculties of the mind under one and the same name; ­the pure reason or ‘vis scientifica’; and the discourse, or prudential power, the proper objects of which are the ‘phaenomena’ of sensuous experience.  The greatest loss which modern philosophy has through wilful scorn sustained, is the grand distinction of the ancient philosophers between the [Greek:  noumena], and [Greek:  phainomena].  This gives the true sense of Pliny ­’venerare Deos’ (that is, their statues, and the like,) ‘et numina Deorum’, that is, those spiritual influences which are represented by the images and persons of Apollo, Minerva, and the rest.

Ib. .

  Religion has for its object the moral care and the moral cultivation
  of man.  Its beauty is not to be sought in the regions of mystery, or
  in the flights of abstraction.

What ignorance!  Is there a single moral precept of the Gospels not to be found in the Old Testament?  Not one.  A new edition of White’s ‘Diatessaron’, with a running comment the Hebrew, Greek, and Roman writers before Christ, and those after him who, it is morally certain, drew no aids from the New Testament, is a grand ‘desideratum’; and if anything could open the eyes of Socinians, this would do it.

Ib. .

  The masculine strength and moral firmness which once distinguished the
  great mass of the British people is daily fading away.  Methodism with
  all its cant, &c.

Well! but in God’s name can Methodism be at once the effect and the cause of this loss of masculine strength and moral firmness? ­Did Whitfield and Wesley blow them out at the first puff ­these grand virtues of masculine strength and moral firmness?  Admire, I pray you, the happy antithesis.  Yet “feminine” would be an improvement, as then the sense too would be antithetic.  However, the sound is sufficient, and modern rhetoric possesses the virtue of economy.

Ib. .

So with the Tinker; I would give him the care of kettles, but I would not give him ‘the cure of souls’.  So long as he attended to the management and mending of his pots and pans, I would wish success to his ministry:  but when he came to declare ‘himself’ a “chosen vessel,” and demand permission to take the souls of the people into his holy keeping, I should think that, instead of a ‘licence’, it would be more humane and more prudent to give him a passport to St. Luke’s.  Depend upon it, such men were never sent by Providence to rule or to regulate mankind.

Whoo!  Bounteous Providence that always looks at the body clothes and the parents’ equipage before it picks out the proper soul for the baby!  Ho! the Duchess of Manchester is in labour: ­quick, Raphael, or Uriel, bring a soul out of the Numa bin, a young Lycurgus.  Or the Archbishop’s lady: ­ho! a soul from the Chrysostom or Athanasian locker. ­But poor Moll Crispin is in the throes with twins: ­well! there are plenty of cobblers’ and tinkers’ souls in the hold ­John Bunyan!!  Why, thou miserable Barrister, it would take an angel an eternity to tinker thee into a skull of half his capacity!

Ib. , 31.

“A ‘truly’ awakened conscience,” (these anti-moral editors of the Pilgrim’s Progress assure us,) “can never find relief from the law:  (that is, the ’moral law’.) The more he looks for peace ’this way, his guilt’, like a heavy burden, becomes more intolerable; when he becomes ‘dead’ to the ’law’, ­as to ’any dependence upon it for salvation’, ­by the body of Christ, and married to him, who was raised from the dead, then, and not till then, his heart is set at liberty, to run the way of God’s commandments.”

  Here we are taught that the ‘conscience’ can never find relief from
  obedience to the law of the Gospel.

False.  We are told by Bunyan and his editors that the conscience can never find relief for its disobedience to the Law in the Law itself; ­and this is as true of the moral as of the Mosaic Law.  I am not defending Calvinism or Bunyan’s theology; but if victory, not truth, were my object, I could desire no easier task than to defend it against our doughty Barrister.  Well, but I repent ­that is, regret it! ­Yes! and so you doubtless regret the loss of an eye or arm: ­will that make it grow again? ­Think you this nonsense as applied to morality?  Be it so!  But yet nonsense most tremendously suited to human nature it is, as the Barrister may find in the arguments of the Pagan philosophers against Christianity, who attributed a large portion of its success to its holding out an expiation, which no other religion did.  Read but that most affecting and instructive anecdote selected from the Hindostan Missionary Account by the Quarterly Review. Again let me say I am not giving my own opinion on this very difficult point; but of one thing I am convinced, that the ’I am sorry for it, that’s enough’ ­men mean nothing but regret when they talk of repentance, and have consciences either so pure or so callous, as not to know what a direful and strange thing remorse is, and how absolutely a fact ‘sui generis’!  I have often remarked, and it cannot be too often remarked (vain as this may sound), that this essential heterogeneity of regret and remorse is of itself a sufficient and the best proof of free will and reason, the co-existence of which in man we call conscience, and on this rests the whole superstructure of human religion ­God, immortality, guilt, judgment, redemption.  Whether another and different superstructure may be raised on the same foundation, or whether the same edifice is susceptible of important alteration, is another question.  But such is the edifice at present, and this its foundation:  and the Barrister might as rationally expect to blow up Windsor Castle by discharging a popgun in one of its cellars, as hope to demolish Calvinism by such arguments as his.

Ib. , 36.

  “And behold a certain lawyer stood up and tempted him, saying, Master,
  what shall I do ’to inherit eternal life’?”

  “He said unto him, ‘What is written in the law?  How readest thou?’”

  “And he answering said, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy
  heart, with all thy soul, and with ‘all thy strength’, and with all
  thy mind; and thy neighbour as thyself.”

  “And he said unto him, Thou ’hast answered right.  This do, and thou
  shall live.’”

  Luke -28.

So would Bunyan, and so would Calvin have preached; ­would both of them in the name of Christ have made this assurance to the Barrister ­’This do, and thou shalt live.’  But what if he has not done it, but the very contrary?  And what if the Querist should be a staunch disciple of Dr. Paley:  and hold himself “morally obliged” not to hate or injure his fellow-man, not because he is compelled by conscience to see the exceeding sinfulness of sin, and to abhor sin as sin, even as he eschews pain as pain, ­no, not even because God has forbidden it; ­but ultimately because the great Legislator is able and has threatened to put him to unspeakable torture if he disobeys, and to give him all kind of pleasure if he does not? Why, verily, in this case, I do foresee that both the Tinker and the Divine would wax warm, and rebuke the said Querist for vile hypocrisy, and a most nefarious abuse of God’s good gift, intelligible language.  What! do you call this ’loving the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength, and all your mind, ­and your neighbour as yourself’?  Whereas in truth you love nothing, not even your own soul; but only set a superlative value on whatever will gratify your selfish lust of enjoyment, and insure you from hell-fire at a thousand times the true value of the dirty property.  If you have the impudence to persevere in mis-naming this “love,” supply any one instance in which you use the word in this sense?  If your son did not spit in your face, because he believed that you would disinherit him if he did, and this were his main moral obligation, would you allow that your son loved you ­and with all his heart, and mind, and strength, and soul? ­Shame!  Shame!

Now the power of loving God, of willing good as good, (not of desiring the agreeable, and of preferring a larger though distant delight to an infinitely smaller immediate qualification, which is mere selfish prudence,) Bunyan considers supernatural, and seeks its source in the free grace of the Creator through Christ the Redeemer: ­this the Kantean also avers to be supersensual indeed, but not supernatural, but in the original and essence of human nature, and forming its grand and awful characteristic.  Hence he calls it ’die Menschheit’ ­the principle of humanity; ­but yet no less than Calvin or the Tinker declares it a principle most mysterious, the undoubted object of religious awe, a perpetual witness of that God, whose image ([Greek:  eikon]) it is; a principle utterly incomprehensible by the discursive intellect; ­and moreover teaches us, that the surest plan for stifling and paralyzing this divine birth in the soul (a phrase of Plato’s as well as of the Tinker’s) is by attempting to evoke it by, or to substitute for it, the hopes and fears, the motives and calculations, of prudence; which is an excellent and in truth indispensable servant, but considered as master and primate of the moral diocese precludes the possibility of virtue (in Bunyan’s phrase, holiness of spirit) by introducing legality; which is no cant phrase of Methodism, but of authenticated standing in the ethics of the profoundest philosophers ­even those who rejected Christianity, as a miraculous event, and revelation itself as far as anything supernatural is implied in it.  I must not mention Plato, I suppose, ­he was a mystic; nor Zeno, ­he and his were visionaries: ­but Aristotle, the cold and dry Aristotle, has in a very remarkable passage in his lesser tract of Ethics asserted the same thing; and called it “a divine principle, lying deeper than those things which can be explained or enunciated discursively.”

Ib. , 46.

Sure I am that no father of a family that can at all estimate the importance of keeping from the infant mind whatever might raise impure ideas or excite improper inquiries will ever commend the Pilgrim’s Progress to their perusal.

And in the same spirit and for the same cogent reasons that the holy monk Lewis prohibited the Bible in all decent families; ­or if they must have something of that kind, would propose in preference Tirante the White!  O how I abhor this abominable heart-haunting impurity in the envelope of modesty!  Merciful Heaven! is it not a direct consequence from this system, that we all purchase our existence at the price of our mother’s purity of mind?  See what Milton has written on this subject in the passage quoted in the Friend in the essays on the communication of truth.

Ib. .

Let us ask whether the female mind is likely to be trained to purity by studying this manual of piety, and by expressing its devotional desires after the following example.  “Mercy being a young and breeding woman longed for something,” &c.

Out upon the fellow!  I could find it in my heart to suspect him of any vice that the worst of men could commit!

Ib. pp. 55, 56.

’As by one man’s disobedience many were made sinners, so by the obedience of one shall many be made righteous’.  The interpretation of this text is simply this: ­As by following the fatal example of one man’s disobedience many were made sinners; so by that pattern of perfect obedience which Christ has set before us shall many be made righteous.

What may not be explained thus?  And into what may not any thing be thus explained?  It comes out little better than nonsense in any other than the literal sense.  For let any man of sincere mind and without any system to support look round on all his Christian neighbours, and will he say or will they say that the origin of their well-doing was an attempt to imitate what they all believe to be inimitable, Christ’s perfection in virtue, his absolute sinlessness?  No ­but yet perhaps some particular virtues; for instance, his patriotism in weeping over Jerusalem, his active benevolence in curing the sick and preaching to the poor, his divine forgiveness in praying for his enemies? ­I grant all this.  But then how is this peculiar to Christ?  Is it not the effect of all illustrious examples, of those probably most which we last read of, or which made the deepest impression on our feelings?  Were there no good men before Christ, as there were no bad men before Adam?  Is it not a notorious fact that those who most frequently refer to Christ’s conduct for their own actions, are those who believe him the incarnate Deity ­consequently, the best possible guide, but in no strict sense an example; ­while those who regard him as a mere man, the chief of the Jewish Prophets, both in the pulpit and from the press ground their moral persuasions chiefly on arguments drawn from the propriety and seemliness ­or the contrary ­of the action itself, or from the will of God known by the light of reason?  To make St. Paul prophesy that all Christians will owe their holiness to their exclusive and conscious imitation of Christ’s actions, is to make St. Paul a false prophet; ­and what in such case becomes of the boasted influence of miracles?  Even as false would it be to ascribe the vices of the Chinese, or even our own, to the influence of Adam’s bad example.  As well might we say of a poor scrofulous innocent:  “See the effect of the bad example of his father on him!” I blame no man for disbelieving, or for opposing with might and main, the dogma of Original Sin; but I confess that I neither respect the understanding nor have confidence in the sincerity of him, who declares that he has carefully read the writings of St. Paul, and finds in them no consequence attributed to the fall of Adam but that of his bad example, and none to the Cross of Christ but the good example of dying a martyr to a good cause.  I would undertake from the writings of the later English Socinians to collect paraphrases on the New Testament texts that could only be paralleled by the spiritual paraphrase on Solomon’s Song to be found in the recent volume of “A Dictionary of the Holy Bible, by John Brown, Minister of the Gospel at Haddington:”  third edition, in the Article, Song.

Ib. , 64.

Call forth the robber from his cavern, and the midnight murderer from his den; summon the seducer from his couch, and beckon the adulterer from his embrace; cite the swindler to appear; assemble from every quarter all the various miscreants whose vices deprave, and whose villainies distress, mankind; and when they are thus thronged round in a circle, assure them ­not that there is a God that judgeth the earth ­not that punishment in the great day of retribution will await their crimes, &c. &c. ­Let every sinner in the throng be told that they will stand ‘justified’ before God; that the ‘righteousness’ of ‘Christ’ will be imputed to ‘them’, &c.

Well, do so. ­Nay, nay! it has been done; the effect has been tried; and slander itself cannot deny that the effect has been the conversion of thousands of those very sinners whom the Barrister’s fancy thus convokes.  O shallow man! not to see that here lies the main strength of the cause he is attacking; that, to repeat my former illustration, he draws the attention to patients in that worst state of disease which perhaps alone requires and justifies the use of the white pill, as a mode of exposing the frantic quack who vends it promiscuously!  He fixes on the empiric’s cures to prove his murders! ­not to forget what ought to conclude every paragraph in answer to the Barrister’s Hints; “and were the case as alleged, what does this prove against the present Methodists as Methodists?” Is not the tenet of imputed righteousness the faith of all the Scotch Clergy, who are not false to their declarations at their public assumption of the ministry?  Till within the last sixty or seventy years, was not the tenet preached Sunday after Sunday in every nook of Scotland; and has the Barrister heard that the morals of the Scotch peasants and artizans have been improved within the last thirty or forty years, since the exceptions have become more and more common? ­Was it by want of strict morals that the Puritans were distinguished to their disadvantage from the rest of Englishmen during the reigns of Elizabeth, James I. Charles I. and II.?  And that very period, which the Barrister affirms to have been distinguished by the moral vigor of the great mass of Britons, ­was it not likewise the period when this very doctrine was preached by the Clergy fifty times for once that it is heard from the same pulpits in the present and preceding generation?  Never, never can the Methodists be successfully assailed, if not honestly, and never honestly or with any chance of success, except as Methodists; ­for their practices, their alarming theocracy, their stupid, mad, and mad-driving superstitions.  These are their property ‘in peculio’; their doctrines are those of the Church of England, with no other difference than that in the Church Liturgy, and Articles, and Homilies, Calvinism and Lutheranism are joined like the two hands of the Union Fire Office:-the Methodists have unclasped them, and one is Whitfield and the other Wesley.

Ib. .

“For the same reason that a book written in bad language should never be put into the hands of a child that speaks correctly, a book exhibiting instances of vice should never be given to a child that thinks and acts properly.” (Practical Education.  By Maria and R.L.  Edgeworth.)

How mortifying that one is never lucky enough to meet with any of these ‘virtuosissimos’, fifteen or twenty years of age.  But perhaps they are such rare jewels, that they are always kept in cotton!  The Kilcrops!  I would not exchange the heart, which I myself had when a boy, while reading the life of Colonel Jack, or the Newgate Calendar, for a waggon-load of these brilliants.

Ib. .

“When a man turns his back on this world, and is in good earnest resolved for everlasting life, his carnal friends, and ungodly neighbours, will pursue him with hue and cry; but death is at his heels, and he cannot stop short of the city of Refuge.” (Notes to the Pilgrim’s Progress by Hawker, Burder, &c.) This representation of the state of real Christians is as mischievous as it is false.

Yet Christ’s assertion on this head is positive, and universal; and I believe it from my inmost soul, and am convinced that it is just as true A.D. 1810, as A.D. 33.

Ib. .

The spirit with which all their merciless treatment is to be borne is next pointed out. “‘Patient bearing of injuries’ is true Christian fortitude, and will always be more effectual to ‘disarm our enemies’, and to bring others to the knowledge of the truth, than all ‘arguments’ whatever.”

Is this Barrister a Christian of any sort or sect, and is he not ashamed, if not afraid, to ridicule such passages as these?  If they are not true, the four Gospels are false.

Ib. .

  It is impossible to give them credit for integrity when we behold the
  obstinacy and the artifice with which they defend their system against
  the strongest argument, and against the clearest evidence.

Modest gentleman!  I wonder he finds time to write bulky pamphlets:  for surely modesty, like his, must secure success and clientage at the bar.  Doubtless he means his own arguments, the evidence he himself has adduced: ­I say doubtless, for what are these pamphlets but a long series of attacks on the doctrines of the strict Lutherans and Calvinists, (for the doctrines he attacks are common to both,) and if he knew stronger arguments, clearer evidence, he would certainly have given them; ­and then what obstinate rogues must our Bishops be, to have suffered these Hints to pass into a third edition, and yet not have brought a bill into Parliament for a new set of Articles?  I have not heard that they have even the grace to intend it.

Ib. .

On this subject I will quote the just and striking observations of an excellent modern writer.  “In whatever village,” says he, “the fanatics get a footing, drunkenness and swearing, ­sins which, being more exposed to the eye of the world, would be ruinous to their great pretensions to superior sanctity ­will, perhaps, be found to decline; but I am convinced, from personal observation, that every species of fraud and falsehood ­sins which are not so readily detected, but which seem more closely connected with worldly advantage ­will be found invariably to increase.” (Religion without Cant; by R. Fellowes, A.M. of St. Mary’s Hall, Oxford.)

In answer to this let me make a “very just observation,” by some other man of my opinion, to be hereafter quoted “from an excellent modern writer;” ­and it is this, that from the birth of Christ to the present hour, no sect or body of men were zealous in the reformation of manners in society, without having been charged with the same vices in the same words.  When I hate a man, and see nothing bad in him, what remains possible but to accuse him of crimes which I cannot see, and which cannot be disproved, because they cannot be proved?  Surely, if Christian charity did not preclude these charges, the shame of convicted parrotry ought to prevent a man from repeating and republishing them.  The very same thoughts, almost the words, are to be found of the early Christians; of the poor Quakers; of the Republicans; of the first Reformers. ­Why need I say this?  Does not every one know, that a jovial pot-companion can never believe a water-drinker not to be a sneaking cheating knave who is afraid of his thoughts; that every libertine swears that those who pretend to be chaste, either have their mistress in secret, or far worse, and so on?

Ib. .

  The same religious abstinence from all appearance of recreation on the
  Lord’s day; and the same neglect of the weightier matters of the moral
  law, in the course of the week, &c.

This sentence thus smuggled in at the bottom of the chest ought not to pass unnoticed; for the whole force of the former depends on it.  It is a true trick, and deserves reprobation.

Ib. .

Note.  It was procured, Mr. Collyer informs us, by the merit of his “Lectures on Scripture facts.”  It should have been “Lectures on ‘Scriptural’ Facts.”  What should we think of the grammarian, who, instead of ‘Historical’, should present us with “Lectures on ‘History’ Facts?”

But Law Tracts?  And is not ‘Scripture’ as often used semi-adjectively?

Ib. .

“Do you really believe,” says Dr. Hawker, “that, because man by his apostacy hath lost his power and ability to obey, God hath lost his right to command?  Put the case that you were called upon, as a barrister, to recover a debt due from one man to another, and you knew the debtor had not the ability to pay the ‘creditor’, would you tell your client that his debtor was under no legal or moral obligation to pay what he had no power to do?  And would you tell him that the very expectation of his just right ’was as foolish as it was tyrannical’?” I will give my reply to these questions distinctly and without hesitation. Suppose A. to have lent B. a thousand pounds, as a capital to commence trade, and that, when he purchased his stock to this amount, and lodged it in his warehouse, a fire were to break out in the next dwelling, and, extending itself to ‘his’ warehouse, were to consume the whole of his property, and reduce him to a state of utter ruin.  If A., my client, were to ask my opinion as to his right to recover from B., I should tell him that this his right would exist should B. ever be in a condition to repay the sum borrowed; but that to attempt to recover a thousand pounds from a man thus reduced by accident to utter ruin, and who had not a shilling left in the world, would be ‘as foolish as it was tyrannical’.

But this is rank sophistry.  The question is: ­Does a thief (and a fraudulent debtor is no better) acquire a claim to impunity by not possessing the power of restoring the goods?  Every moral act derives its character (says a Schoolman with an unusual combination of profundity with quaintness) ’aut voluntate originis aut origine voluntatis’.  Now the very essence of guilt, its dire and incommunicable character, consists in its tendency to destroy the free will; ­but when thus destroyed, are the habits of vice thenceforward innocent?  Does the law excuse the murder because the perpetrator was drunk?  Dr. Hawker put his objection laxly and weakly enough; but a manly opponent would have been ashamed to seize an hour’s victory from what a move of the pen would render impregnable.

Ib. , 3.

When at this solemn tribunal the sinner shall be called upon to answer for the transgression of those ‘moral’ laws, on obedience to which salvation was made to depend, will it be sufficient that he declares himself to have been taught to believe that the Gospel ’had neither terms nor conditions’, and that his salvation was secured by a covenant which procured him pardon and peace, ‘from all eternity’:  a covenant, the effects of which no folly or ‘after-act whatever’ could possibly destroy? ­Who could anticipate the sentence of condemnation, and not weep in agony over the deluded victim of ignorance and misfortune who was thus taught a doctrine so fatally false?

What then!  God is represented as a tyrant when he claims the penalty of disobedience from the servant, who has wilfully incapacitated himself for obeying, ­and yet just and merciful in condemning to indefinite misery a poor “deluded victim of ignorance and imposture,” even though the Barrister, spite of his antipathy to Methodists, would “weep in agony” over him!  But before the Barrister draws bills of imagination on his tender feelings, would it not have been as well to adduce some last dying speech and confession, in which the culprit attributed his crimes ­not to Sabbath-breaking and loose company, ­but to sermon-hearing on the ‘modus operandi’ of the divine goodness in the work of redemption?  How the Ebenezerites would stare to find the Socinians and themselves in one flock on the sheep-side of the judgment-seat, ­and their cousins, and fellow Methodists, the Tabernaclers, all caprifled ­goats every man: ­and why?  They held, that repentance is in the power of every man, with the aid of grace; while the goats held that without grace no man is able even to repent.  A. makes grace the cause, and B. makes it only a necessary auxiliary.  And does the Socinian extricate himself a whit more clearly?  Without a due concurrence of circumstances no mind can improve itself into a state susceptible of spiritual happiness:  and is not the disposition and pre-arrangement of circumstances as dependent on the divine will as those spiritual influences which the Methodist holds to be meant by the word grace?  Will not the Socinian find it as difficult to reconcile with mercy and justice the condemnation to hell-fire of poor wretches born and bred in the thieves’ nests of St. Giles, as the Methodists the condemnation of those who have been less favoured by grace?  I have one other question to ask, though it should have been asked before.  Suppose Christ taught nothing more than a future state of retribution and the necessity and sufficiency of good morals, how are we to explain his forbidding these truths to be taught to any but Jews till after his resurrection?  Did the Jews reject those doctrines?  Except perhaps a handful of rich men, called Sadducees, they all believed them, and would have died a thousand deaths rather than have renounced their faith.  Besides, what is there in doctrines common to the creed of all religions, and enforced by all the schools of philosophy, except the Epicurean, which should have prevented their being taught to all at the same time?  I perceive, that this difficulty does not press on Socinians exclusively:  but yet it presses on them with far greater force than on others.  For they make Christianity a mere philosophy, the same in substance with the Stoical, only purer from errors and accompanied with clearer evidence: ­while others think of it as part of a covenant made up with Abraham, the fulfilment of which was in good faith to be first offered to his posterity.  I ask this only because the Barrister professes to find every thing in the four Gospels so plain and easy.

Ib. .

  The Reformers by whom those articles were framed were educated in the
  Church of Rome, and opposed themselves rather to the perversion of its
  power than the errors of its doctrine.

An outrageous blunder.

Ib. .

  Lord Bacon was the first who dedicated his profound and penetrating
  genius to the cultivation of sound philosophy, &c.

This very same Lord Bacon has given us his ‘Confessio Fidei’ at great length, with full particularity.  Now I will answer for the Methodists’ unhesitating assent and consent to it; but would the Barrister subscribe it?

Ib. .

We look back to that era of our history when superstition threw her victim on the pile, and bigotry tied the martyr to his stake: ­but we take our eyes from the retrospect and turn them in thankful admiration to that Being who has opened the minds of many, and is daily opening the minds of more amongst us to the reception of these most important of all truths, that there is no true faith but in practical goodness, and that the worst of errors is the error of the ‘life’.

Such is the conviction of the most enlightened of our Clergy:  the conviction, I trust, of the far greater part .  They deem it better to inculcate the moral duties of Christianity in the pure simplicity and clearness with which they are revealed, than to go aside in search of ‘doctrinal mysteries’.  For as mysteries cannot be made manifest, they, of course, cannot be understood; and that which cannot be understood cannot be believed, and can, consequently, make no part of any system of faith:  since no one, till he understands a doctrine, can tell whether it be true or false; till then, therefore, he can have no faith in it, for no one can rationally affirm that he believes that doctrine to be true which he does not know to be so; and he cannot know it to be true if he does not understand it.  In the religion of a true Christian, therefore, there can be nothing unintelligible; and if the preachers of that religion do not make mysteries, they will never find any.

Who? the Bishops, or the dignified Clergy?  Have they at length exploded all “doctrinal mysteries?” Was Horsley “the one red leaf, the last of its clan,” that held the doctrines of the Trinity, the corruption of the human Will, and the Redemption by the Cross of Christ?  Verily, this is the most impudent attempt to impose a naked Socinianism on the public, as the general religion of the nation, admitted by all but a dunghill of mushroom fanatics, that ever insulted common sense or common modesty!  And will “the far greater part” of the English Clergy remain silent under so atrocious a libel as is contained in this page?  Do they indeed solemnly pray to their Maker weekly, before God and man, in the words of a Liturgy, which, they know, “cannot be believed?” For heaven’s sake, my dear Southey, do quote this page and compare it with the introduction to and petitions of the Liturgy, and with the Collects on the Advent, &c.

Ib. .

We shall discover upon an attentive examination of the subject, that all those laws which lay the basis of our constitutional liberties, are no other than the rules of religion transcribed into the judicial system, and enforced by the sanction of civil authority.

What!  Compare these laws, first, with Tacitus’s account of the constitutional laws of our German ancestors, Pagans; and then with the Pandects and ‘Novellae’ of the most Christian Justinian, aided by all his Bishops.  Observe, the Barrister is asserting a fact of the historical origination of our laws, ­and not what no man would deny, that as far as they are humane and just, they coincide with the precepts of the Gospel.  No, they were “transcribed.”

Ib. .

Where a man holds a certain system of doctrines, the State is bound to tolerate, though it may not approve, them; but when he demands a ‘license to teach’ this system to the rest of the community, he demands that which ought not to be granted incautiously and without grave consideration.  This discretionary power is delegated in trust for the common good, &c.

All this, dear Southey, I leave to the lash of your indignation.  It would be oppression to do ­what the Legislature could not do if it would ­prevent a man’s thoughts; but if he speaks them aloud, and asks either for instruction and confutation, if he be in error, or assent and honor, if he be in the right, then it is no oppression to throw him into a dungeon!  But the Barrister would only withhold a license!  Nonsense.  What if he preaches and publishes without it, will the Legislature dungeon him or not?  If not, what use is either the granting or the withholding?  And this too from a Socinian, who by this very book has, I believe, made himself obnoxious to imprisonment and the pillory ­and against men, whose opinions are authorized by the most solemn acts of Parliament, and recorded in a Book, of which there must be one, by law, in every parish, and of which there is in fact one in almost every house and hovel!

Part IV. .

The religion of genuine Christianity is a revelation so distinct and specific in its design, and so clear and intelligible in its rules, that a man of philosophic and retired thought is apt to wonder by what means the endless systems of error and hostility which divide the world were ever introduced into it.

What means this hollow cant ­this fifty times warmed-up bubble and squeak?  That such parts are intelligible as the Barrister understands?  That such parts as it possesses in common with all systems of religion and morality are plain and obvious?  In other words that ABC are so legible that they are legible to every one that has learnt to read?  If the Barrister mean other or more than this, if he really mean the whole religion and revelation of Christ, even as it is found in the original records, the Gospels and Epistles, he escapes from the silliness of a truism by throwing himself into the arms of a broad brazenfaced untruth.  What!  Is the sixth chapter of St. John’s Gospel so distinct and specific in its design, that any modest man can wonder that the best and most learned men of every age since Christ have deemed it mysterious?  Are the many passages concerning the Devil and demoniacs so very easy?  Has this writer himself thrown the least light on, or himself received one ray of light from, the meaning of the word Faith; ­or the reason of Christ’s paramount declarations respecting its omnific power, its absolutely indispensable necessity?  If the word mean only what the Barrister supposes, a persuasion that in the present state of our knowledge the evidences for the historical truth of the miracles of the Gospel outweigh the arguments of the Sceptics, will he condescend to give us such a comment on the assertion, that had we but a grain of mustard seed of it, we might control all material nature, without making Christ himself the most extravagant hyperbolist that ever mis-used language?  But it is impossible to make that man blush, who can seriously call the words of Christ as recorded by St. John, plain, easy, common sense, out of which prejudice, artifice, and selfish interest alone can compose any difficulty.  The Barrister has just as much right to call his religion Christianity, as to call flour and water plum pudding: ­yet we all admit that in plum pudding both flour and water do exist.

Ib. .

  Socinus can have no claim upon my veneration:  I have never concerned
  myself with what he believed nor with what he taught &c.

  The Scripture is my authority, and on no other authority will I ever,
  knowingly, lay the foundation of my faith.

Utterly untrue.  It is not the Scripture, but such passages of Scripture as appear to him to accord with his Procrustean bed of so called reason, and a forcing of the blankest contradictions into the same meaning, by explanations to which I defy him to furnish one single analogy as allowed by mankind with regard to any other writings but the Old and New Testament.  It is a gross and impudent delusion to call a Book his authority, which he receives only so far as it is an echo of his own convictions.  I defy him to adduce one single article of his whole faith, (creed rather) which he really derives from the Scripture.  Even the arguments for the Resurrection are and must be extraneous:  for the very proofs of the facts are (as every ‘tyro’ in theology must know) the proofs of the authenticity of the Books in which they are contained.  This question I would press upon him: ­Suppose we possessed the Fathers only with the Ecclesiastical and Pagan historians, and that not a page remained of the New Testament, ­what article of his creed would it alter?

Ib. .

  If the creed of Calvinistic Methodism is really more productive of
  conversions than the religion of Christianity, let them openly and at
  once say so.

But Calvinistic Methodism?  Why Calvinistic Methodism?  Not one in a hundred of the Methodists are Calvinists.  Not to mention the impudence of this crow in his abuse of black feathers!  Is it worse in a Methodist to oppose Socinianism to Christianity, that is, to the doctrines of Wesley or even Whitfield, which are the same as those of all the Reformed Churches of Christendom, and differ only wherein the most celebrated divines of the same churches have differed with each other, ­than for the Barrister to oppose Methodism to Christianity (his Christianity) ­that is, to Socinianism, which in every peculiar doctrine of Christianity differs from all divines of all Churches of all ages?  For the one tenet in which the Calvinist differs from the majority of Christians, are there not ten in which the Socinian differs from all?  To what purpose then this windy declamation about John Calvin?  How many Methodists, does the Barrister think, ever saw, much less read, a work of Calvin’s?  If he scorns the name of Socinus as his authority, and appeals to Scripture, do not the Methodists the same?  When do they refer to Calvin?  In what work do they quote him?  This page is therefore mere dust in the eyes of the public.  And his abuse of Calvin displays only his own vulgar ignorance both of the man, and of his writings.  For he seems not to know that the humane Melancthon, and not only he, but almost every Church, Lutheran or Reformed, throughout Europe, sent letters to Geneva, extolling the execution of Servetus, and returning their thanks.  Yet it was a murder not the less:  Yes! a damned murder:  but the guilt of it is not peculiar to Calvin, but common to all the theologians of that age; and, ‘Nota bene,’ Mr. Barrister, the Socini not excepted, who were prepared to inflict the very same punishment on F. Davidi for denying the adorability of Christ.  If to wish, will, resolve, and attempt to realize, be morally to commit, an action, then must Socinus and Calvin hunt in the same collar.  But, O mercy! if every human being were to be held up to detestation, who in that age would have thought it his duty to have passed sentence ‘de comburendo herético’ on a man, who had publicly styled the Trinity “a Cerberus,” and “a three-headed monster of hell,” what would the history of the Reformation be but a list of criminals?  With what face indeed can we congratulate ourselves on being born in a more enlightened age, if we so bitterly abuse not the practice but the agents?  Do we not admit by this very phrase “enlightened,” that we owe our exemption to our intellectual advantages, not primarily to our moral superiority?  It will be time enough to boast, when to our own tolerance we have added their zeal, learning, and indefatigable industry.

Ib. , 14.

If religion consists in listening to long prayers, and attending long sermons, in keeping up an outside appearance of devotion, and interlarding the most common discourse with phrases of Gospel usage: ­if this is religion, then are the disciples of Methodism pious beyond compare.  But in real humility of heart, in mildness of temper, in liberality of mind, in purity of thought, in openness and uprightness of conduct in private life, in those practical virtues which are the vital substance of Christianity, ­in these are they superior?  No.  Public observation is against the fact, and the conclusion to which such observation leads is rarely incorrect. The very name of the sect carries with it an impression of meanness and hypocrisy.  Scarce an individual that has had any dealings with those belonging to it, but has good cause to remember it from some circumstance of low deception or of shuffling fraud.  Its very members trust each other with caution and reluctance.  The more wealthy among them are drained and dried by the leeches that perpetually fasten upon them.  The leaders, ignorant and bigoted ­I speak of them collectively ­present us with no counter-qualities that can conciliate respect.  They have all the craft of monks without their courtesy, and all the subtlety of Jesuits without their learning.

In the whole ‘Bibliotlieca theologica’ I remember no instance of calumny so gross, so impudent, so unchristian.  Even as a single robber, I mean he who robs one man, gets hanged, while the robber of a million is a great man, so it seems to be with calumny.  This worthy Barrister will be extolled for this audacious slander of thousands, for which, if applied to any one individual, he would be in danger of the pillory.  This paragraph should be quoted:  for were the charge true, it is nevertheless impossible that the Barrister should know it to be true.  He positively asserts as a truth known to him what it is impossible he should know: ­he is therefore doubly a slanderer; for first, the charge is a gross calumny; and were it otherwise, he would still be a slanderer, for he could have no proof, no ground for such a charge.

Ib. .

Amidst all this spirit of research we find nothing ­comparatively nothing ­of improvement in that science of all others the most important in its influence .  Religion, except from the emancipating energy of a few superior minds, which have dared to snap asunder the cords which bound them to the rock of error has been suffered to remain in its principles and in its doctrines, just what it was when the craft of Catholic superstition first corrupted its simplicity.  So, so.  Here it comes out at last!  It is not the Methodists; no; it is all and each of all Europe, Infidels and Socinians excepted!  O impudence!  And then the exquisite self-conceit of the blunderer!

Ib. .

­If of ‘different denominations’, how were they thus conciliated to a society of this ominous nature, from which they must themselves of necessity be excluded by that indispensable condition of admittance, “‘a union’ of religious sentiment in the ’great doctrines’:”  which very want of union it is that creates these ‘different denominations’?

No, Barrister! they mean that men of different denominations may yet all believe in the corruption of the human will, the redemption by Christ, the divinity of Christ as consubstantial with the Father, the necessity of the Holy Spirit, or grace (meaning more than the disposition of circumstances), and the necessity of faith in Christ superadded to a belief of his actions and doctrines, ­and yet differ in many other points.  The points enumerated are called the great points, because all Christians agree in them excepting the Arians and Socinians, who for that reason are not deemed Christians by the rest.  The Roman Catholic, the Lutheran, the Calvinist, the Arminian, the Greek, with all their sub-divisions, do yet all accord in these articles: ­the booksellers might have said, all who repeat the Nicene Creed.  N. B. I do not approve, or defend, nay, I dislike, these “United Theological Booksellers”:  but this utter Barrister is their best friend by attacking them so as to secure to them victory, and all the advantages of being known to have been wickedly slandered; ­the best shield a faulty cause can protend against the javelin of fair opposition.

Ib. .

Our Saviour never in any single instance reprobated the exercise of reason:  on the contrary, he reprehends severely those who did not exercise it.  Carnal reason is not a phrase to be found in his Gospel; he appealed to the understanding in all he said, and in all he taught.  He never required ‘faith’ in his disciples, without first furnishing sufficient ‘evidence’ to justify it.  He reasoned thus:  If I have done what no ‘human power’ could do, you must admit that my power is ’from above’, &c.

Good heavens! did he not uniformly require faith as the condition of obtaining the “evidence,” as this Barrister calls it ­that is, the miracle?  What a shameless perversion of the fact!  He never did reason thus.  In one instance only, and then upbraiding the base sensuality of the Jews, he said:  “If ye are so base as not to believe what I say from the moral evidence in your own consciences, yet pay some attention to it even for my works’ sake.”  And this, an ‘argumentum ad hominem,’ a bitter reproach (just as if a great chemist should say; ­Though you do not care for my science, or the important truths it presents, yet, even as an amusement superior to that of your jugglers to whom you willingly crowd, pay some attention to me) ­this is to be set up against twenty plain texts and the whole spirit of the whole Gospel!  Besides, Christ could not reason so; for he knew that the Jews admitted both natural and demoniacal miracles, and their faith in the latter he never attacked; though by an ‘argumentum ad hominem’ (for it is no argument in itself) he denied its applicability to his own works.  If Christ had reasoned so, why did not the Barrister quote his words, instead of putting imaginary words in his mouth?

I, 61.

Religion is a system of ‘revealed’ truth; and to affirm of any revealed truth, that we ‘cannot understand’ it, is, in effect, either to deny that it has been revealed, or ­which is the same thing ­to admit that it has been revealed in vain.

It is too worthless!  I cannot go on.  Merciful God! hast thou not revealed to us the being of a conscience, and of reason, and of will; ­and does this Barrister tell us, that he “understands” them?  Let him know that he does not even understand the very word understanding.  He does not seem to be aware of the school-boy distinction between the [Greek:  hoti esti] and the [Greek:  dioti]?  But to all these silly objections religion must for ever remain exposed as long as the word Revelation is applied to any thing that can be ‘bona fide’ given to the mind ‘ab extra’, through the senses of eye, ear, or touch.  No! all revelation is and must be ‘ab intra’; the external ‘phaenomena’ can only awake, recall evidence, but never reveal.  This is capable of strict demonstration.

Afterwards the Barrister quotes from Thomas Watson respecting things above comprehension in the study of nature:  “in these cases, the ‘fact’ is evident, the cause lies in obscurity, deeply removed from all the knowledge and penetration of man.”  Then what can we believe respecting these causes?  And if we can believe nothing respecting them, what becomes of them as arguments in support of the proposition that we ought, in religion, to believe what we cannot understand?

Are there not facts in religion, the causes and constitution of which are mysteries?

“And from this account of obligation it follows, that we can he obliged to nothing but what we ourselves are to gain or lose something by; for nothing else can be a violent motive to us.  As we should not be obliged to obey the laws, or the magistrate, unless rewards or punishments, pleasure or pain, somehow or other depended upon our obedience; so neither should we, without the same reason, be obliged to do what is right, to practise virtue, or to obey the commands of God.”

‘Paley’s Moral and Polit.  Philosophy’, B. II. .

“The difference, and the only difference, (’between prudence and duty’,) is this; that in the one case we consider what we shall gain or lose in the present world; in the other case, we consider also what we shall gain or lose in the world to come.”

Ib. . ­Ed.]