Letter 2.

LETTER 2.

HONOURED AND REVEREND SIR, — Having endeavoured in my last to do justice to the practical Gospel of Christ, and Mr. Wesley’s awful declarations, I pass on to the other mistakes of your Narrative. That which strikes me next is “the public recantation of your useful sermons, in the face of the whole world.” (Page 22.)

1. O! sir, what have you done! Do you not know that your sermons contain not only the legally evangelical doctrine of the Minutes, but likewise all the doctrine which moderate Calvinists esteem as the marrow of the Gospel! And shall all be treated alike? “Wilt thou also destroy the righteous with the wicked? That be far from thee to do after this manner!” Thus did a good man formerly plead the cause of a wicked city, and thus I plead that of your good sermons, those twelve valuable, though unripe fruits of your ministerial labours. Upon this plea the infamous city would have been spared, had only “ten” good men been found in it. Now, sir, spare a valuable book for the sake of a “thousand” excellent things it contains. But if you are inflexible, and still wish it “burned,” imitate, at least, the kind angels who sent Lot out of the fiery overthrow, and except all the evangelical pages of the unfortunate volume.

Were it not ridiculous to compare wars which cost us only a little ink, and our friends a few pence, to those which cost armies their blood, and kingdoms their treasures, I would be tempted to say to you, Imitate the Dutch in their last effort to balance the victory, and secure the field. When they are pressed by the French, rather than yield, they break their dykes, let in the sea upon themselves, and lay all their fine gardens and rich pastures under water: but before they have recourse to that strange expedient, they prudently save all the valuable goods they can. Why should you not follow them in their prudential care, as you seem to do in their bold stratagem? When you publicly lay your useful book under the bitter waters of an anathema, why do you save absolutely nothing? Why must Gospel truths, more precious than the wealth of Holland and the gold of Ophir, lie for ever under the severe scourge of your recantation? Suppose you had “recanted” your third sermon, The way to eternal life, in opposition to mysticism; and “burned” the fourth, Salvation by Christ for Jews and Gentiles, in honour of Calvinism, could you not have spared the rest? If you say, you may do what you please with your own; I answer, Your book, publicly exposed to sale, and bought perhaps by thousands, is, in one sense, no more your own; it belongs to the purchasers, before whom you lay, I fear, a dangerous example: for when they shall hear that the author has “publicly recanted it in the face of the whole world,” it will be a temptation to them to slight the Gospel it contains, and perhaps to ridicule it “in the face of the whole world.”

You add, “It savours too strongly of mysticism.” Some passages (are a little tainted with Mr. Law’s capital error, and you might have pointed them out: but if you think mysticism is intrinsically bad, you are under a mistake. One of the greatest Mystics, next to Solomon, is Thomas a Kempis, and a few errors excepted, I would no more burn his” Imitation of Jesus Christ,” than the Song of Solomon, and Mr. Romaine’s edifying” Paraphrase of the 107th Psalm.”

You urge also, your sermons “savour too much of free will.” Alas! sir, can you recant “free will?” Was not your will as free when you recanted your sermons as when you composed them? Is there not as much free will expressed in this one line of the Gospel as in all your sermons, “I would have gathered you, and ye would not?” Do not “free-will offerings, with a holy worship,” delight the Lord more than forced, and, if I may be allowed the expression, bond-will services? Is not the free will with which the martyrs went to the stake as worthy of our highest admiration, as the mysticism of the Canticles is of our deepest attention? If all that strongly “savours of free will” must be “burned,” ye heavens! what Smithfield work will there be in your lucid plains! Wo to saints! Wo to angels! for they are all free-willing beings — all full of free will. Nor can you deny it, unless you suppose they are bound by irresistible decrees, as the heathens fancied their deities were hampered with the adamantine chains of an imaginary something they called “fate:” witness their Fata vetant, and Fata jubent, and ineluctabile Fatum.

Pardon, Rev. sir, the oddity of these exclamations. I am so grieved at the great advantage we give infidels against the Gospel, by making it ridiculous, that I could try even the method of Horace, to bring my friends back from the fashionable refinements of Crisp, to the plain truth as it is in Jesus.

Ridiculum acri

Fortius ac melius stultas plerumque secat res.

Nor is this the only bad tendency of your new doctrine: for by exploding the freedom of the will, you rob us of free agency. You afford the wicked, who determine to continue in sin, the best excuse in the world to do it without either shame or remorse; you make us mere machines, and indirectly reflect upon the wisdom of our Lord, for saying to a set of Jewish machines, “I would, and ye would not.” But what is still more deplorable, you inadvertently represent it an unwise thing in God to judge the world in righteousness; and your new glass shows his vindictive justice in the same unfavourable light, in which England saw two years ago the behaviour of a great monarch, who was exposed in the public papers, for unmercifully cutting with a whip, and tearing with spurs, the horses worked in a tapestry of his royal apartment, because they did not prance and gallop at his nod.

If a commendable, but immoderate fear of Pelagius’ doctrine drove you into that of Augustine, the oracle of all the Dominicans, Thomists, Jansenists, and all other Roman Catholic predestinarians, you need not go so far beyond him as to recant all your sermons, because you mention perhaps three or four times, the freedom of our will, in the whole volume. “Let no one,” says judicious Melancthon, “be offended at the words free will, (liberum arbitrium,) for St. Augustine himself uses it in many volumes, and that almost in every page, even to the surfeit of the reader.” The most ingenious Calvinist that ever wrote against free will is, I think, Mr. Edwards, of New-England. And his fine system turns upon a comparison by which it may be overturned, and the freedom of the will demonstrated.

The will, says he, (if I remember right,) is like an even balance which can never turn without a weight, and must necessarily turn with one. But whence comes the weight that necessarily turns it? From the understanding, answers he; the last dictate of the understanding necessarily turns the will. And is the understanding also necessarily determined? Yes, by the effect which the objects around us necessarily have upon us, and by the circumstances in which we necessarily find ourselves; so that from first to last, our tempers, words, and actions, necessarily follow each other, and the circumstances that give them birth, as the second, third, and fourth links of a chain follow the first, when it is drawn along. Hence the eternal, infallible, irresistible, universal concatenation of events, both in the moral and material world.

This is, if I mistake not, the scheme of that great, divine, and he spends no less than four hundred and fourteen large pages in trying to establish it. I would just observe upon it, that it makes the First Cause or First Mover, the only free Agent in the world; all others being necessarily bound with the chain of his decrees, drawn along by the irresistible motion of his arm, or, which is the same, entangled in forcible circumstances unalterably fixed by his immutable counsel.

And yet, even upon this scheme, you needed not, sir, be so afraid of free will; for if the will be like an even balance, it is free in itself, though it is only with what I beg leave to call “a mechanical freedom;” for an even balance, you know, is free to turn either way.

But with respect to our ingenious author’s assertion, that the will cannot turn without a weight, because an even balance cannot, I must consider it as a mere begging the question, if not as an absurdity. What is a balance but lifeless matter? And what is the will but the living, active soul, springing up in its willing capacity, and self-exerting, self-determining power? O how tottering is the mighty fabric raised, I shall not say upon such a fine spun metaphysical speculation, but upon so weak a foundation as a comparison, which supposes that two things, so widely different as spirit and matter, a living soul and a lifeless balance, are exactly alike with reference to self determination! Just as if a spirit, made after the image of the living, free, and powerful God, was no more capable of determining itself, than a horizontal beam supporting two equal copper bowls by six silken strings!

I am sorry, sir, to dissent from such a respectable divine as yourself; but, as I have no taste for new refinements, and cannot even conceive how far actions can be morally good or evil, any farther than our free will is concerned in them, I must follow the universal experience of mankind, and side with the author of the sermons against the author of the Narrative concerning the freedom of the will.

Nor is this freedom derogatory to free grace: for as it was free grace that gave an upright free will to Adam at his creation; so whenever his fallen children think or act aright, it is because their free will is mercifully prevented, touched, and so far rectified by free grace.

However, it must be granted, that many fashionable professors, and the large book of Mr. Edwards, are for you: but when you maintained the freedom of the will, Jesus Christ and the Gospel were on your side. To the end of the world this plain, peremptory assertion of our Lord, “I would and ye would not,” will alone throw down the sophisms, and silence the objections of the most subtle philosophers against free will. When I consider what it implies, far from supposing that the will is a lifeless pair of scales, necessarily turned by the least weight, I see it is such a strong, self-determining power, that it can resist the effect of the most amazing weights; keep itself inflexible under all the warnings, threatenings, miracles, promises, entreaties, and tears of the Son of God; and remain obstinately unmoved under the strivings of his Holy Spirit. Yes: put in one scale the most stupendous weights, for instance, the hopes of heavenly joys, and the dread of hellish torments; and only the gaudy feather of honour, or the breaking bubble of worldly joy, in the other; if the will casts itself into the light scale, the feather or bubble will instantly preponderate. Nor is the power of the rectified will less wonderful; for though you should put all the kingdoms of the world and their glory in the one scale, and nothing but “the reproach of Christ” in the other; yet, if the will freely leap into the infamous scale, a crown of thorns easily outweighs a thousand golden crowns, and a devouring flame makes ten thousand thrones kick the beam. Thus it appears the will can be persuaded, but never forced. You may bend it by moral suasions; but if you do this farther than it freely gives way, you break, you absolutely destroy it. A will forced, is no more a will; it is mere compulsion; freedom is not less essential to it than moral agency to man. Nor do I go, in these observations upon the freedom of the will, one step farther than honest John Bunyan, whom all the Calvinists so deservedly admire. In his “Holy War” he tells us, “There is but one Lord Will-be-Will in the town of Man’s-soul:” whether he serves Diabolus or Shaddai, he is Lord Will-be-Will still, “a man of great strength, resolution, and courage, whom in his occasion no one can turn,” if he does not freely turn, or yield to be turned.

I hope, sir, these hints upon the harmlessness of mysticism, and the important doctrine of our free agency, will convince you, and the purchasers of your sermons, that you have been too precipitate in “publicly recanting them in the face of the whole world,” especially the ninth. If you ask, why I particularly interest myself in behalf of that one discourse, I will let you into the mystery. At the first reading I liked and adopted it: I cut it out of the volume in which it was bound, put it in my sermon case, and preached it in my church. The title of it is, you know, “Justification by Faith;” and, among several striking things on the subject, you quote twice this excellent passage out of our homilies: “Justification by faith implies a sure trust and confidence which a man hath in God, that by the merits of Christ his sins are forgiven, and he is reconciled to the favour of God.” O sir, why did you not except it in your recantation, both for the honour of our Church and your own?

Were I to print and disperse such an advertisement as this’ “Eight years ago I preached in my church a sermon, entitled Justification by Faith, composed by the honourable and reverend Mr. Shirley, to convince Papists and Pharisees that we are accepted through the alone merits of Christ: but I see better now; I wish this sermon had been burned, and I publicly recant it in the face of the whole world;” how would the Popish priest of Madeley rejoice! And how will that of Loughrea triumph when he hears you have actually done it in your Narrative! What will your Protestant parishioners, to whom your book is dedicated, say, when the surprising news reaches Ireland? And what will the world think, when they see you warmly plead in August for justification by faith, as being “the foundation that must by all means be secured;” and publicly recant, in September, your own excellent sermon on “Justification by Faith?”

Indeed, sir, though I admire your candour in acknowledging there are some exceptionable passages in your discourses, and your humility in readily giving them up, I can no more approve of your readiness in making, than in insisting upon “formal recantations.” We cannot be too careful in dealing in that kind of ware; and it is extremely dangerous to do it by wholesale; as by that mean we may give up, or seem to give up, “before the whole world,” precious truths, delivered by Christ himself, and brought down to us in streams of the blood of martyrs.

Among some blunt expostulations that Mr. Wesley erased in my Fifth Letter, as being too severe, he kindly but unhappily struck out this: “Before you could with candour insist upon ‘ a recantation’ of Mr. Wesley’s Minutes, should you not have recanted yourself the passages of your own sermons where the same doctrines are maintained; and have sent your recantation through the land, together with your Circular Letter?” Had this been published, it might have convinced you of the unseasonableness of your “recantation.” Thus, this second hasty step would have been prevented; and if I dwell so long upon it now, believe me, sir, it is chiefly to prevent a third.

And, now your sermons are recanted, is the Vindication of Mr. Wesley’s Minutes invalidated? Not at all; for you have not yet recanted the Bath Hymnbook, nor can you ever get Mr. Henry, Mr. Williams, and a tribe of other anti-Crispian, though Calvinist divines, now in glory, to recant with you; much less the prophets, apostles, and Christ himself, on whose irrefragable testimony we chiefly rest our doctrine.

II. As I have pleaded out the cause of free will against bound will, or that of your sermons against your Narrative, and am insensibly come to the Vindication, give me leave, sir, to speak a word also for that performance and the author of it.

You say he has “attempted a vindication of the Minutes;” but do not some people think he has likewise executed it? And have you proved he has not? You reply, “There would be a great impropriety in my giving a full and particular answer to those letters, because the author did all he could to revoke them, and has given me ample satisfaction in his letters of submission.” Indeed, sir, you quite mistook the nature of that “submission:” it had absolutely no reference to the arguments of the Vindication; it only respected the polemic dress in which the vindicator had put them. You might have been convinced of it by this paragraph of his letter of submission: “I was going to preach when I had the news of your happy accommodation, and was no sooner out of church than I wrote to beg my Vindication might not appear in the dress in which I had put it. I did not then, nor do I yet, repent having written upon the Minutes; but, as matters are now, I am very sorry I did not write in a general manner, without taking notice of the Circular Letter, and mentioning your dear name.” He begs, therefore, you will not consider his letter of submission as a reason for not giving “a full or particular answer” to his arguments. On the contrary, if you can prove they want solidity; a letter of thanks shall follow his “letter of submission:” if he is wrong, he sincerely desires to be set right.

You add, however, that he has “broken the Minutes into sentences and half sentences; and by refining upon each of the detached particles, has given a new turn to the whole.” But he appeals to every impartial reader whether he has not, like a candid man, first considered them all together, and then every one asunder. He begs to be informed, whether an artist can better inquire into the goodness of a watch, than by making first his observations on the whole movement in general, and then by taking it to pieces, that he may examine every part with greater attention. And he desires you would show, whether what you are pleased to call “a new turn,” is not preferable to the heretical turn some persons give them; and whether it is not equally, if not better adapted to the literal meaning of the words, as well as more agreeable to the Antinomian state of the Church, the general tenor of the propositions, and the system of doctrine maintained by Mr. Wesley for near forty years?

The vindicator objects likewise to your asserting, [(page 21,)] that “when he first saw the Minutes, he expressed to Lady Huntingdon his abhorrence of them.” Had you said SURPRISE, the expression would have been strictly just; but that of abhorrence is far too strong, Her ladyship, who testified her detestation of them in the strongest terms, might easily mistake his abhorrence of the sense fixed upon the Minutes, for an abhorrence of the Minutes themselves; but she may recollect, that, far from ever granting they had that sense, he said again and again, even in their first conversation upon them, “Certainly, my lady, Mr. Wesley can mean no such thing’ he will explain himself.”

But supposing he had a first been so far influenced by the jealous fears of Lady Huntingdon, as to express as great an abhorrence of the Minutes as the mistaken disciples did of the person of our Lord, when they took him for an apparition, and “cried out for fear;” would this have excused either him or you, sir, for resolutely continuing in a mistake, in the midst of a variety of means and calls to escape from it? And if the vindicator, before he had weighed the Minutes in the balance of the sanctuary, had even taken his pen, and condemned them as dangerously legal, what could you fairly have concluded from it, but that he was not partial to Mr. Wesley, and had also “leaned so much toward Calvinism,” as not instantly to discover, and “rejoice in the truth?”

In your last page you take your friendly leave of the vindicator, by saying, you “desire in love to cast a veil over all apparent mistakes of his judgment on this occasion;” but as he is not conscious of “all these apparent mistakes,” he begs you would in love take off “the veil” you have cast upon them, that he may see, and rectify at least those which are capital. III. And that you may not hastily conclude he was “mistaken” in his Vindication of that article that touches upon merit, he embraces this opportunity of presenting you with another quotation from the JOHN WESLEY of the last century, he means Mr. BAXTER, the most judicious divine, as well as the greatest, most useful, and most laborious preacher of his age.

In his “Catholic Theology,” answering the objections of an Antinomian, he says: “Merit is a word, I perceive, you are against; you may therefore choose any other of the same signification, and we will forbear this rather than offend you. But yet tell me,

(1.) What, if the words Greek axiov and axia were translated deserving and merit, would it not be as true a translation as worthy and worthiness, when it is the same thing that is meant?

(2.) Do not all the ancient teachers of the Churches, since the apostles, particularly apply the names axia and meritum to believers? And if you persuade men that all these teachers were Papists, will you not persuade most that believe you to be Papists too?

(3.) Are not reward, and merit or desert, relative words, as punishment and guilt, master and servant, husband and wife? And is there any reward which is not meriti præmium, “the reward of some merit?” Again:

“Is it not the second article of our faith, and next to ‘believing there is a God,’ that ‘he is the rewarder of them that diligently seek him?’ When you thus extirpate faith and godliness, on pretence of crying down merit, you see what overdoing tends to. And indeed by the same reason that men deny a reward to duty, (the faultiness being pardoned through Christ,) they would infer there is no punishment for sin; for if God will not do good to the righteous, neither will he do evil to the wicked; he becomes like the god of Epicurus, he does not trouble himself about us, nor about the merit or demerit of our actions. But David knew better: ‘The Lord,’ says he, ‘plenteously rewardeth the proud doers; and verily there is a reward for the righteous, for there is a God that judgeth the earth;’ that sees matter of praise or dispraise, rewardableness or worthiness of punishment, in all the actions of men.” This is, sir, all Mr. Baxter and Mr. Wesley mean by merit or demerit; and if the vindicator be wrong in thinking they are both in the right, please to remove “the veil” that conceals his “mistake.” IV. As one of his correspondents desires him to explain himself a little more upon the article of the Minutes which respects undervaluing ourselves; and as you probably place the arguments he has advanced upon that head among his “apparent mistakes,” he takes likewise this opportunity of making some additional observations on that delicate subject.

How we can “esteem every man better than ourselves,” and ourselves “the chief of sinners,” or “the least of saints,” seems not so much a calculation for the understanding, as for the lowly, contrite, and loving heart. It puzzles the former, but the latter at once makes it out. Nevertheless, the seeming contradiction may, perhaps, be reconciled to reason by these reflections: —

1. If friendship brings the greatest monarch down from his throne, and makes him sit on the same couch with his favourites; may not brotherly love, much more powerful than natural friendship; may not humility, excited by the example of Christ washing his disciples’ feet; may not a deep regard for that precept, “He that will be greatest among you, let him be the least of all,” sink the true Christian to the dust, and make him lie in spirit at the feet of every one?

2. A well-bred person uncovers himself, bows, and declares, even to his inferiors, that he is their “most humble servant.” This affected civility of the world is but an apish imitation of the genuine humility of the Church; and if those who customarily speak humble words without meaning, may yet be honest men, how much more the saints, who have “truth written in their inward parts,” and “speak out of the abundance of their humble hearts!”

3. He who walks in the light of Divine love, sees something of God’s spiritual, moral, or natural image in all men, the worst not excepted; and at the sight, that which is merely creaturely in him, (by a kind of spiritual instinct found in all who are “born of the Spirit,”) directly bows to that which is of God in another. He imitates the captain of a first rate man of war, who, upon seeing the king or queen coming up in a small boat, forgetting the enormous size of his ship, or considering it is the king’s own ship, immediately strikes his colours; and the greater vessel, consistently with wisdom and truth, pays respect to the less.

4. The most eminent saint, having known more of the workings of corruption in his own breast, than he can possibly know of them in that of any other man, may, with great truth, (according to his present views and former feelings of the internal evil he has overcome,) call himself “the chief of sinners.”

5. Nor does he know, but if the feeblest believers had all his talents and graces, with all his opportunities of doing and receiving good, they would have made far superior advances in the Christian life; and in this view also, without hypocritical humility, he prefers the least saint to himself. Thus, although, according to the humble light of others, all true believers certainly “undervalue,” yet, according to their own humble light, they make a true estimate of “themselves.”

V. The vindicator having thus solved a problem of godliness, which you have undoubtedly ranked among his “apparent mistakes,” he takes the liberty of presenting you with a list of some of your own “apparent mistakes on this occasion.”

1. In the very letter in which you recant your Circular Letter, you desire Mr. Wesley to “give up the fatal errors of the Minutes,” though you have not yet proved they contain one; you still affirm, “They appear to you evidently subversive of the fundamentals of Christianity,” that is, in plain English, still “dreadfully heretical;” and you produce a letter which asserts, also, without shadow of proof, that the “Minutes were given for the establishment of another foundation than that which is laid;” that they are “repugnant to Scripture, the whole plan of man’s salvation under the new covenant of grace, and also to the clear meaning of our Established Church, as well as to all other Protestant Churches.”

2. You declare in your Narrative that, “when you cast your eye over the Minutes, you are just where you was,” and assure the public, that “nothing inferior to an attack upon the foundation of our hope, through the all-sufficient sacrifice of Christ, could have been an object sufficient to engage you in its defence.” Thus, by continuing to insinuate such an ATTACK was really made, you continue to wound Mr. Wesley in the tenderest part.

3. Although Mr. Wesley and fifty-three of his fellow labourers have let you quietly “secure the foundation,” (which, by the by, had only been shaken in your own ideas, and was perfectly secured by these express words of the Minutes, “not by the merit of works,” but by “believing in Christ,”) yet, far from allowing them to secure the superstructure in their turn, which would be nothing but just, you begin already a contest with them about “our second justification by works in the day of judgment.”

4. Instead of frankly acknowledging the rashness of your step, and the greatness of your mistake, with respect to the Minutes, you make a bad matter worse, by treating the Declaration as you have treated them; forcing upon it a dangerous sense, no less contrary to the Scriptures, than to Mr. Wesley’s meaning, and the import of the words.

5. When you speak of the dreadful charges you have brought against the Minutes, you softly call them “misconstructions you may seem to have made of their meaning.” [(Page 22, line 4.)] Nor is your

“acknowledgment” much stronger than your “may seem;” at least it does not appear, to many, adequate to the hurt done by your Circular Letter to the practical Gospel of Christ, and the reputation of his eminent servant, thousands of whose friends you have grieved, offended, or stumbled; while you have confirmed thousands of his enemies in their hard thoughts of him, and in their unjust contempt of his ministry.

6. And, lastly, far from candidly inquiring into the merit of the arguments advanced in the Vindication, you represent them as mere “metaphysical distinctions;” or cast, as a veil over them, a friendly submissive letter of condolence, which was never intended for the use to which you have put it. Therefore the vindicator, who does not admire a peace founded upon a “may seem” on your part, and on Mr. Wesley’s part upon a “declaration,” to which you have already fixed a wrong unscriptural sense of your own, takes this public method to inform you, he thinks his arguments in favour of Mr. Wesley’s anti-Crispian propositions rational, Scriptural, and solid; and once more he begs you would remove the veil you have hitherto “cast over all the apparent mistakes of his judgment on this occasion,” that he may see whether the Antinomian gospel of Dr. Crisp is preferable to the practical Gospel which Mr. Wesley endeavours to restore to its primitive and Scriptural lustre.

VI. Having thus finished my remarks upon the mistakes of your Narrative, I gladly take my leave of controversy for this time. Would to God it were for ever! I no more like it than I do applying a caustic to the back of my friends; it is disagreeable to me, and painful to them; and nevertheless, it must be done, when their health and mine is at stake.

I assure you, sir, I do not like the warlike dress of the vindicator, any more than David did the heavy armour of Saul. With gladness, therefore, I cast it aside, to throw myself at your feet, and protest to you, that, although I thought it my duty to write to you with the utmost plainness, frankness, and honesty, yet the design of doing it with bitterness never entered my heart. However, for every “bitter expression” that may have dropped from my sharp vindicating pen, I ask your pardon; but it must be in general, for neither friends nor foes have yet particularly pointed out to me one such expression.

You have accepted of “a letter of submission” from me; let, I beseech you, a concluding paragraph of submission meet also with your favourable acceptance. You condescend, Rev. sir, to call me your “learned friend.” Learning is an accomplishment I never pretended to; but your friendship is an honour I shall always highly esteem, and do at this time value above my own brother’s love. Appearances are a little against me: I feel I am a thorn in your flesh; but I am persuaded it is a necessary one, and this persuasion reconciles me to the thankless and disagreeable part I act. If Ephraim must vex Judah, let Judah bear with Ephraim, till, happily tired of their contention, they feel the truth of Terence’s words, Amantium (why not credentium?) iræ amoris redintegratio est.f7 I can assure you, my dear sir, without metaphysical distinction, I love and honour you, as truly as I dislike the rashness of your well-meant zeal. The motto I thought myself obliged to follow was E bello pax;f8 but that which I delight in is, In bello pax;f9 may we make them harmonize till we learn war and polemic divinity no more!

My Vindication cost me tears of fear, lest I should have wounded you too deeply. That fear, I find, was groundless; but should you feel a little for the great truths and the great minister I vindicate, these expostulations will wound me, and probably cost me tears again.

If, in the meantime, we offend our weak brethren, let us do something in order to lessen the offence till it is removed. Let us show them we make war without so much as shyness. Should you ever come to the next county, as you did last summer, honour me with a line, and I shall gladly wait upon you, and show you, (if you permit me,) the way to my pulpit, where I shall think myself highly favoured to see you “secure the foundation,” and hear you enforce the doctrine of justification by faith, which you fear we attack. And should I ever be within thirty miles of the city where you reside, I shall go to submit myself to you, and beg leave to assist you in reading prayers for you, or giving the cup with you. Thus shall we convince the world, that controversy may be conscientiously carried on without interruption of brotherly love; and I shall have the peculiar pleasure of testifying to you, in person, how sincerely I am, Hon. and dear sir, your Submissive and obedient servant, in the bond of a PRACTICAL Gospel,

J. FLETCHER.