Letter 3.

LETTER 3.

HONOURED AND REVEREND SIR, — If I mistake not the workings of my heart, a concern for St. James’ “pure and undefiled religion” excites me to take the pen once more, and may account for the readiness with which I have met you in the dangerous field of controversy. You may possibly think mere partiality to Mr. Wesley has inspired me with that boldness; and others may be ready to say as Eliab, “We know the pride and haughtiness of thy heart. Thou art come down that thou mightest see the battle.” But may I not answer with David, “Is there not a cause?”

Is it not highly necessary to make a stand against Antinomianism? Is not that gigantic “man of sin” a more dangerous enemy to King Jesus, than the champion of the Philistines was to King Saul? Has he not defied more than forty days the armies and arms, the people and truths of the living God? By audaciously daring the thousands in Israel, has he not made all the faint hearted among them ashamed to stand “in the whole armour of God,” afraid to defend the important post of duty? And have not many left it already, openly running away, flying into the dens and caves of earthly mindedness, “putting their light under a bushel,” and even burying themselves alive in the noisome grave of profaneness?

Multitudes indeed still keep the field, still make an open profession of godliness. But how few of these “endure hardship as good soldiers of Jesus Christ!” How many have already cast away “the shield of Gospel faith, the faith which works by love!” What numbers dread the cross, the heavenly standard they should steadily bear, or resolutely follow! While in pompous speeches they extol the cross of Jesus, how do they, upon the most frivolous pretence, refuse to “take up” their own! Did the massy staff of Goliah’s spear seem more terrible to the frighted Israelites than the daily cross of those dastardly followers of the Crucified? What Boanerges can spirit them up, and lead them on “from conquering to conquer?” Who can even make them look the enemy in the face? Alas! “in their hearts they are already, gone back to Egypt. Their faces are but half Sion ward.” They give way, — they “draw back;” O may it not be “to perdition!” May not the king of terrors overtake them in their retreat, and make them as great monuments of God’s vengeance against cowardly soldiers, as Lot’s wife was of his indignation against halting racers!

But setting allegory aside, permit me, sir, to pour my fears into your bosom, and tell you with the utmost plainness my distressing thoughts of the religious world.

For some years I have suspected there is more imaginary than “unfeigned faith” in most of those who pass for believers. With a mixture of indignation and grief have I seen them carelessly follow the stream of corrupt nature, against which they should have manfully wrestled. And by the most preposterous mistake, when they should have exclaimed against their Antinomianism,f10 I have heard them cry out against “the legality f11 of their wicked hearts; which” they said “still suggested they were to do something in order to salvation.” Glad was I, therefore, when I had attentively considered Mr. Wesley’s Minutes, to find they were levelled at the very errors which give rise to an evil I had long lamented in secret, but had wanted courage to resist and attack.

I. This evil is Antinomianism; that is, any kind of doctrinal or practical opposition to God’s law, which is the perfect rule of right, and the moral picture of the God of love, drawn in miniature by our Lord in these two exquisite precepts, “Thou shalt love God with all thy heart, and thy neighbour as thyself.”

As “the law is good, if a man use it lawfully,” so legality is excellent, if it be evangelical. The external respect shown by Pharisees to the law is but feigned and hypocritical legality. Pharisees are no more truly legal, than Antinomians are truly evangelical. “Had ye believed Moses,” says Jesus to people of that stamp, “ye would have believed me:” but in your hearts you hate his law as much as you do my Gospel.

We see no less Gospel in the preface of the ten commandments, “I am the Lord thy God,” &c, than we do legality in the middle of our Lord’s sermon on the mount, “I say, Whosoever 1ooketh on a woman to lust after her, hath already committed adultery in his heart.” Nevertheless, the latter “has in all things the pre-eminence” over the former. For if “the law,” shortly prefaced by the Gospel, “came by Moses;” grace, the gracious, the full display of the Gospel, and truth, the true explanation and fulfilling of the law, “came by Jesus Christ.”

This evangelical law should appear to us “sweeter than the honeycomb, and more precious than fine gold.” We should continually spread the tables of our hearts before our heavenly Lawgiver, beseeching him to write it there with his own finger, the powerful Spirit of life and love. But alas! God’s commandments are disregarded; they are represented as the needless or impracticable sanctions of that superannuated legalist, Moses; and if we express our veneration for them, we are looked upon as people who are always strangers to the Gospel, or are fallen into the Galatian state. Not so David. He was so great an admirer of God’s law, that he declares the godly man “doth meditate therein day and night.” He expresses his transcendent value for it, under the synonymous expressions of law, words, statutes, testimonies, precepts, and commandments, in almost every verse of the 119th Psalm. And he says of himself, “O how I love thy law! It is my meditation all the day!”

St. Paul was as evangelically legal as David; for he knew the law is as much contained in the Gospel, as the tables of stone, on which the moral law was written, were contained in the ark. He therefore assured the Corinthians, that “though he had all faith,” even that which is most uncommon, and performed the greatest wonders, it would “profit him nothing,” unless it was accompanied by “charity,” unless it “worked by love,” which is “the fulfilling of the law;” the excellency of faith arising from the excellent end it answers in producing and nourishing love. Should it be objected, that St. Paul says to the Galatians, “I through the law am dead to the law, that I might live to God;” and to the Romans, “Ye are become dead to the law by the body of Christ:” I answer, in the apostle’s days, that expression, the law, frequently meant “the whole Mosaic dispensation;” and in that sense every believer is dead to it, dead to all that Christ has not adopted. For,

(1.) He is dead to the Levitical law, “Christ having abolished in himself the law of ordinances. Touch not, taste not, handle not.”

(2.) He is dead to the ceremonial law, which was only “a shadow of good things to come,” a typical representation of Christ and the blessings flowing from his sacrifice.

(3.) He is dead to the curse attending his past violations of the moral law; for “Christ hath delivered us from the curse of the law, being made a curse for us.” And lastly, he is dead to the hopes of recommending himself to God by the merit of his obedience to the moral law; for in point of merit, he “is determined to know nothing but Christ and him crucified.”

To make St. Paul mean more than this, is,

(1.) To make him maintain that no believer can sin: for if “sin is the transgression of the law,” and “the law is dead and buried,” it is plain, no believer can sin, as nobody can transgress a law which is abolished: for “where no law is, there is no transgression.”

(2.) It is to make him contradict St. James, who exhorts us to “fulfil the royal law, according to the Scripture, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.” And,

(3.) It is to make him contradict himself: for he charges the Galatians “by love to serve one another; all the law being fulfilled in one word, even in this, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.” And he assures the Hebrews, that under the new covenant, believers, far from being “without God’s laws, have them written in their hearts; God himself placing them in their minds.” We cannot, therefore, with any shadow of justice, put Dr. Crisp’s coat upon the apostle, and press him into the service of Antinomians.

And did our Lord side with Antinomians? Just the reverse. Far from repealing the two above mentioned royal precepts, he asserts, that “on them hang all the law and the prophets;” and had the four Gospels been then written, he would no doubt have represented them as subservient to the establishing of the law, as he did the book of Isaiah, the evangelical prophet. Such high thoughts had he of the law, that when a lawyer expressed his veneration for it, by declaring that “the love of God, and our neighbour, was more than all whole burnt offerings and sacrifices, Jesus, seeing that he had answered discreetly, said unto him, Thou art not far from the kingdom of God.”

The Gospel itself terminates in the fulfilling of the commandments. For as the curse of the law, like the scourge of a severe schoolmaster, drives, so the Gospel, like a loving guide, brings us to Christ, the great Law Fulfiller, in whom we find inexhaustible treasures of pardon and power; of pardon for past breaches of the law, and of power for present obedience to it. Nor are we sooner come to him than he magnifies the law, by his precepts, as he formerly did by his obedience unto death. “If ye love me,” says he, “keep my commandments.” “This is his commandment, that we should love one another; and he that loveth another hath fulfilled the law.” Again: the Gospel displays Jesus’ dying love, that by “believing” it “we may” love him, that is, “have everlasting life,” the life of love which abideth when the life of faith is no more. Hence St. John sums up Christianity in these words, “We love him because he first loved us!” And what is it to love Jesus, but to fulfil the whole law at once, to love God and man, the Creator and the creature, united in one divinely human person! Did the Son of God “magnify the law,” that we might vilify it? Did he “make it honourable,” that we might make it contemptible? Did he “come to fulfil it,” that we might be discharged from fulfilling it according to our capacity? That is, discharged from loving God and our neighbour? Discharged from the employment and joys of heaven? No: the “Word was never made flesh” for this dreadful end. None but Satan could have become incarnate to go upon such an infernal errand as this! Standing, therefore, upon the rock of evangelical truth, we ask, with St. Paul, “Do we then make void the law through faith? God forbid! Nay, we establish the law.” We point sinners to that Saviour in and from whom they may Continually have the law-fulfilling power; “that the righteousness of the law may be fulfilled in us, who walk not after the flesh but after the Spirit.” Such are the glorious and delightful views which the Scriptures give us of the law, disarmed of its curse in Christ; the law of holy, humble love, so strongly enforced in the discourses, and sweetly exemplified in the life and death of the “Prophet like unto Moses!” So amiable, so precious is the book of the law, when delivered to us by Jesus, sprinkled with his atoning blood, and explained by his loving Spirit! And so true is St. Paul’s assertion, “We are not without law to God, but under the law to Christ!” Instead then of dressing up the law as a scarecrow, let us in our degree “magnify it, and make it honourable,” as did our Lord. Instead of representing it as “an intolerable yoke of bondage,” let us call it, with St. Paul, “the law of Christ;” and, with St. James, “the perfect law of liberty.” And let every true believer say, with David, “I love thy commandments above gold and precious stones: I shall alway keep thy law, yea, for ever and ever; I will walk at LIBERTY, for I seek thy precepts.” But, alas! how few give us these evangelical views of the law, and practical views of the Gospel! How many intimate Christ has “fulfilled all righteousness,” that we might be the children of God with hearts “full of unrighteousness!” If some insist upon our “fulfilling all righteousness” also, is it not chiefly when they want to draw us into their peculiarities, and dip us into their narrow denomination? And what numbers, under the fair pretence that they “have a living law written in their hearts,” insinuate, “there is no need of preaching the law” to them, either to show them more of God’s purity, endear the atoning blood, regulate their conduct, or convince them of the necessity of perfecting holiness!

But suppose these objectors love, as they say, “the law written in their inward parts,” (which the actions and tempers of some make rather doubtful,) is the writing so “perfectly finished,” that no one stroke need to be added to it? Is not the law an important part of “the word of righteousness?” And could not the Holy Ghost retouch the writing, or deepen the engraving, by the ministry of “the word of righteousness?” Again: if the internal teachings of the Holy Spirit supersede the letter of the law, must they not, by the same reason, supersede the letter of the Gospel? Is there any more need of preaching the Gospel than the law to believers? Or have they not the Gospel “written in their hearts,” as well as the law? At what amazing heights of unscriptural perfection must our objectors suppose themselves to have arrived! What palpable errors do they run into, that they may have the honour of passing for evangelical! And who will envy them the glory of countenancing the Antinomian delusion, by standing in direct opposition to Christ, who thus decides the controversy: “Think not that I am come to destroy the law and the prophets: I am not come to destroy but to fulfil. For verily I say unto you, till heaven and earth pass away, one jot or tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled,” either in what it requires or, denounces: for the law is “fulfilled” not only when its precepts are obeyed, but when rewards are given to the observers, and punishments inflicted upon the violators of it. “Whosoever, therefore, shall DO my commandments, and TEACH them, shall be great in the kingdom of heaven.”

Do not imagine, Rev. sir, I thus cry up God’s law to drown the late cries of heresy and apostasy. I appeal to matter of fact and your own observations. Consider the religious world, and say, if ANTINOMIANISM is not in general a motto better adapted to the state of professing congregations, societies, families, and individuals, than HOLINESS UNTO THE LORD, the inscription that should be even upon our “horses’ bells.”

II. Begin with CONGREGATIONS, and cast first your eyes upon the hearers. In general” they have curious “itching ears, and will not endure sound doctrine.” Many of them are armed with the “breastplate of a righteousness” which they have vainlyf12 imputed to themselves: they have on the showy “helmet of a presumptuous hope,” and hold fast the impenetrable shield of strong prejudice. With these they “quench the fiery darts of” convincing truth, and stand undaunted under volleys of reproof. They say, they “will have nothing, but Christ.” And who could blame them, if they would have Christ in all his offices? Christ, with all his parables and sermons, cautions and precepts, reproofs and expostulations, exhortations and threatenings? Christ, preaching to the multitudes upon a mountain, as well as honourably teaching in the temple? Christ, fasting in the wilderness, or praying in Gethsemane; as well as Christ making the multitude sit down upon the grass to receive “loaves and fishes,” or promising “thrones” to his disciples? Christ, “constraining them to get into a ship, and toil in rowing all night with a contrary wind;” as well as Christ “coming in the morning,” and causing “the ship to be immediately at the land whither they went?” Christ upon Mount Calvary, as well as Christ upon Mount Tabor? In a word, who would find fault with them if they would have Christ with his poverty and self-denial, his reproach and cross, his Spirit and graces, his prophets and apostles, his plain apparel and mean followers? But alas! it is not so. They will have what they please of Christ, and that too as they please. If he come accompanied by legal Moses and honest Elijah, who talk of the crucifixion of the body, and “decease” of the flesh, they can do very well without him. If he preach “free grace, free will, faithfulness, or heavenly mindedness,” some turn to the right, some wheel about to the left, others go directly back, and all agree to say or think, “This is a hard saying, who can hear it?”

They admire him in one chapter, and know not what to make of him in another. Some of his words they extol to the sky, and others they seem to be ashamed of. If he assert his authority as a Lawgiver, they are ready to treat him with as little ceremony as they do Moses. If he say, “Keep my Commandments: I am a king;” like the Jews of old, they rise against the awful declaration; or they “crown him” as a Surety, the better to “set him at naught” as a Monarch. And if he add, to his ministers, “I am the prophet that was to come; go in my name, and teach all nations to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you;” they complain, “This is the law; give us the Gospel; we can relish nothing but the Gospel!” They have no idea of “eating the paschal lamb” whole, “his head with his legs, and the purtenance thereof;” nor do they take care of “not breaking his bones;” they do not like him roast with fire neither; but “raw or sodden with water” out of their own “broken cisterns.” If you present him to them as the type of the “Lamb of God that taketh away the sin of the world, and maketh an end of it;” their hearts heave, they say, “Pray have me excused” from thus feeding upon him: and though it is said, “Ye shall let nothing of it remain until the morning, you shall eat it in haste,” they postpone, they beg leave to keep it till the article of death: and if, in the meantime, you talk to them of “bitter herbs,” they marvel at your Jewish, legal taste, and complain that you spoil the Gospel feast.

They do not consider we must “give every one his portion of meat,” or proper medicine, “in due season;” and that sweet things are not always wholesome. They forget we must “leave all” Antinomian refinements “to follow Christ,” who sometimes says to decent Pharisees, “How can you escape the damnation of hell?” And to a beloved disciple that shuns the cross, “Satan, thou savourest not the things of God, but the things of men.” They will have nothing but the atonement. Nor do they choose to remember, that St. Paul, who “did not shun to declare the whole counsel of God,” preached Christ to Felix, by “reasoning of temperance, righteousness, and judgment to come.”

Hence it is that some preachers must choose comfortable subjects to please their hearers; just as those who make an entertainment for nice persons are obliged to study what will suit their difficult taste. A multitude of important scriptures may be produced, on which no minister, who is unwilling to lose his reputation as “an evangelical preacher,” must dare to speak in some pulpits, unless it be to explain away or enervate their meaning. Take some instances: —

The good old Calvinists, (Archbishop Leighton for one,) questioned whether a man was truly converted who did not sincerely “go on to perfection,” and heartily endeavour to “perfect holiness in the fear of God.” But now, if we only quote such passages with an emphasis, and enforce their meaning with some degree of earnestness, the truth of our conversion is suspected: we even pass for enemies to Christ’s righteousness. If we have courage to handle such scriptures as these, “To do good and to distribute forget not, for with such sacrifices God is well pleased. Show me thy faith by thy works. Was not Rahab justified by works? By works was Abraham’s faith made perfect,” &c, the bare giving out of our text prejudices our Antinomian hearers against us, and robs us of their candid attention, unless they expect a charity sermon; for on such an occasion they will yet allow us, at the close of our discourse, to speak honourably of good works: just as those who run to the opposite extreme, will yet, on some particular days, such as Christmas and Good Friday, permit us to make honourable mention of Jesus Christ.

The evil would be tolerable if we were only obliged to select smooth texts in order to gratify an Antinomian audience; but, alas! it is grown so desperate, that unless we “adulterate the sincere milk of the word,” many reject it as poison. It is a doubt whether we could preach in some celebrated pulpits on “the good man, who is merciful and lendeth, who hath dispersed abroad and given to the poor, and whose righteousness remaineth for ever;” or on “breaking off our sins by righteousness, and our iniquities by showing mercy to the poor;” or on “the righteousness which exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees;” or on “the robes washed and made white in the blood of the Lamb,” without giving general disgust; unless, to keep in the good grace of our Nicolaitan hearers, we were to dissent from all sober commentators, and offer the greatest violence to the context, our own conscience, and common sense, by saying, that the righteousness and robes, mentioned in those passages, are Christ’s imputed, and not our performed obedience.

How few of our evangelical congregations would bear from the pulpit an honest explanation of what they allow us to read in the desk! We may open our service by saying, that “when the wicked man turneth away from his wickedness, and doth that which is lawful and right, he shall save his soul alive;” but wo to us, if we handle the Scripture in the pulpit, unless we wrest it by representing CHRIST as “the wicked man who DOES that which is lawful and right, to save our souls alive,” without any of our doings. Were we to preach upon these words of our Lord, “This DO and thou shalt live,” Luke 10:25, the sense of which is fixed by the thirty-seventh verse, “Go and DO thou likewise;” or only to handle, without deceit, those common words of the Lord’s prayer, confirmed by a plain parable, “Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive them that trespass against us;” our reputation as Protestants would be in as much danger, from the bulk of some congregations, as our persons from the fire of a whole regiment in the day of battle. How would such a discourse, and the poor blind man that preached it, be privately exclaimed against; or publiclyf13 exposed in a Magazine presented to the world under the sacred name of Gospel! In short, whoever has courage enough to preach as St. Paul did at Athens, at Lystra, and before Felix, rebuking sin without respect of persons; whoever will imitate St. Peter, and exhort all his hearers to “save themselves from this perverse generation,” assuring them that “the promise of the Holy Spirit is unto them, and their children;” must expect to be looked upon as unsound, if not as an enemy of free grace, and a setter forth of Pelagian or Popish doctrines. Moderate Calvinists themselves must run the gantlet, if they preach free grace as St. Peter did. A pious clergyman, noted for his strong attachment to what some call “the doctrines of grace,” was, to my knowledge, highly blamed by one part of his auditory, for having preached to the other “repentance toward God,” and exhorted them to call on him for mercy. And I remember he just saved his sinking reputation as a sound divine, by pleading, that two apostles exhorted even Simon Magus to “repent of his wickedness, and pray to God, if perhaps the thought of his heart might be forgiven him.” When such professors will not bear the plainest truth, from ministers whose sentiments agree with theirs; how will they rise against deeper truths advanced by those who are of a different opinion! Some will even lose all decency. Observing, in preaching last summer, one of them remarkably busy in disturbing all around him, when the service was over I went up to him, and inquired into the cause of the dissatisfaction he had so indecently expressed. “I am not afraid to tell it to your face,” said he; “I do not like your doctrine. You are a free willer.” “If I have spoken evil,” replied I, “bear witness of the evil.” He paused awhile, and then charged me with praying before the sermon, as if ALL might be saved. “That is false doctrine,” added he, “and if Christ himself came down from heaven to preach it, I would not believe him.”

I wondered at first at the positiveness of my rigid objector: but, upon second thoughts, I thought him modest, in comparison of numbers of professors, who see that Christ actually came down from heaven, and preached the doctrine of perfection in his sermon upon the mount, and yet will face us down that it is an antichristian doctrine. This Antinomian cavilling of hearers against preachers is deplorable; and the effects of it will be dreadful. If the Lord do not put a stop to this growing evil, we shall soon see every where, what we see in too many places, self-conceited, unhumbled men, rising against the truths and ministers of God; men who “are not meek doers of the law,” but insolent judges, preposterously trying that law by which they shall soon be tried; — men who, instead of sitting as criminals before all the messengers of their Judge, with arrogancy invade the Judge’s tribunal, and arraign even his most venerable ambassadors; — men, who should “fall on their faces before all, and give glory to God, by confessing that he is with his ministers,” of every denomination, “of a truth;” but who, far from doing it, boldly condemn the word that condemns them, snatch the two-edged sword from the mouth of every faithful messenger, blunt the edge of it, and audaciously thrust at him in their turn; — men, who, when they see a servant of God in their pulpit, suppose he stands at their bar; try him with as much insolence as Korah, Dathan, and Abiram tried Moses; cast him with less kindness than Pilate did Jesus; force a fool’s coat of their own making upon him; and then, from “the seat of the scornful,” pronounce the decisive sentence: “He is legal, dark, blind, unconverted; an enemy to free grace. He is a rank Papist, a Jesuit, a false prophet, or a wolf in sheep’s clothing.”

III. But whence springs this almost general Antinomianism of our congregations? Shall I conceal the sore because it festers in my own breast? Shall I be partial? No, in the name of Him who is “no respecter of persons,” I will confess my sin, and that of many of my brethren. Though I am the least, and (I write it with tears of shame) the most unworthy of them all, I will follow the dictates of my conscience, and use the authority of a minister of Christ. If Balaam, a false prophet, took in good part the reproof of his ass, I should wrong my honoured brethren and fathers, the true prophets of the Lord, if I feared their resenting some well-meant reproofs, which I first level at myself, and for which I heartily wish there was no occasion.

Is not the Antinomianism of hearers fomented by that of preachers? Does it not become us to take the greatest part of the blame upon ourselves, according to the old adage, “Like priest, like people?” Is it surprising that some of us should have an Antinomian audience? Do we not make or keep it so? When did we preach such a practical sermon as that of our Lord on the mount, or write such close letters as the epistles of St. John? Alas! I doubt it is but seldom. Not living so near to God ourselves as we should, we are afraid to come near to the consciences of our people. The Jews said to our Lord, “In so saying thou reproachest us;” but now the case is altered, and our auditors might say to many of us,” In so saying you would reproach yourselves.”

Some prefer popularity to plain dealing. We love to see a crowd of worldly-minded hearers, rather than “a little flock, a peculiar people zealous of good works.” We dare not shake our congregations to purpose, lest our five thousand should, in three years’ time, be reduced to a hundred and twenty.

Luther’s advice to Melancthon, Scandaliza fortiter, “So preach that those who do not fall out with their sins may fall out with thee,” is more and more unfashionable. Under pretence of drawing our hearers by love, some of us softly rock the cradle of carnal security in which they sleep. For “fear of grieving the dear children of God,” we let “buyers and sellers, sheep and oxen,” yea, goats and lions, fill “the temple” undisturbed. And because “the bread must not be kept from the hungry children,” we let those who are wanton make shameful waste of it, and even allow “dogs,” which we should “beware of,” and noisy parrots that can speak shibboleth, to do the same. We forget that God’s children “are led by his Spirit,” who is “the Comforter” himself; that they are all afraid of being deceived, all “jealous for the Lord of hosts;” and therefore prefer a preacher who “searches Jerusalem with candles,” and cannot suffer God’s house to be made a “den of thieves,” to a workman who “whitewashes the noisome sepulchres,” he should open, and “daubs over with untempered mortar the bulging walls” he should demolish.

The old Puritans strongly insisted upon personal holiness, and the first Methodists upon the new birth; but these doctrines seem to grow out of date. The Gospel is cast into another mould. People, it seems, may now be “in Christ,” without being “new creatures,” and “new creatures” without casting “old things” away. They may be God’s children without God’s image; and “born of the Spirit” without “the fruits of the Spirit.” If our unregenerate hearers get orthodox ideas about the way of salvation in their heads, evangelic phrases concerning Jesus’ love in their mouths, and a warm zeal for our party and favourite forms in their hearts; without any more ado, we help them to rank themselves among the children of God. But, alas! this self adoption into the family of Christ will no more pass in heaven than self imputation of Christ’s righteousness. The work of the Spirit will stand there, and that alone. Again:

Some of us often give our congregations particular accounts of the covenant between the persons of the blessed Trinity, and speak of it as confidently as if the King of kings had admitted us members of his privy council; but how seldom do we do justice to the Scriptures, where the covenant is mentioned in a practical manner! How rarely do the ministers., who are fond of preaching upon the covenant between God and David, dwell upon such scriptures as these! “Because they continued not in my covenant, I regarded them not; because they have transgressed the law, changed the ordinances, and broken the everlasting covenant, therefore hath the curse devoured the earth, and they that dwell therein are desolate: therefore the inhabitants of the earth are burned, and few men left. I say to the wicked, What hast thou to do to take my covenant in thy mouth? They kept not the covenant of God, and refused to walk in his law;” they would not be evangelically legal, “therefore a fire was kindled in Jacob, the wrath of God came upon them, he slew the fattest of them, and smote down the chosen, the elect of Israel!”

We frequently keep back from our hearers the very portions that honest Nathan or blunt John the Baptist would have particularly enforced. The taste of many is perverted; they “loathe the manna of the word,” not because it is light, but heavy food. They must have “savoury meat, such as their soul loveth;” and we “hunt for venison,” we minister to their spiritual luxury, and feast with them on our doctrinal refinements. Hence “many are weak and sickly among us.” Some that might be “fat and well-liking, cry out, My leanness! My leanness!” And “many sleep” in a spiritual grave, the easy prey of corruption and sin.

How few Calebs, how few Joshuas are found among the many spies who bring a report of the good land! The cry is seldom, “Let us go up and possess it,” unless the good land be the map of the Gospel drawn by Dr. Crisp. On the contrary, the difficulties attending the noble conquest are magnified to the highest degree. “The sons of Anak are tall and strong, and their cities are fenced up to heaven.” “All our corruptions are gigantic. The castle where they dwell shall always remain a den of thieves. It is an impregnable citadel, strongly garrisoned by Apollyon’s forces: we shall never love God here with all our souls: we shall always have desperately wicked hearts.”

How few of our celebrated pulpits are there, where more has not been said at times for sin than against it! With what an air of positiveness and assurance has that Barabbas, that murderer of Christ and souls, been pleaded for! “It will humble us, make us watchful, stir up our diligence, quicken our graces, endear Christ,” &c. That is, in plain English, pride will beget humility; sloth will spur us on to diligence; rust will brighten our armour; and unbelief, the very soul of every sinful temper, is to do the work of faith! Sin must not only be always lurking about the walls and gates of the town of Man’s Soul, (if I may once more allude to Bunyan’s Holy War,) but it shall dwell in it, in the King’s palace, “in the inner chamber,” the inmost recesses of the heart; there is no turning it out. Jesus, who cleansed the lepers with a word or a touch, cannot, with all the force of his Spirit and virtue of his blood, expel this leprosy. It is too inveterate. Death, that foul monster, the offspring of sin, shall have the important honour of killing his father. He, he alone is to give the great, the last, the decisive blow. This is confidently asserted by those who cry, Nothing but Christ! They allow him to lop off the branches; but death, the great saviour death, is to destroy the root of sin. In the meantime “the temple of God shall have agreement with idols, and Christ concord with Belial: the Lamb” of God shall “lie down with the roaring lion” in our hearts. Nor does the preaching of this internal slavery, this bondage of spiritual corruption, shock our hearers. No: this mixture of light and darkness passes for Gospel in our days. And what is more astonishing still, by making much ado about “finished salvation,” we can even put it off as “the only pure, genuine, and comfortable Gospel:” while the smoothness of our doctrine will atone for our most glaring inconsistencies. We have so whetted the Antinomian appetite of our hearers, that they swallow down almost any thing. We may tell them St. Paul was, at one and the same time, “carnal, sold under sin,” crying, “Who shall deliver me from this body of death?” and triumphing that he did “not walk after the flesh, but after the Spirit, rejoicing in the testimony of a good conscience,” and glorying that “the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus had made him free from the law of sin and death!” This suits their experience; therefore they readily take our word, and it passes for “the word of God.” It is a mercy that we have not yet attempted to prove, by the same argument, that lying and cursing are quite consistent with apostolic faith; for St. Paul speaks of his “lie,” and St. James says, “With our tongues curse we men.” We may make them believe, that though adultery and murder are damning sins in poor blind Turks and heathens, yet they are only the spots of God’s children in enlightened Jews and favoured Christians: that God is the most partial of all judges; some being accursed to the pit of hell for breaking the law in the most trifling points; while others, who actually break it in the most flagrant instances, are richly “blessed with all heavenly benedictions:” and that, while God beholds “no iniquity in Jacob, no perverseness in Israel,” he sees nothing but odious sins in Ishmael, and devilish wickedness in Esau; although the Lord assures us, “The wickedness of the wicked shall be upon him,” and that “though hand join in hand the wicked shall not go unpunished,” were he as great in Jacob as Korah, and as famous as Zimri in Israel.

We may tell our hearers, one hour, that “the love of Christ sweetly constrains” all believers to walk, yea, to “run the way of God’s commandments,” and that they cannot help obeying its forcible dictates: and we may persuade them, the next hour, that “how to perform what is good they find not; that they fall continually into sin; for that which they do they allow not, and what they would, that do they not; but what they hate, that do they.” And that these inconsistencies may not shock their common sense, or alarm their consciences, we again touch the sweet-sounding string of “finished salvation:” we intimate we have the key of evangelical knowledge, reflect on those who expect deliverance from sin in this life, and “build up” our congregations in a most comfortable, I wish I could say, “most holy faith.”

In short, we have so used our people to strange doctrines, and preposterous assertions, that, if we were to intimate, God himself sets us a pattern of Antinomianism, by disregarding his own most holy and lovely law, which inculcates perfect love, — if we were even to hint that he bears a secret grudge, or an immortal enmity to those very souls whom he commands us to “love as Christ has loved us;” that he feeds them only for the great day of slaughter, and has determined, (so inveterate is his hatred!) “before the foundation of the world” to “fit” them as “vessels of wrath,” that he might eternally fill them with his fiery vengeance, merely to show what a great and sovereign God he is; I doubt whether some would not be highly pleased, and say we had “preached a sound and sweet discourse.” This would probably be the ease, if we addressed them in such a manner as to make them believe they are elect; not, indeed, of those ancient, legal, and wrestling “elect, who cry to God day and night to be avenged of their spiritual adversary,” but of those modern, indolent elect, who have found out a short way to heaven, and maintain, “We are absolutely to do nothing in order to salvation.”

With joy I confess, however, that glorious and rousing truths are frequently delivered in the demonstration of the Spirit and of power. But, alas! the blow is seldom followed. You have seen fond mothers violently correcting their children one instant, and the next dandling them upon their knees; and, by foolishly kissing away their tears, spoiling the correction they had given. Just so it is with several of us: we preach a close discourse, and seem determined to drive the buyers and sellers out of the temple. Our Antinomian hearers begin to awake and look about them: some are even ready to cry out, “Men and brethren, what shall we do?” but, alas! we sound a retreat when we should shout for a second battle. By an unaccountable weakness, before we conclude, we soothe them up, and make a way for their escape; or, which is not much better, the next time we preach, by setting up Dr. Crisp’s doctrine as much as ever, we industriously repair the breach we had made in the Antinomian Babel. And suppose some of us preach against Antinomianism, is not our practice contrary to our preaching? We are under a dangerous mistake if we think ourselves clear from Antinomianism merely because we thunder against Antinomian principles’ for as some, who zealously maintain such principles, by the happiest inconsistency in the world, pay nevertheless, in their practice, a proper regard to the law they revile; so not a few, who profess the deepest respect for it, are so unhappily inconsistent as to transgress it without ceremony. The God of holiness says, “Go and WORK in my vineyard;” the inconsistent Antinomian answers, “I will not be bound by any law; I scorn the ties of duty” but nevertheless “he repents and goes.” The inconsistent legalist replies, “It is my bounden duty to obey; I go, Lord:” nevertheless “he does not go.” Which of the two is the greater Antinomian? The latter, no doubt: his practical Antinomianism is much more odious to God and man than the speculative error of the former. The Lord God help us to avoid both! Whether the hellish wolf comes barefaced, or “in sheep’s clothing;” or, what is a still more dangerous disguise, in Lamb’s clothing; in the clothes of the Shepherd, covered from head to foot with a righteousness which he has “imputed” to himself, and sings the siren song of “finished salvation.”

IV. I shall close these reflections upon the Antinomianism of preachers, by presenting you with sketches of two very opposite ways of preaching. The first is an extract from Bishop Hopkins’ twenty-fourth sermon, entitled, Practical Christianity, upon those words of St. Paul, “Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling,” &c. This testimony will weigh so much the more with you: as he was a sound Calvinist, and a truly converted man. “To work out our salvation, says the godly prelate, is to persevere in the ways of obedience until, through them, that salvation which is begun here on earth be perfected in heaven. This work implies three things:

(1.) Pains and labour. Salvation is that which must be wrought out; it is that which will make the soul pant and breathe, yea, run down with sweat to obtain it.

(2.) It implies constancy and diligence. A Christian that would ‘work out his salvation’ must be always employed about it. It is a web, into which we must weave the whole thread of our lives. That man who works at salvation only by some passionate fits, and then, within awhile, undoes it all again by foul apostasy and notorious sins, will never work salvation out.

(3.) It promises success; though it be hard work, it shall not be long work; continue working, it shall be wrought out; what before was your work, shall be your reward; and this salvation, that was so painful in working, shall be most blessed in the enjoyment.

“Say not, ‘We have no strength to work with.’ What God commands us to do he will assist us in doing. We are impotent, but God is omnipotent. Work, therefore; for this omnipotent God ‘ works in you both to will and to do.’

“The proposition I shall lay down from the text is this: ‘ That it is the duty of every true Christian to work out his own salvation with fear and trembling:’ or,’ that every Christian, yea, every man, ought to work for his living, even for an eternal life.’ To mention places for the proof of this, were to transcribe the Bible. We can no where open this blessed book but we find this truth proved to us, either directly or by consequence. And yet, it is strange in these days to see how dubiously some men, who would be thought admirers of free grace, speak of obedience and working, as if they were the badge of a legal spirit. O, it is a soft and easy doctrine to bid men sit still and believe, as if God would translate them to heaven upon their couches! Is it possible that these notions should be dispersed and entertained, but because it has always been the devil’s policy to vent those doctrines that indulge the flesh under the patronage of free grace and Gospel attainments?

“Wherefore is it that we are commanded to ‘strive that we may enter in at the strait gate? So to run that we may obtain?’ So to wrestle that we may be ‘able to stand?’ So ‘to fight, that we may lay hold on eternal life?’ Can you strive and run, and wrestle and fight, and all this by doing nothing? If God would save you without working, why has he given you grace, an operative principle, that you might work? He might as well save you without grace as without works: for that is not grace that does not put forth itself in working. God, rather than we shall not work, will set us at work. He gives and promises assistance, only that we might work out our own salvation. ‘We are not sufficient to think any thing:’ What then? Must we therefore sit still? ‘No,’ says the apostle: for God, who finds us employment will also find us strength. ‘Our sufficiency is of God.’

“Wherefore is it that men are justly damned? Is it not because they will not do what they are able to do? And whence have they this ability? Is it not from the grace of God’s Spirit? What is it that men expect? Must God drive them to heaven by force and violence, whether they will or not?

“If man will, he may work out his salvation. I speak not this to assert the power of man to work out salvation without the aid of special grace to incline his will. Where there is special grace given to make the will willing to convert, there is nothing more required to make him able, because conversion chiefly consists in the act of the will itself; only to make him willing is required special grace; which they, that favour the undue liberty of the will, deny. Our impotency lies in the stubbornness of our wills. The greatest sinner may work out his own salvation if he will. If he be but willing, he has that already that may make him able. God puts no new powers in the soul when he converts it.

“Are there any so desperately profane as not to have prayed unto God in their whole life? Why now, to what end have you prayed? Was it not for salvation? And did you work for salvation, and at the same time believe you could not work?. Thou art inexcusable, O man, whoever thou art, that wilt not work: it is in vain to plead thou wantest power! God will confute thee out of thy own mouth. “Would a master, when he commands his servant to work, take this as a sufficient excuse for his sloth and idleness, that he has no power to work till God acts and moves him? Why, this is a truth, and it may as well be objected by’ your servants to you, as by you unto God. Though it is impossible that men should stir without God’s concurrence, yet this hinders not endeavour, no, nor is it any matter of discouragement to them. They put these things to the trial. Now, why should we not do so in spirituals as well as in temporals? Are they not of greater concernment? It is not inability, but wilful sloth, that destroys men. Sinners, wherefore will you perish? Why will you sleep away your souls into hell? Is it more painful for you to work than to be damned? Endeavour therefore to do what you can: labour and sweat at salvation’s work, rather than fail of it for a wilful neglect. ‘How shall you escape if you neglect so great salvation?’

“OBJECTION. Thus to press men to working is derogatory to Christ’s merits, by which alone we are saved, and not by our works. Christ has done all for us, and wrought out our salvation by himself. Shall we piece out his work by our obedience, when all we have now to do is to believe on him?”

“ANSWER. There is the sweetest harmony between the merits of Christ and our ‘working out of our salvation.’ To make it evident, I shall show what Christ has done for us, and what he expects we should do for ourselves. He has merited grace, and purchased eternal happiness. And why did Christ merit grace?. Was it not that we might act it in obedience? If he merited grace that we might obey, is it sense to object, that our obedience is derogatory to his merit? If one end of his doing all that he did for us was to enable us to do for ourselves, will any man say, ‘Now I am bound to do nothing, because Christ has done all?’ How lost are such men both to reason and religion, who undertake so to argue! No: salvation was purchased and grace procured, that, by the acting and exercise of that grace, we might attain to that salvation. It is not by way of merit or purchase that we exhort men to work out their salvation. Those are guilty of practical blasphemy against the priestly office of Christ who think to merit it by their own works.

“As Christ has done two things for us, so he requires two things from us.

(1.) That we should put forth all the strength of nature in labouring after grace: and

(2.) That we should put forth the power of grace in labouring for the salvation purchased for us.

(1.) Let every sinner know it is his work to repent and return, that he may live. You cannot sit down and say, ‘What need is there of my working? Christ has already done all my work for me to my hands.’ No: Christ has done his own work, the work of a Saviour and a Surety; but he never did the work of a sinner.

“If Christ, by meriting grace, had bestowed it upon thee, and wrought it in thee, then indeed no more would be required of thee to become holy, but to cast back a lazy look at the purchase of Jesus Christ: then thy sloth would have some pretence not to labour. But this will not do. Our Saviour commands all men ‘to seek first the kingdom of God:’ and the apostle exhorts Simon Magus ‘to pray.’ Do not therefore cheat your own souls into perdition by lazy notions about Christ’s merits. If you sit still, expecting till the meriting grace of Christ drop down into your souls, and change your hearts, truly, it may be, before that time you yourselves may drop down into hell, with your old unchanged hearts!

“(2.) Christ expects that those who have grace should put forth the utmost power thereof in labouring after the salvation he has purchased for them. He has merited salvation for them; but it is to be obtained by their own labour and industry. Is not what Christ has done sufficient? Must he repent, believe, and obey for them? This is not to make him a Saviour, but a drudge. He has done what was fit for a Mediator to do. He now requires of us what is meet for sinners to do; that is, to repent, &c. He now bids you ‘wash and be clean.’ Would you have the great Prophet come and strike off your leprosy, and you do nothing toward the cure? The way to heaven is made possible; but if you do not walk in the way that leads to it, you may still be as far from heaven as ever. Though Christ’s bearing the punishment of the law by death does exempt us from suffering, yet his obeying of the law does not excuse our obedience to the law. Nor is our obedience derogatory to Christ’s, because it proceeds from other grounds than Christ’s did. He obeyed the law as a covenant of works, — we only as a rule of righteousness.

“To conclude upon this point: so work with that earnestness, constancy, and unweariedness in well doing, as if thy works alone were able to justify and save thee’ and so absolutely depend and rely upon the merits of Christ for justification and salvation, as if thou never hadst performed one act of obedience in all thy life. This is the right Gospel frame of obedience, so to work, as if we were only to be saved by our own merits; and withal so to rest on the merits of Christ, as if we had never wrought any thing. It is a difficult thing to give to each of these its due in our practice. When we work, we are too apt to neglect Christ; and when we rely on Christ, we are too apt to neglect working. But that Christian has got the right art of obedience who can mingle these two together; who can with one hand ‘work the works of God,’ and yet, at the same time, lay fast hold on the merits of Jesus Christ. Let this Antinomian principle be for ever rooted out of the minds of men, that our working is derogatory to Christ’s work. Never more think he has done all your work for you, but labour for that salvation which he has purchased and merited. Could ever such senseless objections prevail with men who have seriously read this scripture? ‘He gave himself for us, that he might redeem us from all iniquity, and purify to himself a peculiar people zealous of good works.’ But truly, when sloth and ignorance meet together, if you tell men what powers their natures, assisted by preventing grace, have to work, and how necessary obedience is to salvation, they, with the sluggard, fold their arms in their bosom, doing nothing; telling us these doctrines are Arminianism and flat Popery. But deceive not yourselves: whether this doctrine takes hold on your judgments now, I know not; but this I know assuredly, it shall take hold on your consciences either here or hereafter; and then it will not suffice you to say, either that you had no power to do any thing, or that Christ has already done all for you.”

This excellent discourse should be in all the houses of professors. It would shame the careless remonstrants, and show them how orthodox some Calvinists are in point of works; and it would confound the slothful Calvinists, and make them see how they have left practical Christianity for Antinomian Crispianity. For east cannot be farther from west than the preceding extract of Bishop Hopkins’ sermon is from the following propositions, extracted from Dr. Crisp’s Works, which some make the standard of evangelical preaching. They are refuted also in “Gospel Truth Vindicated, by Mr. Williams,” whose excellent refutation is recommended by fifty-three Calvinist divines of the last century. And Mr. Wesley’s propositions, in the Minutes of the conference held in 1770, may be looked upon as the ground on which that refutation stands.

“Must not a believer, an elect, be reckoned to be a sinner while he does sin? No: though he does sin, yet he is not to be reckoned as a sinner; his sins are reckoned to be taken away from him. A man does sin against God; God reckons not his sin to be his; he reckons it Christ’s, therefore he cannot reckon it to be his. There is no condition in the covenant of grace; man has no tie upon him to perform any thing whatsoever as a condition that must be observed on his part; and there is not one bond or obligation upon man to the fulfilling of his part of the covenant, or partaking of the benefits of it. There is no better way to know your portion in Christ, than, upon the general tender of the Gospel, to conclude absolutely he is yours: say, ‘My part is as good as any man’s:’ set down thy rest here; question it not, but believe it. Christ belongs to sinners as sinners; and if there be no worse than sinfulness, rebellion, and enmity in thee, he belongs to thee, as well as to any in the world. Christ does justify a person before he believes; we do not believe that we may be justified, but because we are justified. The elect are justified from eternity, at Christ’s death; and the latest time is before they are born. It is a received conceit among persons that our obedience is the way to heaven; and though it be not, say they, the cause of our reign, yet it is the way to the kingdom: but I must tell you, all this sanctification of life is not a jot the way of that justified person to heaven. To what purpose do we propose to ourselves the gaining of that by our labour and industry that is already become ours before we do one jot? Must they now labour to gain these things, as if it were referred to their well or evil walking, that as they shall walk so they shall speed? The Lord does nothing in his people upon conditions. The Lord intends not that by our obedience we shall gain something, which, in case of our failing, we shall miscarry of. While you labour to get by duties, you provoke God as much as in you lies. We must work from life, and not for life. There is nothing you can do from whence you ought to expect any gain to yourselves. Love to the brethren, universal obedience, and all other inherent qualifications, are no signs by which we should judge of our state. Every elect vessel, from the first instant of his being, is as pure in the eyes of God from the charge of sin as he shall be in glory. Though such persons do act rebellion, yet the loathsomeness and hatefulness of this rebellion is laid on the back of Christ; he bears the sin, as well as the blame and shame: and God can dwell with persons that act the thing, because all the filthiness of it is translated from them upon the back of Christ. It is the voice of a lying spirit in your hearts, that says, ‘You that are believers (as David) have yet sin wasting your conscience.’ David indeed says, My sins are gone over my head, but he speaks from himself, and all that he speaks from himself was not truth. There is as much ground to be confident of the pardon of sin to a believer, as soon as he committed it, as to believe it after he has performed all the humiliation in the world. A believer may be assured of pardon as soon as he commits any sin, even adultery and murder. There is not one fit of sadness in a believer, but he is out of the way of Christ. God does no longer stand displeased though a believer do sin often. There is no sin that ever believers commit that can possibly do them any hurt. Therefore, as their sins cannot hurt them, so there is no cause of fear in their sins committed. Sins are but scarecrows and bugbears to fright ignorant children, but men of understanding see they are counterfeit things. Sin is dead, and there is no more terror in it than in a dead lion. If we tell believers, except they walk thus and thus holily, and do these and those good works, God will be angry with them, we abuse the Scriptures, undo what Christ has done, injure believers, and tell God lies to his face. All our righteousness is filthy, full of men-struosity, the highest kind of filthiness: — even what is the Spirit’s must be involved within that which is a man’s own, under the general notion of dung. God has done every thing in Christ, and taken away all things that can disturb our peace; but man will be mincing the truth, and tell you, that if you keep close to God, and refrain from sin, God will love you. Christ does all his work for him as well as in him that believes. If persons are not united to Christ, and do not partake of justification before they do believe, there will be bringing to life again the covenant of works; you must of necessity press upon yourselves these terms, ‘I must do, that I may have life in Christ; I must believe.’ Now if there be believing first, then there is doing before living. To what purpose do we tell men of wrath and damnation? We had as good hold our tongues,” &c, &c.

“I observe,” Says my judicious Calvinist author, “the pretence for these opinions is, that they exalt CHRIST and FREE GRACE. Under this shadow Antinomianism set up in Germany. This was the great cry in England above fifty years since. The Synod of New-England expose this as one of the speeches of them whom they call Antinomians: ‘Here is a great stir about grace and looking to hearts; but give me Christ! I seek not for graces, but for Christ: I seek not for promises, but for Christ: I seek not for sanctification, but for Christ: tell me not of meditation and duties, but tell me of Christ.’ Dr. Crisp very often bears upon this point, as if all he said was to advance Christ and grace.”

You will perhaps say that our Gospel ministers are far more guarded than the doctor. But I would ask whether all his scheme is not collected and made to centre in the one fashionable expression of finished salvation? which seems to be our Shibboleth.

If the salvation of the elect was finished upon the cross, then was their justification finished, their sanctification finished, their glorification finished. For justification, sanctification, and glorification finished, are but the various parts of our finished salvation. If our justification be finished, there is no need of believing in order to be justified. If our sanctification be finished, there is no need of mortifying one sin, praying for one grace, taking up one cross, parting with either right eye or right hand, in order to perfect holiness. Again:

Suppose our salvation be finished, it follows, Christ has done all, and we are to do nothing. Obedience and good works are no more necessary in order to it, than cutting and carrying stones are necessary to the completing of Westminster bridge. We are as perfect in Christ, as completely blameless and holy in the midst of all our sins, as ever we shall be in glory. In a word, if salvation be finished, well ordered in all things and sure, our sins cannot take any thing from it, nor our righteousness have any thing to do with it. The little flock of the elect shall be saved, nay, are fully saved now, do what they please; and the multitudes of the reprobates shall be damned, do what they can. Give me only the smooth ring of finished salvation, and without offering the least violence to common sense, I shall necessarily draw every link of Dr. Crisp’s Antinomian chain. I have often wondered how so many excellent men can be so fond of an expression which is the stalking horse of every wild ranter. Is it Scriptural? Which of the prophets or apostles ever used it on earth? Do even “the spirits of just men made perfect,” ascribe finished salvation to the Lamb? If they did, would not their uncollected dust, and the souls “crying under the altar,” prove their praises premature? Will salvation be finished till “the last enemy, death,” is fully overcome by the general resurrection? Again: Is the expression of finished salvation consistent with the analogy of faith? Does it not supersede our Lord’s “intercession at the right hand of God?” Whether he intercede for the reprobate or the elect, acts he not a most unwise part? Is he not giving himself a needless trouble, whether he intercede for the justification of those whom he has himself reprobated, or for the salvation of those whose salvation is finished? Is it right to offer an insult to our High Priest upon his mediatorial throne, under pretence of honouring him on the cross? And may not I say, with judicious Baxter, “See what this overdoing tends to!” See what contempt it pours upon Him “who is the brightness of his Father’s glory!”

If that favourite expression be neither Scriptural nor agreeable to the analogy of faith, is it at least rational? I doubt it is not. Finished salvation implies both a deliverance from bodily and spiritual evils, and a being made fully partakers of heavenly glory, in body and in soul. But waiving the consideration of glory and heaven, and taking the word salvation in its negative and lower sense, I ask, Can it be said, with any propriety, that bodily salvation is finished, while innumerable pains and diseases surround us, to drag us to the grave, and deliver us to putrefaction? And is spiritual ‘salvation finished? “Is the body of sin destroyed?” Do not those very ministers, who preach finished salvation with one breath, tell us with the next,” There is no deliverance, (that is, no finished salvation,) from sin in this life?”

And what end does that expression answer? I know of none but that of spreading Dr. Crisp’s doctrine, and making thousands of deluded souls talk as if the “tower” of their salvation was finished, when they have not so much as “counted the cost;” or when they have just laid the foundation. Therefore, with all due deference to my brethren and fathers who preach finished salvation, I ask, Would it not be better to drop that doctrine, with all the other dangerous refinements of Dr. Crisp,. and preach a finished atonement, a present sovereign remedy, completely prepared to heal all our spiritual infirmities, assuage all our miseries, and fit us for finished salvation in glory? Would not this be as well at least, as to help our patients to compose themselves to sleep upon the pillow of Antinomianism; by making them believe that the preparation of the remedy, and a complete cure, are all one; so that now they have absolutely nothing to do in order to saving health, and (as the apostles concluded about Lazarus,) “if they sleep they shall do well?” And should we not, even in speaking of redemption, imitate the judicious Calvinists of the last century, who carefully distinguished between redemption by the price of Jesus’ blood, and redemption by the power of his Spirit? “The former,” said they, “was finished upon the cross but the latter is not so much as begun in thousands; even in all that are unborn or unconverted.”

V. To speak the melancholy truth, how few individuals are free from practical Antinomianism! Setting aside their attendance on the ministry of the word, where is the material difference between several of our genteel believers and other people? Do we not see the sumptuous furniture in their apartments, and fashionable elegance in their dress? What sums of money do they frequently lay out in costly superfluities to adorn their persons, houses, and gardens!

Wise heathens, by the help of a little philosophy, saw the impropriety of having any useless brittle vessels about them: they broke them on purpose that they might be consistent with the profession they made of seeking wisdom. But we, who profess to have “found CHRIST the Wisdom of God,” purchase such vessels and toys at a high rate; and instead of hiding them for shame, as Rachel did her teraphim for fear, we ‘“write our motto over against the candlestick upon the plaster of the wall,” and any man that fears the God of Daniel may, upon studying the Chinese characters, make out ANTINOMIANISM.

Our Lord, whose garment does not appear to have been cut in the height of the fashion, as it was made without seam, informs us that they who wear “soft clothing” and splendid apparel “are in kings’ houses.” But had he lived in our days, he might have found them in God’s houses; in our fashionable churches or chapels. There you may find people professing to believe the Bible, who so conform to this present world, as to wear gold, pearls, and precious stones, when no distinction of office or state obliges them to it; in direct opposition to the words of two apostles: “Let not their adorning,” says St. Peter, “be that outward adorning of plaiting the hair, and of wearing of gold, or of putting on of apparel.” “Let them adorn themselves in modest apparel,” adds St. Paul, “not with curled hair, or gold, or pearls, or costly array.”

Multitudes of professors, far from being convinced of their sin in this respect, ridicule Mr. Wesley for bearing his testimony against it. The opposition he dares make to that growing branch of vanity, affords matter of pious mirth to a thousand Antinomians. Isaiah could openly reprove the “haughty daughters of Zion, who walked with stretched-forth necks, wanton eyes, and tinkling feet.” He could expose “the bravery of their fashionable ornaments, their round tires like the moon, their chains, bracelets, headbands, rings, and earrings.” But some of our humble Christian ladies will not bear a reproof from Mr. Wesley on the head of dress. They even laugh at him, as a pitiful legalist: and yet, O the inconsistency of the Antinomian spirit! they call Isaiah the evangelical prophet!

Finery is often attended with an expensive table, at least with such delicacies as our purse can reach. St. Paul “kept his body under, and was in fastings often;” and our Lord gives us directions about the proper manner of fasting. But the apostle did not know the easy way to heaven taught by Dr. Crisp; and our Lord did not approve of it, or he would have saved himself the trouble of his directions. In general, we look upon fasting, much as we do upon penitential flagellation. Both equally raise our pity. We leave them both to Popish devotees. Some of our good old Church people will yet fast on Good Friday; but our fashionable believers begin to cast away that last scrap of self denial. Their faith, which should produce, animate, and regulate works of mortification, goes a shorter way to work, — it explodes them all.

“But perhaps ‘we wrestle not with flesh and blood,’ because we are entirely taken up with ‘wrestling against principalities, powers, and spiritual wickednesses in high places.’”

Alas! I fear this is not the case. Few of us know what it is “to cry out of the deep,” to pray and believe, till in the name of Jesus we force our way beyond flesh and blood, come within the reach of the eternal world, conflict in an agony with the powers of darkness, vanquish Apollyon in all his attacks, and continue wrestling till the day of eternity break upon us, and the God of Jacob “bless us with all spiritual benedictions in heavenly places.” John Bunyan’s pilgrim, the old Puritans, and the first Quakers, had such engagements, and gained such victories; but they soon got over the hedge of internal activity, into the smooth easy path of Laodicean formality. Most of us, called Methodists, have already followed them; and when we are in that snare, Satan scorns to conflict with us; puny flesh and blood are more than a match for us. We fall asleep under their bewitching power, and begin to dream strange dreams. “Our salvation is finished, we have got above legality, we live without frames and feelings, we have attained Christian liberty, we are perfect in Christ, we have nothing to do, our covenant is sure,” &c. True! But unhappily it is a covenant with the flesh. Satan, who is too wise to break it by rousing us in the spirit, leaves us to our delusions; and we think ourselves in the kingdom of God, when we are only in a fool’s paradise.

“At midnight, I will rise and praise thee,” said once a pious Jew; but we pious Christians, who enjoy both health and strength, are imprisoned within our bed curtains, long after the sun has “called the diligent to their labour.” When “the fear of the Lord” was in us “the beginning of wisdom,” we durst “not so confer with flesh and blood.” We had then a little faith; and, so far as it went, it showed itself by our works. Then we could without hesitation and from our hearts pray, “Stir up, we beseech thee, O Lord, the wills of thy faithful people, that they, plenteously bringing forth the fruit of good works, may by thee be plenteously rewarded, through Jesus Christ our Lord.” (Collect for the last Sunday in Trinity.) We believed there was some truth in these words of our Lord: “Except a man forsake all that he hath, deny himself, and take up his cross daily, he cannot be my disciple. He that wills save his life Shall lose it, and he that will lose his life for my sake shall find it. If thine eye offend thee, pluck it out: it is better for thee to enter into life with one eye, than having two eyes to be cast into hell fire. Strive to enter in at the strait gate; for I say unto you, that many shall seek to enter in, and shall not be able;” because they will seek to enter in at the wide, rather than the strait gate; the Antinomian or Pharisaic, rather than the evangelically legal gate of salvation. But now “we know better,” say some of us, “we have got over our scruples and legality.” We can “conform to this present world;” cleave to instead of “forsaking all we have,” and even grasp what we have not. What a strange way this of “growing in grace, and in the knowledge of Christ crucified!” Daniel informs us, that he “made his petition three times,” and David, that he offered up his “praises seven times a day.” Once also, like them, we had fixed hours for private prayer and self examination, for reading the Scriptures, and meditating upon them perhaps upon our knees; but we thought this was legality too; and under the specious pretence of going beyond forms, and learning “to pray always,” we first threw away our forms, and, soon after, our endeavours to watch unto prayer. Now we scarcely ever, for any length of time, solemnly bend the knee before “our Father who sees in secret.” And, instead of leaning on Christ’s bosom in all the means of grace, we take our graceless rest on the bosom of that painted Jezebel, formality.

If we are backward in performing that leading work of PIETY, secret prayer, is it a wonder if, in general, we are averse to every work of MERCY that costs us something, beside a little of our superfluous money? And would to God some did not even grudge this, when it is pressed out of their purses, by the importunate address of those who beg for the poor! However, we give yet at the door of a church, or at the communion; whether with indifference or joy, whether out of custom, shame, or love, we seldom examine. But that important branch of St. James’ “pure and undefiled religion before God, even the Father,” which consists “in visiting the fatherless and widows in their afflictions,” is, with many, almost as much out of date as a pilgrimage to our Lady of Loretto. O ye forsaken sons of poverty, and ancient daughters of sorrow, who pine away in your desolate garrets or cellars, without fire in winter, destitute of food, physic, or nurse in sickness! raise a moment your emaciated bodies, wrapped up in thread-bare blankets, if you are possessed of any such covering, and tell me, tell the world, how many of our gay professors of religion have sought and found you out in your deplorable circumstances! How many are come to visit, in you, and to worship, with you, “the Man of sorrows” who once lay on the cold ground in a bloody sweat! When did they “make your bed in your sickness?” When have they kindly inquired into all your wants, sympathized in all your temptations, supported your drooping heads in a fainting fit, revived your sinking spirits with suitable cordials, gently wiped your cold sweats, or mixed them with their tears of pity?

Alas! you sometimes find more compassion and assistance in your extremity from those who never “name the name of Christ,” than from our easy, Antinomian, Laodicean believers. Their wants are richly supplied; that is enough: they do not inquire into yours, and you are ashamed or afraid to trouble them with the dismal story. Nor indeed would some of them understand you if you did. Their uninterrupted abundance makes them as incapable of feeling for you, as the warm inhabitants of Ethiopia are to feel for the frozen Icelanders.

While the table of some believers, (so called,) is alternately loaded with a variety of delicate meats and rich wines, what have ye to sustain sinking nature? Alas! one can soon see your all of food and physic. A pitcher of water stands by your bed side upon a stool, the only piece of furniture left in your wretched apartment. The Lord God bless the poor widow that brought it you, with her two mites! Heaven reward a thousand-fold the loving creature, that not only shares with you, but freely bestows upon you “all her living, even all that she has,” when they forgot to inquire after you, and to send you something out of their luxurious abundance! “The Son of man, once forsaken by all the disciples, and comforted by an angel, make her bed in the time of sickness!” and a waiting band of celestial spirits “carry” her charitable soul “into Lazarus’ bosom” in the awful hour of dissolution! I had rather be in her case, though she should not confidently profess the faith, than in yours, O ye caressed believers, who let your affluence overflow to those that have more need to learn frugality in the school of scarceness, than to receive bounties which feed their sensuality, and indulge their pride.

And ye women professing godliness, who enjoy the comforts of health and abundance, in whose “streets there is no complaining, no decay, whose daughters are as the polished corners of the temple!” when did you ever want visiters? Alas! ye have too many, for the good they do you, or that you do them. Does not your conversation, which begins with the love of Jesus, terminate in religious scandal; as naturally as your soul, which once “began in the spirit, ends now in the flesh?” O that your visiters were as ready to attend work houses, jails, infirmaries, and hospitals, as they are to wait upon you! O that at least, like the Dorcases, the Phebes, and Priscillas of old, you would teach them cheerfully to work for the poor, to be the free servants of the Church, and tender nurses of the sick! O that they saw in you all, now the holy women, “the widows who were widows indeed,” formerly “entertained strangers, washed the saints’ feet, instructed the younger women, and continued night and day in prayer!” But alas! “the love of many,” once warm as the smoking flax, “is waxed cold,” instead of taking fire, and flaming. They who once began “to seek the profit of many,” now seek “their own” ease, or interest; their own honour, or indulgence.

Almost all, when they come to the foot of the hill Difficulty, take their leave of Jesus as a guide, because he leads on through spiritual death to the regeneration. Some, disliking that “door,” like “thieves and robbers, climb up” an easier way. And others, leaving the highway of the cross, under the fair pretence that blind Papists walk therein, make for themselves and others broad and downward roads, to ascend the steep hill of Zion. Those easy paths are innumerable, like the people that walk in them. O that “my eyes, like David’s, did run down like water, because men,” professing godliness, “keep not God’s law,” and are even offended at it! “Their mouth talketh of vanity; they dissemble with their double heart, and their right hand is a right hand of sloth, or positive iniquity.” O that I had the tenderness of St. Paul, “to tell you, even weeping, of those who mind earthly things;” those “who have sinned and have not repented;” those who, while they boast they “are made free by the Son” of God, are “brought under the power of many things;” whom foolish desires, absurd fears, undue attachments, imported superfluities, and disagreeable habits, keep in the most ridiculous bondage!

“O that my head were waters, and my eyes fountains of tears,” to deplore, with Jeremiah, “the slain of the daughter of God’s people, who live in pleasure, and are dead while they live!” And to lament over spiritual Pharisees of every sort; those who say, “Stand by, I am holier than thou;” and those who fix the names of poor creature! blind! and carnal! upon every publican they see in the temple; and boldly placing themselves among the elect, “thank God they are not as other men,” and in particular as the reprobates!

Who can number “the adulterers and adulteresses, who know not that the friendship of the world is enmity against God?” The concealed idolaters, who have their “chambers of imagery within, and set up their idols in their hearts?” The envious Cains, who carry murder in their breasts? The profane Esaus, who give up their birthright for a sensual gratification; and covetous Judases, who “sell the truth” which they should buy, and part with Christ “for filthy lucre’s sake?” The sons of God, who look at the fair daughters of men, and take to themselves wives of all whom they choose? The gay Dinahs, who “visit the daughters of the land,” and come home polluted in body or in soul. The filthy Onans, “who defile the temple of God.” “The prophets of Bethel,” who deceive the “prophets of Judah,” entice them out of the way of self denial, and bring the roaring lion and death upon them. The fickle Marcuses, who depart when they should “go to the work.” The self-made prophets, who “run before they are sent,” and scatter instead of “profiting the people.” The spiritual Absaloms, who rise against their fathers in the Gospel, and in order to reign without them, raise a rebellion against them, The furious Zedekiahs, who “make themselves horns of iron to push” the true servants of the Lord, because they will not “prophesy smooth things and deceit,” as they do?

Who can count the fretful Jonahs, who are “angry to death” when the worm of disappointment “smites the gourd” of their creature happiness? The weak Aarons, who dare not resist a multitude, and are carried by the stream into the greatest absurdities. The jealous Miriams, who rise against the ministers that God honours. The crafty Zibas, who calumniate and supplant their brethren. The treacherous Joabs, who kiss them, to get an opportunity of “stabbing them under the fifth rib.” The busy sons of Zeruiah, who perpetually stir up resentment and wrath. The mischievous Doegs, who carry about poisonous scandal, and blow up the fire of discord. The hypocritical Gehazis, who look like saints before their masters and ministers, and yet can impudently lie, and impiously cheat. The Gibeonites, always busy in hewing wood and drawing water, in going through the drudgery of outward services, without ever aspiring at the adoption of sons. The halting Naamans, who serve the Lord anti bow to Rimmon. The backsliding Solomons, who once chose wisdom, but now pursue folly in her most extravagant and impious forms. The apostatizing Alexanders, who “tread under foot the Son of God, and count the blood of the covenant, wherewith they were sanctified, an unholy thing.” And, to include multitudes in one class, the Samaritans, who, by a common mixture of truth and error, of heavenly and earthly mindedness, “worship the Lord, and serve their gods;” are one day for God, and the next for Mammon? Or the thousands in Israel, who “halt between two opinions,” crying out when Elijah prevails, “The Lord, he is the God!” and when Jezebel triumphs, returning to the old song, “O Baal, save us! O trinity of the world, money, pleasure, and honour, make us happy!”

VI. Time would fail to describe the innumerable branches of Antinomianism, with all the fruits they bear. It may be compared to the astonishing tree which Nebuchadnezzar saw in his mysterious dream: “A strong tree set in the midst of the church; the height thereof reaches unto heaven, and the sight thereof unto the ends of the earth. Its leaves are fair, and its fruit much.” Thousands sleep under its fatal shadow, and myriads feed upon its pernicious fruit. At a distance it looks like “the tree of life planted in the midst of paradise;” but it only proves “the tree of knowledge of good and evil.” The woman, (the Antinomian Church,) is deceived by the appearance. “She sees that it is good for food, pleasant to the eye, and desirable to make one wise.” She eats to the full, and flushed with fond hopes of heaven, nay, fancying herself as God, she presents of the poisonous fruit that intoxicates her, to the nobler part of the Church, the obedient members of the second Adam.

O ye sons of God, and daughters of Abraham, who, in compliance with the insinuation of this deceived Eve, have already stretched forth your hands to receive her fatal present, instantly draw them back, for eternal “death is in the fruit!” Flee from the tree on which she banquets to the tree of life, the despised cross of Jesus; and there feed on “him crucified,” till you are “crucified with him;” till the “body of sin is destroyed,” and you feel eternal life abundantly circulating through all your sanctified powers. And ye uncorrupted, self-denying followers of Jesus, whom love and duty still compel to bear your cross after him, join to pray that “the Watcher and his holy ones may come down from heaven, and cry aloud, Hew down the tree of Antinomianism; cut off its branches, shake off its leaves, scatter its fruit, and let not even the stump of its roots be left in the earth! Your prayer is heard: —

He comes! he comes! the Judge severe!

The seventh trumpet speaks him near.

Behold, he appears in his glory, “with ten thousand of his saints, to execute judgment upon all. The thrones are cast down; the Ancient of days doth sit, whose garment is white as snow, and the hair of his head like pure wool; his throne is like the fiery flame, and his wheels as burning fire. A fiery stream issues, and comes forth from before him: thousand thousands minister unto him, and ten thousand times ten thousand stand before him. The trumpet sounds: the sea gives up the dead which are in it, death and hades deliver up the dead which are in them.” The just are separated from the unjust; and while the “earth and the heaven flee away from the face of him that sits on the great resplendent throne, and there is found no place for them, the judgment is set, the books are opened, and the dead, small and great, are judged, every one according to their works.” Fear not, ye righteous. Ye are “in the hand of the Lord, and there shall no torment touch you. In the sight of the unwise ye seemed to die,” they laughed at your dying daily: “but ye are in peace, and your joy is full of immortality.” Having been a little chastised, you shall be greatly rewarded; for God proved you, and found you worthy for himself. And now that “the time of your visitation is come,” judge the nations, and reign with your Lord for ever; for, “such as are faithful in love shall abide with him; grace and mercy are to his saints, and he careth for his elect: he sets his sheep on his right hand,” and stretching it toward them with ravishing looks of benignity and love, he finally justifies by works those whom he freely justified by faith. How sublime and solemn is the sentence! “‘Come, ye blessed of my Father! inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world. For I was hungry, and ye gave me meat; I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink; I was a stranger, and ye took me in; naked, and ye clothed me; I was sick, and ye visited me; I was in prison, and ye came to me!’ And do not ask, with astonishment, WHEN you gave me all these tokens of your love: for whatever you did out of regard to me, my law, and my people, you did it ‘in my name;’ and whatever you did ‘in my name’ to the least of my creatures, and in particular ‘to the least of these my brethren, you did it unto me!’”

As if he said,

“Think not that I am biassed by lawless partiality. No: I am the Author of eternal salvation to them that obeyed me,’ and made a right use of my sanctifying blood. Such are ‘the blessed of my Father;’ and such are ye. ‘Your faith unfeigned’ produced unfeigned love: you ‘loved not in word only, but in deed and in truth:’ witness the works of mercy that adorned your lives, or the fruits of the Spirit that now replenish your souls. ‘You, of all the families of the earth, have I known’ with approbation. Ye have not ‘denied me in works;’ or, if ye have, bitter repentance, and purifying, renovating faith followed your denial; and by ‘keeping that faith, ye continued in my covenant, and endured unto the end.’ “Thou seest it, righteous Father, for to thee the books are always open. Thou readest ‘my laws in their minds,’ and beholdest my loving precepts ‘written in their hearts:’ I therefore ‘confess them before thee;’ and before you, my angels, who have seen them agonize, and ‘follow me through the regeneration.’ I take the new heavens and the new earth to witness, that ‘I am to them a God, and they are to me a people. They walked WORTHY of God, who called them to his kingdom and glory; therefore they are worthy of me.’

“I have confessed your PERSONS, O ye ‘just men made perfect!’ Ye precious jewels of my mediatorial crown; let me next reward your WORKS. In the days of my flesh I declared, that ‘a cup of water given in my name,’ (and my name ye know is Mercy, Goodness, and Love,) ‘should in no wise lose its reward;’ and that ‘whosoever should forsake’ earthly friends or property for righteousness’ sake, should have ‘a hundred fold, and everlasting life.’ The pillars of heaven have given way; but my promise stands, firm as the basis of my throne. Triumph in my faithfulness, as you have in my forgiving love. I bestow, on all, crowns of blissful immortality; ‘I appoint unto each a kingdom’ which shall not be destroyed. Be ‘kings and priests unto God for ever.’ ‘Prepare to follow me to the realms of glory, and there ‘whatsoever is right (dicaion) that shall ye receive;’ in just proportion to the various degrees of perfection, with which you have obeyed my law, and improved your talents.” Thus are the persons of the righteous accepted, and their works “praised in the gate” of heaven, and “rewarded in the kingdom of their Father.” Thus they receive crowns of life and glory; but it is only to cast them, to all eternity, with unutterable transports, grateful humble love, at the feet of Him who was crowned with piercing thorns, and hung bleeding upon the cross, to purchase their thrones.

While they shout, “Salvation to God and the Lamb!” the Judge turns to the left hand, where trembling myriads stand waiting for their fearful doom. O how does confusion cover their faces, and guilty horror rack their breasts, while he says, with the firmness of the eternal Lawgiver, and the majesty of the Lord of lords: — “Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels! For I was hungry, and ye gave me no meat; I was thirsty, and ye gave me no drink; I was a stranger, and ye took me not in; naked, and ye clothed me not; sick and in prison, and ye visited me not!”f14

Some are not yet speechless; they only falter. With the trembling insolence of Adam, not yet driven out of paradise, they even dare to plead their desperate cause. While stubborn sons of Belial say, “Lord, thy Father is merciful: and if thou didst die for all, why not for us?” While the obstinate Pharisees plead the good they did in their own name to supersede the Redeemer’s merit, methinks I hear a bold Antinomian address thus the Lord of glory: —

“‘Lord, when saw we thee hungry, or athirst, or a stranger, or naked, or sick, or in prison, and did not minister to thee?’ Had we seen thee, dear Lord, in any distress, how gladly would we have relieved thy wants! Numbers can witness how well we spoke of thee and thy righteousness: it was all our boast. Bring it out in this important hour. Hide not the Gospel of thy free grace. We always delighted in pure doctrine, in salvation without any condition; especially without the condition of WORKS. Stand, gracious Lord, stand by us, and the preachers of thy free grace, who made us hope thou wouldest confirm their word.

“While they taught us to call thee, Lord! Lord! they assured us that love would constrain us to do good works; but finding no inward constraint to entertain strangers, visit the sick, and relieve prisoners, we did it not; supposing we were not called thereto. They continually told us, ‘human righteousness was mere filth before thee; and we could not appear, but to our everlasting shame, in any righteousness but thine in the day of judgment.’ As to works, we were afraid of doing them, lest we should have ‘worked out’ abomination instead of ‘our salvation.’

“And indeed, Lord, what need was there of our ‘working it out?’ For they perpetually assured us, it was finished; saying, If we did any thing toward it, we worked for life, fell from grace like the bewitched Galatians, spoiled thy perfect work, and exposed ourselves to the destruction which awaits yonder trembling Pharisees.

“They likewise assured us, that all depended on THY decrees; and if we could but firmly believe our election, it was a sure sign we were interested in thy salvation. We did so; and now, Lord, for the sake of a few dung works we have omitted, let not our hope perish! Let not electing and everlasting love fail! Visit our offences with a rod, but take not thy loving kindness altogether from us; and break not David’s covenant, ‘ordered in all things and sure,’ of which we have so often made our boast.

“May it please thee also to consider, that if we did not love and assist some of those whom thou callest thy brethren, it was because they appeared to us so exceeding legal; so strongly set against free grace, that we judged them to be obstinate Pharisees, and dangerous reprobates. We therefore thought, that, in hating and opposing them, we did thee service, and walked in thy steps. For thou hast said, ‘It is enough if the servant is as his Lord:’ and supposing ‘thou didst hate them,’ as thou dost Satan; we thought we need not be more righteous than thou, by loving them more than thou didst.

“O suffer us to speak on, and tell thee, we were champions for thy free grace. Like true Protestants, we could have burned against the doctrine of a second justification by works. Let then ‘grace’ justify us ‘freely without works.’ Shut those books,f15 filled with the account of our deeds, open the arms of thy mercy, and receive us just as we are.

“If free grace cannot justify us alone, let faith do it, together with free grace. We do believe finished salvation, Lord; we can join in the most evangelical creeds, and are ready to confess the virtue of thy stoning blood. But if thou sayest, we have ‘trampled it under foot, and made it a common thing,’ grant us our last request, and it is enough.

“Cut out the immaculate garment of ‘thy righteousness’ into robes that may fit us all, and put them upon us by imputation: so shall our nakedness be gloriously covered. We confess we have not dealt our bread to the hungry; but impute to us thy feeding five thousand people with loaves and fishes. We have seldom given drink to the thirsty, and often ‘put our bottle’ to those who were not athirst; but impute to us thy turning water into wine, to refresh the guests at the marriage feast in Cana; and thy loud call, ‘ in the last day of the feast at Jerusalem: If any man thirst, let him come to me and drink!’ We never supposed it was our duty to ‘be given to hospitality:’ but impute to us thy loving invitations to strangers, thy kind assurances of receiving ‘all that come to thee;’ thy comfortable promises of ‘casting out none,’ and of feeding them even with thy ‘flesh and blood.’ We did not clothe the naked as we had opportunity and ability; but impute to us thy patient parting with thy seamless garment for the benefit of thy murderers. We did not visit sick beds and prisons, we were afraid of fevers, and especially of the jail distemper; but compassionately impute to us thy visiting Jairus’ daughter, and Peter’s wife’s mother, who lay sick of a fever; and put to our account thy visiting putrefying Lazarus in the offensive prison of the grave.

“Thy imputed righteousness, Lord, can alone answer all the demands of thy law and Gospel. We did not dare to fast; we should have been called legal and Papists if we had; but thy forty days’ fasting in the wilderness, and thy continual abstinence, imputed to us, will be self denial enough to justify us ten times over. We did not ‘take up our cross;’ but impute to us thy ‘carrying THINE;’ and even fainting under the oppressive load. We did not ‘mortify the deeds of the flesh, that we might live:’ this would have been evidently working for life; but impute to us the crucifixion of thy body, instead of our ‘crucifying our flesh, with its affections and lusts.’ We hated private prayer; but impute to us thy love of that duty, and the prayer thou didst offer upon a mountain all night. We have been rather hard to forgive; but that defect will be abundantly made up if thou impute to us thy forgiving of the dying thief: and, if that will not do, add, we beseech thee, the merit of that good saying of thine, ‘Forgive, and you shall be forgiven.’ We have cheated the king of his customs; but no matter; only impute to us thy exact paying of the tribute money, together with thy good advice, ‘Render unto Cesar the things which are Cesar’s.’ “It is true, we have brought up our children in vanity, and thou never hadst any to bring up. May not thy mercy find out an expedient, and impute to us, instead of it, thy obedience to thy parents? And if we have received the sacrament unworthily, and thou canst not cover that sin with thy worthy receiving, indulge us with the imputation of thy worthy institution of it, and that will do yet better.

“In short, Lord, own us freely as thy children. Impute to us thy perfect righteousness. Cast it as a cloak upon us to cover our filthy souls and polluted bodies. We will have no righteousness but thine. Make no mention, we beseech thee, of our righteousness and personal holiness; they are but” filthy rags,” which thy purity forbids thee to take into heaven; therefore accept us without, and we shall shout, Free grace! Imputed righteousness! and finished salvation! to eternity.”

While the bold Antinomian offers, or prepares to offer, this most impious plea, the Lord, who “is of purer eyes than to behold iniquity,” casts a flaming look upon all the obstinate violators of his law. It pierces their conscience, rouses all its drowsy powers, and restores their memory to its original perfection. Not one wish passed their heart, or thought their brain, but is instantly brought to their remembrance. “The books are opened” in their own breast, and every character has a voice which answers to the voice of “the Lion of the tribe of Judah.”

“Shall I pervert judgment,” says he, “and justify the wicked for a bribe? the bribe of your abominable praise? ‘Think you,’ by your base flatteries ‘to escape the righteous judgment of God?’ Is not my ‘wrath revealed from heaven against all ungodliness, and unrighteousnes of men, who hold the truth in unrighteousness?’ Much more against you, ‘ye vessels of wrath;’ who hold an impious absurdity in matchless insolence.

“Said I not to Cain himself at the beginning, ‘If thou doest well shalt thou not be accepted?’ Personal holiness, which ye scorned, is ‘the wedding garment’ I now look for. ‘I swear in my wrath,’ that without it, ‘none shall taste of my heavenly supper. Ye have rejected my word’ of commandment, ‘and I reject you from being kings. Ye cried unto me and I delivered you. Yet have ye forsaken me and served other gods; therefore I will deliver you no more. Go and cry unto the gods whom ye have chosen. I wound the hairy scalp of such as have gone on still in their wickedness. Whosoever hath sinned against me to the last, him do I blot out of my book.’ And this have you done, ‘ye serpents, ye generation of vipers, awake to everlasting shame! Will ye set the briers and thorns against me in battle,’ and make them pass ‘for roses of Sharon and lilies of the valleys? I will go through them with a look, and consume them together. The day is come that burneth like an oven; all that have DONE wickedly are stubble, and must be burned up root and branch. Upon such I rain snares, fire and brimstone, storm and tempest: this is the portion of their cup. Drink the dregs of it. Ye hypocrites, DEPART! and wring them out in everlasting burnings.’

“Said I not, ‘He that does good is of God; but he that does evil is not of God? Be faithful unto death, and I will give you the crown of life; for he that overcometh, and he only, shall be clothed in white raiment, and I will not blot out his name out of the book of life?’ And shall I keep your name in that book for having ‘continued in doing evil?’ Shall I give you the crown of life for having been unfaithful unto death, and clothe you with the bright robes of my glory, because you defiled your garments to the last? Delusive hope! Because ‘your mind was not to do good,’ be ye rather ‘clothed with cursing, like as with a garment! Let it come into your bowels like water, and like oil into your bones!’”

VII. If “these shall go into eternal punishment;” if such will be the dreadful end of all the impenitent Nicolaitans; if our churches and chapels swarm with them; if they crowd our communion tables; if they are found in most of our houses, and too many of our pulpits; if the seeds of their fatal disorder are in all our breasts; if they produce Antinomianism around us in all its forms; if we see bold Antinomians in principle, barefaced Antinomians in practice, and sly Pharisaical Antinomians, who speak well of the law, to break it with greater advantage: should not every one “examine himself whether he be in the faith,” and whether he have a holy Christ in his heart, as well as a sweet Jesus upon his tongue; lest he should one day swell the tribe of Antinomian reprobates? Does it not become every minister of Christ to drop his prejudices, and consider whether he ought not to imitate the old watchman, who, fifteen months ago, gave a “legal alarm” to all the watchmen that are in connection with him? And should we not do the Church excellent service, if, agreeing to lift up our voices together against the common enemy, we gave God no rest in prayer, and our hearers in preaching, till we all “did our first works,” and “our latter end,” like Job’s, “exceeded our beginning?”

Near forty years ago, some of the ministers of Christ, in our Church, were called out of the extreme of self righteousness. Fleeing from it, we have run into the opposite with equal violence. Now that we have learned wisdom by what we have suffered, in going beyond the limits of truth both ways, let us return to a just Scriptural medium. Let us equally maintain the two evangelical axioms on which the Gospel is founded,

(1.) “All our salvation is of God by free grace, through the alone merits of Christ.” And

(2.) “All our damnation is of ourselves, through our avoidable unfaithfulness.”

This second truth, as important as one half of the Bible, on which it rests, has not only been set aside as useless by thousands, but generally exploded as unscriptural, dangerous, and subversive of true Protestantism. Thus has the Gospel balance been broken, and St. James’ “pure religion” despised. What we owe to truth in a state of oppression, hath engaged me to cast two mites into the scale of truth, which Mr. Wesley has the courage to defend against multitudes of good men, who keep one another in countenance under their common mistake. I do not want his scale to preponderate to the disadvantage of free grace. If it did, far from rejoicing in it, I would instantly throw the insignificant weight of my pen into the other scale; being fully persuaded that Christ can never be so truly honoured, nor souls so well edified, when we overdo on either side of the question, as when we Scripturally maintain the whole “truth as it is in Jesus.”

“But are we not in as much danger from overdoing in Pharisaic works, as in Antinomian faith?”

Not at present. The stream runs too rapidly on the side of lawless faith, to leave any just room to fear we shall be immediately carried into excessive working. There would be some ground for this objection, if we saw most professors of religion obstinately refusing to drink any thing but water, eat any thing but dry bread or cheap vegetables; fasting themselves into mere skeletons; wearing sackcloth instead of soft linen; lying on the bare ground, with a stone for their pillow; imitating Origen, by literally “making themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven’s sake;” turning hermits, spending whole nights in contemplation in churches and church yards; giving away all their goods, the necessaries of life not excepted; allowing themselves only three or four hours’ sleep, and even breaking that short rest to pray or praise; overpowering their bodies the next day with hard labour, to keep them under; scourging their backs unto blood every day; or forgetting themselves in prayer for hours in the coldest weather, till they have almost lost the use of their limbs. But! ask any unprejudiced person, who knows what is now called “Gospel liberty,” whether we are in danger of being thus “righteous overmuch,” or legal to such an extreme? I grant, however, we are not absolutely safe from any quarter: let us therefore continually stand on our guard. The right wing of Emmanuel’s army, which defends living faith, is partly gone over to the enemy, and fights under the Nicolaitan banner. The left wing, which defends good works, is far from being out of the reach of those crafty adversaries. Therefore, as we are, or may be, attacked on every side, let us faithfully use “the word of truth, the power of God, and the armour of righteousness on the right hand and on the left.” Let us gallantly fly where the attack is the hottest, which now, in the religious world, is evidently where gross CRISPIANITY (if I may use the word) is continually obtruded upon us as true Christianity: I say, in the religious world: for, in this controversy, “what have I to do to judge them also that are without? Do not ye judge them that are within,” and represent them as opposers of free grace? Should Pharisees, while we are engaged in repelling the Nicolaitans, try to rob us of present and free justification by faith, under pretence of maintaining justification by works, in the last day: or should they set us upon unnecessary and unscriptural works, we shall be glad of your assistance to repel them also.

If you grant it us, and do not despise ours, the world shall admire, in the Shulamite, (the Church at unity in herself,) “the company of two armies, ready mutually to support each other against the opposite attacks of the Pharisees and the Nicolaitans; the Popish workers who exclude the Gospel, and the modern Gnostics, the Protestant Antinomians who explode the law.

May the Lord God help us to sail safely through these opposite rocks, keeping at an equal distance from both, by taking Christ for our pilot, and the Scripture for our compass! So shall we enter full sail the double haven of present and eternal rest. Once we were in immediate danger of splitting upon “works without faith:” now we are threatened with destruction from faith “without works.” May the merciful Keeper of Israel save us from both, by a living faith, legally productive of all good works, or by good works, evangelically springing from a living faith!

Should the Divine blessing upon these sheets, bring one single reader a step toward that good old way, or only confirm one single believer in it, I shall be “rewarded a hundred-fold” for this little “labour of love;” and I shall be even content to see it represented as the invidious labour of malice: for what is my reputation to the profit of one blood-bought soul! Beseeching you, dear sir, for whom these letters are first intended, to set me right where I am wrong; and not to despise what may recommend itself in them to reason and conscience, on account of the blunt and Helvetic manner in which they are written, I remain with sincere respect, honoured and reverend sir, your affectionate and obedient servant in the practical Gospel of Christ,

J. FLETCHER.