Introduction.

AN ESSAY ON TRUTH; BEING A RATIONAL

VINDICATIONOF THE DOCTRINE OF

SALVATION BY FAITH.

WITH A DEDICATORY EPISTLE TO THE RIGHT

HON. THE COUNTESS OF HUNTINGDON.

Without faith it is impossible to please God, Hebrews 11:6. Whatsoever is not of faith is sin, Romans 14:23. Faith, if it hath not works, is dead, being alone, James 1:17. Good works spring out necessarily of a true and lively faith. (Twelfth Article.)

In Christ Jesus, &c, nothing availeth but faith, which worketh by love, Galatians 5:6

MY LADY, — Because I think it my duty to defend the works of faith against the triumphant errors of the Solifidians, some of your ladyship’s friends conclude that I am an enemy to the doctrine of salvation by faith, and their conclusion amounts to such exclamations as these: “How could a lady, so zealous for God’s glory and the Redeemer’s grace, commit the superintendency of a seminary of pious learning to a man that opposes the fundamental doctrine of Protestantism! How could she put her sheep under the care of such a wolf in sheep’s clothing!” This conclusion, my lady, has grieved me for your sake; and to remove the blot that it indirectly fixes upon you, as well as to balance my Scriptural Essay on the Rewardableness of the Works of Faith, I publish, and humbly dedicate to your ladyship, this piece of my Equal Check to Pharisaism and Antinomianism. May the kindness which enabled you to bear for years with the coarseness of my ministrations, incline you favourably to receive this little token of my unfeigned attachment to Protestanism, and of my lasting respect for your ladyship!

Your aversion to all that looks like controversy can never make you think that an Equal Check to the two grand delusions, which have crept into the Church, is needless in our days. I flatter myself, therefore, that though you may blame my performance, you will approve of my design. And indeed what true Christian can be absolutely neuter in this controversy? If God has a controversy with all Pharisees and Antinomians, have not all God’s children a controversy with Pharisaism and Antinomianism? Have you not for one, my lady? Do you not check in private, what I attempt to check in public? Does not the religious world know that you abhor, attack, and pursue Pharisaism in its most artful disguises? And have I not frequently heard you express, in the strongest terms, your detestation of Antinomianism, and lament the number of sleeping professors whom that Delilah robs of their strength? Nor would you, I am persuaded, my lady, have countenanced the opposition which was made against the Minutes, if your commendable, though (as it appears to me) at that time too precipitate zeal against Pharisaism had not prevented your seeing that they contain the Scripture truths which are most fit to stop the rapid progress of Antinomianism.

However, if you still think, my lady, that I mistake with respect to the importance of those propositions; you know I am not mistaken when I declare before the world that a powerful, practical, actually saving faith is the only faith I ever heard your ladyship recommend as worthy to be contended for. And so long as you plead only for such a faith: so long as you abhor the winter faith that saves the Solifidians In their own conceit: while they commit adultery, murder, and incest, if they choose to carry Antinomianism to such a dreadful length; so long as you are afraid to maintain either directly or indirectly, that the evidence and comfort of justifying faith may indeed be suspended by sin; but that the righteousness of faith, and the justification which it instrumentally procures, can never be lost, no not by the most enormous and complicated crimes; whatever diversity there may be between your ladyship’s sentiments and mine, it can never be fundamental. I preach salvation by a faith that actually works by obedient love: and your ladyship witnesses salvation by an actually operative faith. Nor can I, to this day, see any material difference between those phrases: for if I profess a faith that is actually operative, I cannot with propriety find fault with a faith that actually operates: I cannot with decency sacrifice its works to “Antinomian dotages.” f122 Permit me also to observe, that the grand questions debated between my opponents and me are not (as I fear your ladyship apprehends) whether Pharisaic merit shall eclipse the Redeemer’s worthiness; or whether the doctrine of salvation by a lively faith shall be given up to mere moralists, I no more plead either for the one or for the other, than I do for placing the pretender upon the British throne, and for sacrificing the great charter to arbitrary power. No, my lady. What we contend about is:

(1.) Whether Christ’s law is not perfectly consistent with his blood.

(2.) Whether we are to set him at naught as a Prophet, a King, and a Judge, under pretence of exalting him as a Priest, an Advocate, and a “Surety of the better covenant,” that threatens fallen believers with a “sorer punishment” then that which was inflicted upon the despisers of the Mosaic covenant.

(3.) Whether the evangelical worthiness, which a true believer really derives from Christ, is not absolutely necessary to salvation.

(4.) Whether such a worthiness is not as consistent with Christ’s original and paramount merit, as the light that shines in your apartment is consistent with the original and transcendent brightness of the sun.

(5.) Whether that faith is living, which evidences itself by gross immoralities.

(6.) Whether it is not rather the “dead faith” that St. James exclaims against. And

(7.) Whether the Solifidians do not set up the “abomination of desolation in the holy place,” when they directly or indirectly f123 teach that all believers may go any length in sin, without losing their heavenly thrones, or the Divine favour: that a man may have the justifying, saving, operative faith which your ladyship pleads for, while he adds idolatry to incontinence, murder to adultery, and curses to the repeated denial of Jesus Christ: that fallen believers, who have returned to their sins “as a sow that is washed does to her wallowing in the mire,” stand immaculate before God in a robe of imputed righteousness, even while they “turn God’s grace into lasciviousness, and commit all uncleanness with greediness:” that they shall all infallibly sing in heaven in consequence of their most grievous falls on earth; and that a kind of hypocritical, lying free grace is to be preached to all sinners, which necessarily shuts up most of them under the absolute free wrath of a God ever merciless toward the majority of mankind.

Now, my lady, as I am persuaded that you do not admire such an immoral and narrow Gospel: as I believe that if at any time it creeps into your chapels, it is without your approbation, under the mask of decency, and only by the means of the specious phrases of free Gospel, electing, everlasting love, finished salvation, and free distinguishing grace, which, according to the analogy of the modish faith, sweetly make way for the inseparable and bitter doctrines of a confined Gospel of everlasting hate, reprobating unmercifulness, finished damnation, and free, distinguishing wrath; and as I do your ladyship the justice to acknowledge, that your most earnest desire is to support what appears to you a free and holy Gospel, at the expense of your fortune, life, and character; I beg, my lady, you will also do me the justice to believe that if I oppose the Solifidian Gospel of the day, it is only because it appears to me a confined and unholy Gospel, calculated to foster the Antinomianism of Laodicean believers, and to render Christ’s undefiled religion contemptible to the RATIONAL, and execrable to the MORAL world. If you grant me this request, I shall only trouble you with one more, which is, to believe that, notwithstanding the part I have taken in the present controversy, I remain, with my former respect and devotedness, my lady, your ladyship’s most obliged and obedient servant in the Gospel,

J. FLETCHER

MADELEY, March 12, 1774.

INTRODUCTION.

EXCEEDINGLY sorry should I be if the testimony which I have borne to the necessity of good works caused any of my readers to do the worst of bad works, that is, to neglect believing, and to depend upon some of the external, faithless performances which conceited Pharisees call “good works;” and by which they absurdly think to make amends for their sins, to purchase the Divine favour, to set aside God’s mercy, and to supersede Christ’s atoning blood. Therefore, lest some unwary souls, going from one extreme to the other, should so unfortunately avoid Antinomianism as to run upon the rocks which are rendered famous by the destruction of the Pharisees, I shall once more vindicate the fundamental anti-Pharisaic doctrine of salvation by faith: I say once more, because I have already done it in my guarded sermon. And to the scriptures, articles, and arguments produced in that piece, I shall now add rational and yet Scriptural observations, which, together with appeals to matter of fact, will, I hope, soften the prejudices of judicious moralists against the doctrine of faith, and reconcile considerate Solifidians to the doctrine of works. In order to this, I design in general to prove that true faith is the only plant which can possibly bear good works; that it loses its operative nature, and dies, when it produces them not; and that it as much surpasses good works in importance, as the motion of the heart does all other bodily motions. Inquire we first into the nature and ground of saving faith.