Section 11.

SECTION 11.

An address to Christianized Jews

AND ye, Christianized Jews, will you still be offended at our sincerely preaching free grace to all our fellow Gentiles? Will you still stop your ears and cry out, “The children of Abraham, the temple of the Lord are we?” Or, in other terms, we are the little flock necessarily contradistinguished from the immense herd of absolute reprobates. Will ye still assert, f128 Reprobos ideo in hanc pravitatem addictos, quia justo et inscrutabili Dei judicio suscitati sunt ad gloriam ejus sua damnatione illustrandam: “That the reprobates are devoted to wickedness, because, through the just and unsearchable judgment of God, they were raised up to illustrate his glory by their damnation?” Will ye still add f128 Quos vero damnationi addicit, his justo quidem et irreprehensibili, sed incomprehensibili ejus judicio, vitæ aditum præcludi. “That by God’s just and irreprehensible, though incomprehensible judgment, the way to life is blocked up for those whom he has devoted to damnation?” Will ye never blush to intimate, f128 Quos ergo Dens præterit, reprobat. Neque alia causa, nisi quod ab hæreditate, quam filiis suis prædestinat, illos vult exeludere: “Therefore those whom God passes by, he reprobates, for no other reason but this; he will exclude them from the inheritance which he predestinates for his sons?” Will ye still call “blind” all who think that God is sincerely loving to every man, without any exception, in the day of salvation? Will ye still monopolize “the light that enlightens every man who comes into the world?” Will ye still sound the bottomless abyss of Divine mercy with your short line, and judge of the Almighty’s enlarged heart by the narrowness of your own? O learn to know the God of love, the God of truth better. “He is not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance. He commands all men every where to repent:” and he bids us “account his long suffering salvation; [assuring us that] the riches of his goodness, and forbearance, and long suffering lead to repentance [even those wretches who,] after their hardness and impenitent heart, treasure up unto themselves wrath against the day of wrath, and revelation of his righteous judgment.” If you will not credit God’s word, pay at least some regard to his oath. “As I LIVE,” says he, “I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but that he turn from his way and live.” Just as if he had said, “By myself I swear that I have absolutely reprobated no man. If any perish, their destruction is of themselves, and not of merciless decrees rashly imputed to my sovereignty. Free agency in man, and not free wrath in me, sinks those who make their conditional rejection and reprobation sure by their unnecessary unbelief and avoidable impenitency. Far from delighting absolutely in the reprobation of any one sinner, I solemnly protest that I would offer violence to the liberty of the most obstinate, and force them all into heaven by the exertion of my omnipotence, if my truth as a lawgiver, my justice as a judge, my veracity as the inspirer of my prophets, my wisdom as a rewarder, and my equity as a punisher, did not absolutely forbid it.” Come then, my prepossessed brethren, show yourselves “the children of Abraham:” return to the God of your father, — the God by whom “ALL the families of the earth may be blessed in the seed” of Abraham. Think not that the Lord is only jealous of his supreme dominion; nor make him graceless and merciless toward countless myriads of reprobated infants, to extol the grim sovereignty which your imagination has set up. Set not at odds Heaven’s jarring attributes;

Nor, with one excellence, another wound.

Allow God to be “all over, consummate, absolute, full orb’d, in his whole round of rays complete.” Merciful in the day of salvation, and just in the day of judgment, to every individual of the human race. What can you possibly object to a doctrine so rational, so Scriptural, so worthy of God! If you complain that we make the way to heaven too broad, I ask, Ought we not to represent it as broad as the Scriptures make it? Do we make it wider than St. Peter did when truth and love made him divest himself of his Jewish prejudices, and cry out with pleasing amaze, “Of a truth I perceive that God is no respecter of persons; but in every nation he that feareth him and worketh righteousness is accepted of him?” Or do we make it narrower than St. Paul, when he wrote: “If ye live after the flesh, ye shall die: no adulterer, &c, hath any inheritance in the kingdom of God?” For your own credit do not ask, “If all men may be saved through Christ, by following the light of the Gospel dispensation, which they are under, what advantage hath the Christian? and what profit is there of baptism and Christianity?” If you make such an objection, you “show yourselves to be Christianized Jews” indeed. The apostle has just said, “If the uncircumcision,” i.e. if uncircumcised heathens (like Melchisedec or Job, Cornelius or the Canaanitish woman) “keep the righteousness of the law [according to their light,] shall not their uncircumcision be counted for circumcision?” That is, shall they not be saved as well as if they were circumcised Jews? St. Paul saw that the partial hearts of the Jews would take fright at his doctrine; and would start an objection, capable of demolishing, if possible, the impartiality of God, and the freeness of the everlasting Gospel. He therefore produces this formidable objection thus: — If the Gentiles may be saved by following their light, “what advantage hath the Jew? or what profit is there of circumcision?” Romans 3:1. The answer which he gives stops the mouths of all Jews, whether they live in London, Rome, or Jerusalem. “The Jews,” says he, (and much more the Christians,) “have much advantage every way, chiefly because that unto them were committed the oracles of God.” The heathens have only the light of God’s works, the light of God’s providence, the light of reason, the light of conscience, and the light of that saving grace which “has appeared to all men, teaching them to live soberly,” &c, and reproving them when they do not. But the Jews, (to say nothing of the light of tradition, which is far brighter among them than among the heathens,) over and above this fivefold light, have the light of the Old Testament; and Christians the light of the New.

Come then, my prejudiced brethren, let St. Paul’s answer satisfy you. Get from under your parched gourd of reprobation. “Let not your eye be evil because God is good;” nor fret, like Jonah, because the Father of mercies extends his compassion even to all the humbled heathens in the great city of Nineveh. “As the elect of God, put on bowels of mercy,” and show yourselves the genuine children of Him who “is loving to every man, and whose mercy is over all his works.” So shall your mistakes no longer straiten your minds, sour your tempers, and shut your hearts against your “non-elected” neighbours.

And supposing you are of the happy few, in whose souls the impartial grace of God overrules the ordinary consequences of your partial doctrines; — supposing you are “loving to every man,” and have more bowels of mercy than the God whom you extol; — supposing you are true to all men, and surpass in sincerity the God whom you recommend, who calls “all men every where to repent,” and all the day long stretches out his hands in token of his compassionate love to people, on whom he absolutely fixed his immortal hatred before the foundation of the world; — supposing, I say, you have the happiness of being so much better than your principles, so much holier than the god of your OPINIONS, [Note — I say not “the God of your SALVATION;”] yet, by renouncing those opinions, you will no longer countenance Antinomianism, deceive the simple, contradict yourselves, shock moralists, and render Christianity contemptible in the eyes of all that confound it with your doctrines of forcible grace to hundreds, and of forcible wrath to thousands.

Should you countenance your Jewish notions f129 by saying, “We are Christians: we have nothing to do with the heathens:” I answer:

(1.) You have far too much to do with them, when, by the “doctrine of grace,” which you so zealously inculcate, you indirectly send them, one and all, to the pit; unless they are brought under the Christian dispensation.

(2.) You renounce the Church of England, if you disregard them: for on Good Friday (the day on which Christ “tasted death for every man,”) she enjoins us to pray thus for them: “O merciful God, who hatest nothing that thou hast made, nor wouldest the death of a sinner, but RATHER that he should be converted and live, have mercy upon all Jews, Turks, infidels, and heretics.”

(3.) You indirectly sacrifice the feelings of humanity, and the honour of God’s perfections, to your unscriptural doctrine of grace, when you embrace the horrid idea of the insured damnation of the heathens, for the injudicious pleasure of saying, “Why me! Why me!” and of teaching the “poor reprobated creatures,” while they sink into the bottomless pit, to say, “Why me! Why me!” A dreadful why me this, which is not less offensive to God’s justice, impartiality, goodness, and truth, than your why me is odious to his wisdom, equity, veracity, and holiness.

(4.) If Cain was culpable for intimating that he had nothing to do with his brother, when he had just knocked him on the head, are they praiseworthy, who enjoy with peculiar delight, and recommend with uncommon glee, “doctrines of grace,” so called, which absolutely the unavoidable damnation of perhaps, as many millions of their unborn fellow creatures, as Abel had hairs upon his head? And do they mend the matter, when, to vindicate their severe opinions, they calmly wipe their mouth, and say, “We have nothing to do with the heathens?” That is, in plain English, “our orthodoxy demands, that they should inevitably perish if they do not explicitly believe in Christ crucified, of whom they never heard: nor do we care what becomes of them. Let them sink, provided our doctrines of grace stand!”

O my dear brethren, my heart is enlarged toward you, though yours is straitened toward the heathens, and those who do not engross the light of “the Sun of righteousness.” Suffer the word of expostulation one moment more. Do not you detest the character of a stiff Pharisee? I know you do, in the circumcised progeny. And why should you admire it in the baptized race? I am persuaded that you abhor the damnatory bull of those self-elected men of old, who, from the height of their conceited orthodoxy, looked down upon their neighbours and said, “This people who know not [what we call] the law are cursed.” And will you exemplify their uncharitable positiveness by indirectly saying, “This people [these myriads of men] who know not [what we call] the Gospel are cursed?” Will ye become Christianized Pharisees, to contenance abandoned Antinomians. No: the spark of candour in your breast is stirred, and almost sets fire to your prejudices. You are staggered, you are ready to yield to the force of truth! Some of you would do it even now, if you were not afraid that our doctrine of free grace obscures the Christian dispensation, and encourages the pernicious delusion of antichristian moralists. To convince you that your fear is groundless, permit me to expostulate with them before you.