An Explanation of Some Terms Used in These Sheets.
AN EXPLANATION OF SOME TERMS
USED IN THESE SHEETS.
THE word Solifidian is defined, and the characters of Zelotes, Honestus, and Lorenzo, are drawn in the advertisement prefixed to the first part of this work. It is proper to explain here a few more words or characters. PHARISAISM is the religion of a Pharisee.
A PHARISEE is a loose or strict professor of natural or revealed religion, who so depends upon the system of religion which he has adopted, or upon his attachment to the school or Church he belongs to; (whether it be the school of Plato, Confucius, or Socinus; whether it be the Church of Jerusalem, Rome, England, or Scotland;) who lays such a stress on his religious or moral duties, and has so good an opinion of his present harmlessness and obedience, or of his future reformation and good works, as to overlook his natural impotence and guilt, and to be insensible of the need and happiness of “being justified freely [as a sinner] by God’s grace through the redemption that is in Jesus Christ,” Romans 3:24. You may know him:
(1.) By his contempt of, or coldness for the Redeemer and his free grace.
(2.) By the antichristian confidence which he reposes in his best endeavours, and in the self-righteous exertions of his own free will. Or,
(3.) By the jests he passes upon, or the indifference he betrays for the convincing, comforting, assisting, and sanctifying influences of God’s Holy Spirit.
ANTINOMIANISM is the religion of an Antinomian.
AN ANTINOMIAN is a professor of Christianity, who is antinomos, against the law of Christ, as well as against the law of Moses. He allows Christ’s law to be a rule of life, but not a rule of judgment for believers, and thus he destroys that law at a stroke, as a law; it being evident that a rule by the personal observance or non-observance of which Christ’s subjects can never be acquitted or condemned, is not a law for them. Hence he asserts that Christians shall no more be justified before God by their personal obedience to the law of Christ, than by their personal obedience to the ceremonial law of Moses. Nay, he believes that the best Christians perpetually break Christ’s law; that nobody ever kept it but Christ himself; and that we shall be justified or condemned before God, in the great day, not as we shall personally be found to have finally kept or finally broken Christ’s law, but as God shall be found to have, before the foundation of the world, arbitrarily laid, or not laid to our account, the merit of Christ’s keeping his own law. Thus he hopes to stand in the great day, merely by what he calls “Christ’s imputed righteousness;” excluding with abhorrence, from our final justification, the evangelical worthiness of our own personal, sincere obedience of repentance and faith; — a precious obedience this, which he calls “dung, dross, and filthy rags:” just as if it were the insincere obedience of self-righteous pride, and Pharisaic hypocrisy. Nevertheless, though he thus excludes the evangelical, derived worthiness of the works of faith from our eternal justification and salvation, he does good works, if he is in other respects a good man. Nay, in this case, he piques himself on doing them; thinking he is peculiarly obliged to make people believe that, immoral as his sentiments are, they draw after them the greatest benevolence and the strictest morality. But Fulsome shows the contrary. FULSOME represents a consistent Antinomian — that is, one who is such in practice as well as in theory. He warmly espouses Zelotes’ doctrine of finished salvation; believing that, before the foundation of the world, we were all Calvinistically, i.e. personally ordained to eternal life in Christ, or eternal death in Adam, without the least respect to our own works, that is, to our own tempers and conduct. Hence he draws this just inference: “If Christ never died for me, and I am Calvinistically reprobated, my best endeavours to be finally justified, and eternally saved, will never alter the decree of reprobation, which was made against me from all eternity. On the other hand, if I am Calvinistically elected, and if Christ absolutely secured, yea, finished my eternal salvation on the cross, no sins can ever blot my name out of the book of life. God, in the day of his almighty power, will irresistibly convert or reconvert my soul; and then the greater my crimes shall have been, the more they will set off Divine mercy and power in forgiving and turning such a sinner as me: and I shall only sing in heaven louder than less sinners will have cause to do.” Thus reasons Fulsome; and, like a wise man, he is determined, if he be an absolute REPROBATE, to have what pleasure he can before God pulls him down to hell in the day of his power; or, if he be an absolute ELECT, he thinks it reasonable comfortably to wait for “the day of God’s power,” in which day he shall be irresistibly turned, and absolutely fitted to sing louder in heaven the praises of Calvinistically distinguishing love: — a love this, which (if the Antinomian Gospel of the day be true) eternally, justifies the chief of sinners, without any personal or inherent worthiness.
INITIAL SALVATION is a phrase which sometimes occurs in these sheets. The plain reader is desired to understand by it, salvation begun, or, an inferior state of acceptance and present salvation. In this state sinners are actually saved from hell, admitted to a degree of favour, and graciously entrusted with one or more talents of grace, that is, of means, power, and ability “to work out their own [eternal] salvation,” in due subordination to God, who, consistently with our liberty, “works in us both to will and to do,” according to the dispensation of the heathens, Jews, or Christians, “of his good pleasure.”
By the ELECTION OF GRACE, understand the free, and merely gratuitous choice which God (as a wise and sovereign benefactor) arbitrarily makes of this, that, or the other man, to bestow upon him one, two, or five talents of free grace.
Opposed to this election, you have an ABSOLUTE REPROBATION which does not draw damnation after it, but only rejection from a superior number of talents. In this sense God reprobated Enoch and David; Enoch with respect to the peculiar blessings of Judaism; and David with regard to the still more peculiar blessings of Christianity. But although neither of them had a share in the election of God’s most peculiar grace; that is, although neither was chosen and called to the blessings of Christianity, their lot was never cast with those imaginary “poor creatures,” whom Calvin and his followers affirm to have been from all eternity reprobated with a reprobation which infallibly draws eternal damnation after it. For Enoch and David made their election to the rewards of their dispensations sure by the timely and voluntary obedience of faith. And so might all those who obstinately bury their talent or talents to the last.
By FUTURE CONTINGENCIES, understand those things which will or will not be done; as the free, unnecessitated will of man shall choose to do them or not.
By SEMINAL EXISTENCE, understand the existence that we had in Adam’s loins before Eve had conceived; or the kind of being which the prince of Wales had in the loins of the king before the queen came to England.