you, Zelotes, whose intemperate zeal is now rectified by the judicious solidity of Honestus; and to you, Honestus, whose phlegmatic religion is now corrected by the fervour of Zelotes. Henceforth instead of contending with each other, ye amicably bear together the ark of the Lord. While ye triumphantly sustain the sacred load, and while christian psalmists joyfully sing. "Behold how good and pleasant a thing it is for the brethren to dwell together in unity; union is the refreshing dew which falls upon the hill of Sion, where the Lord promised his blessing, and life for evermore."-While they sing this, I say, the thousands of Israel pass the waters of strife, and take possession of the land of Canaan--the spiritual kingdom of God. Their happiness is almost paradisiacal: The multitude of them that believe are of one heart and of one soul:They continue stedfastly in the Apostles doctrine and fellowship—in breaking of bread and in prayers. They eat their meat with gladness and singleness of heart: neither says any of them, that aught of the things which he possesses are his own; for they have all things common they are perfected in one. Truth has cast them into the mould of love. Their hearts and their language are no more divided. They think and speak the same. In a word, Babel is no more and the new Jerusalem comes down from heaven. O Zelotes, O Honestus, should this pleasing prospect vanish away as the colours of the rainbow? Will ye still make Lorenzo think, that the Acts of the Apostles are a religious novel; and the Christiau harmony there described, a delusive dream? O God of peace, truth, and love, suffer it not. Bless the Scriptures, bless the arguments, which fill these pages. Give, O give me favour in the sight of the two antagonists whom I address. Make me, unworthy as I am, the means of their lasting reconciliation. Remove their prejudices: soften their hearts: humble their minds; and endue me with the strength of spiritual Sampson, that, taking these two pillars of our divisions in the arms of praying love, I may bend them towards each other, and press them, breast to breast, upon the line of moderation, till they become one with the truth, and one with each other. When thou hadst prospered the endeavours of Abraham's servant, to the bringing about the marriage of Isaac and Rebecca, thou wroughtest new miracles. Thou didst melt angry Esau in the arms of trembling Jacob, aud injured Joseph over the neck of his resenting brethren. Repeat, good Lord, these ancient wonders: show thyself still the God of all consolation. Let me not only succeed in asserting the evangelical marriage of condescending Free-grace and humble Free-will, but also in reconciling the contentious divines, who rashly put asunder what thou bast so strongly joined together. O Zelotes! O Honestus! my heart is enlarged towards you. It ardently desires the peace of Jerusalem and your own. If to-day ye do not despise the consistent testimonies of the Fathers, and of our Reformers;-if to-day ye regard the whispers of reason, and the calls of conscience;- if to-day ye reverence the suffrages of the prophets, the assertions of the Apostles, and the declarations of Jesus Christ:-if today ye hear the voice of God speaking to you by the Spirit of Truth, and by the Prince of Peace; harden not your hearts.You, Zelotes, harden it not against Free-will, sincere obedience, and your brother Honestus. And you, Honestus, humbly bow to Free-grace, and kindly embrace your brother Zelotes. All things are now ready. Come together to the marriage of Free-grace and Free-will. Come to the feast of reconciliation. Jesus himself will be there to turn your bitter waters of jealousy into the generous wine of brotherly-kindness. Too long have you begged to be excused; saying, "I have married a wife-I have espoused a party, and therefore I cannot come." Party spirit has se THE SCRIPTURE SCALES. your duced you; put away that strumpet. Espouse Truth: embrace love; and you will soon give each other the right-hand of fellowship. -with rational I have gently drawn you both with the bands of a manarguments. I have morally compelled you with the Spirit's sword-the word of God. By the numerous and heavy weights which fill these scripture-scales, I have endeavoured to turn the scale of the prejudices, which each of you has entertained against one of the gospel-axioms. But alas! my labour will be lost, if you are determined still to rise against that part of the truth, which each of you has hitherto defended. Come then, when reason invites, when revelation bids, when conscience urges, yield to my plea :-Nay, yield to the solicitations of thousands: for al though I seem to meditate alone between you both, thousands of wellwishers to Sion's peace, thousands of moderate men, who mourn for the Their good desolations of Jerusalem, wish success to my mediation, wishes support my pen: their ardent prayers warm my soul: my love for peace grows importunate, and constrains me to redouble my intreaties. O Zelotes, O Honestus, by the names of christians and protestants, which ye bear by your regard for the honour and peace of Sion; by the blessings promised to them that love her prosperity;-by the curses denounced against those who widen the breaches of her wails; by the scandalous joy, which your injudicious contentions give to all the classes of infidels;-by the tears of undissembled sorrow, which God's mistaken zeal dearest children shed in secret over the disputes which has raised, and which your obstinate opposition to a part of the truth continues to foment ;- -by your professed regard for the sacred Book, which your divisions lacerate, and render contemptible;-by the worth of the souls, which you fill with prejudices against christianity;-by the danger of those, who you have already driven into the destructive errors of the Antinomians and of the Pharisees ;-by the Redeemer's seamless -by the insults, the garment, which you rend from top to bottom;blows, the wounds which Christ PERSONAL received in the house of his Jewish friends; and by those which Christ DOCTRINAL daily receives at your own hands; by the fear of being found proud despisers of one half of God's revealed decrees, and rebellious opposers of some of the Redeemer's most solemn proclamations ;-by all the woes pronounced by the against the enemies of his royal crown, of his bloody cross; dreadful destruction which awaits Antichrist: whether he transforms himself into an angel of light, artfully to set aside Christ's righteous law; or whether he appears as a man of God, slyly to super-ede Christ's gracious promises ;-by the horrible curse which shall light on them, who, when they are properly informed, and lovingly warned, will nevertheless obstinately continue to weigh out in false balances the food of the poor, to whom the gospel is preached;--and, above all, by the matchless love of him who was in Christ reconciling the world unto himself, I intreat you, suffer the word of reconciliation: be ye reconciled to reason and conscience to each other and to me-to all the Bible and to primitive Christianity-to Christ our KING and to Christ our PRIEST. So shall all unprejudiced Christians meet and embrace you both, upon the meridian of moderation and protestantism, which stands at an equal distance from Antinomian dreams, and pharisaic delusions. -- O Zelotes-O Honestus-mistaken servants of God; if there is any consolation in Christ; if any delight in truth; if any comfort of love; if any fellowship of the Spirit; it any bowels of mercies, fulfil ye my joy, and the joy of all moderate men in the church militant; nay, fulfil ye the joy of saints and angels in the church triumphant: Be ye like minded; having the same love; being of one accord, of one mind. Let nothing be done through strife, or vain glory; but in lowliness of mind, let each esteem the other better than himself. Look not each on VOL. 1. 51 his own things [on the scriptures of his favourite scale ;] but look also on the things of the other, on the passages which fill the scale defended by your brother. Remember, that if we have all faith, and all external works, without charity we are nothing. Charity suffereth long and is kind; charity envieth not; charity seeketh not her own; charity rejoiceth not in iniquity and discord, but rejoiceth not in truth, even when truth bruises the head of our favourite serpent-our darling prejudice. Let then charity, never-failing charity perfect you both in one. Hang on this golden beam, and it will make you a couple of impartial, complete divines, holding together as closely, and balancing one another as evenly, as the concordant passages which form my scripture scales. My message respecting the equipose of the gospel-axioms, I have endeavoured to deliver with the plainness, and earnestness, which the importance of the subject calls for: if, in doing it, my aversion to uncriptural extremes, aud my love for peaceful moderation, have betrayed me into any unbecoming severity of thought, or asperity of expression, forgive me this wrong, which I never designed, and for which I would make you all possible satisfaction, if I were conscious of guilt in this respect. Ye are sensible, that I could not act as a reconciler, without doing first the office of an expostulator, and reprover!--An office this which is so much the more thankless, as our very friends are sometimes prone to suspect that we enter upon it, not so much to do them good, as to carry the mace of superiority, and indulge a restless, meddling, censorious, lordly disposition. If unfavourable appearances have represented me to you in these odious colours, give me leave to wipe them off, by cordial assurances of my esteem and respect for you. Yes, my dear, though mistaken brothers, I sincerely honour you both for the good which is in you; being persuaded that your mistakes spring from your religious pr. judices, and not from a conscious enmity against part of the truth. When I have been obliged to expose your partiality, I have comforted myself with the pleasing thought, that it is a partiality to an important part of the gospel. The meek and lowly Saviour, in whose steps I desire to tread, teaches me to honour you for the part of the truth which you embrace, and forbids me to despise you, for that which you cannot yet see it your duty to espouse. Nay, so far as ye have defended Free-grace without annihilating Free-will, or contended for Free-will without undervaluing Free-grace, ye have done the duty of evangelists in the midst of this pharisaic and Antinomian generation. For this ye both deserve the thanks of every Bible-christian, and I publicly return you mine. Yes, so far as Zelotes has built the right wing of Christ's palace without pulling down the left; and so far as Honestus has raised the left wing, without demolishing the right; I acknowledge that ye are both ingenious and laborious architects, and I shall think myself highly honoured, if, like an under-labourer, I am permitted to wait upon you, and to bring you some rational and scriptural materials, that you may build the temple of gospeltruth with more solidity, more evangelical symmetry, and more brotherly love, than you have yet done. God only knows what contemptible thoughts I have of myself. It is better to spread them before him, than to do it before you. This only I will venture to say: in a thousand respects I see myself vastly inferior to either of you. If I have presumed to uncover your theological sores, and to pour into them some tincture of myrrh and aloes, it is no proof that I prefer myself to you. A Surgeon may open an imposthume in a royal breast, and believe that be understands the use of his scissors and probe better than the king, without entertaining the least idea of his being the king's superior. If I have made A PAIR of scripture-scales, which weigh gospel-gold better than your SINGLE SCALES; it no more follows, that I esteen myself your superior, than it follows that an artist who makes scales to weigh common gold, esteems himself superior to the ministers of state, because he understands scale-making better than they. Horace will help me to illustrate the consistency of my reproofs for you, with my professions of respect for you. I consider you, Zelotes, as a one-edged sword, which cuts down the pharisaic error: and you Honestus, as a one-edged scymetar, which hews the Antinomian mistakes in pieces: but I want to see you both as the Lord's two-edged sword; and I have indulged my Alpine roughness, in hopes, that [through the concurrence of your candour with the divine blessing, which I implore on these pages] you will be ground to the other edge you want. This, ye know, cannot be done without some close rubbing: and therefore, while ye glitter in the field of action, let not your displeasure arise against a grinding stone cut from the neighbourhood of the Alps, and providentially brought into a corner of your church, where it wears itself away in the thankless office of grinding you both, that each of you may be as dreadful to Antinomianism and to pharisaism, as the cherub's flaming sword, which turned, and cut every way, was terrible to the two first offenders. So shall ye keep the way to the tree of life in an evangelical manner; and instead of triumphing over you, as I go the dull round of my controversial labour, I shall adopt the Poet's humble saying: Fungor vice cotis, acutum Reddere quæ ferrum valet, exsors ipsa secandi. Nor that I dare to flaming zeal pretend, Or rather, considering what the prophet says of the impartial hand which weighed feasting Belshazzar, and wrote his awful doom upon the wall that faced him, I will pray; "O God be merciful to me, a sinner; and when I turn my face to the wall on my dying bed, let not my knees smite one against the other at the sight of the killing word, TEKEL: Thou art weighed in the balance, and art found wanting. Let me not be found wanting either the testimony of thy Free-grace, through faith, or the testimony of a good conscience through the works of faith. So shall the Spirit of thy Free-grace bear witness with my free-willing spirit, that I am a child of thine, that I have kept the faith, and that in the great day, when I shall be weighed in the balances of the sanctuary, I shall be found a JUSTIFIED SINNER, according to the ANTI-PHARISAIC weights, which fill the first scripture-scale; and a JUSTIFIED BELIEVER, according to the ANTI-SOLIFIDIAN weights, which fill the second." A SUPPLEMENT ΤΟ SECTION VIII. (ENDING AT PAGE 624.) ZELOTES founds one of his mistakes chiefly upon three texts, which it may be proper more fully to balance here, on account of the undue stress which he lays upon them. 1. I have suffered the loss of all things for Christ, and do count them but dung, that I may win Christ, and be found in him, NOT HAVING ON MINE OWN [Pharisaic, external] RIGHTEOUSNESS, which is of the [letter of the Mosaic] law.[that antichristian righteousness touching which I was BLAMELESS, when I breathed out threatenings and slaughter against the disciples of the Lord.] Compare Phil. iii. 9. with Phil. iii. 6, and Acts ix. 1. 2. Thou meetest him that rejoiceth, and WORKETH RIGHTEOUSNESS, Is. Ixiv. 4.--Blessed are they who are persecuted FOR RIGHTEOUSNESS SAKE: [that is, for the good THEY DO; it being absurd to suppose, that the wicked will persecute the righteous for the good which Christ did 1750 years ago,] Matt. v. 10.-Solomon said, Thou bast shewed to David my father great mercy, ACCORDING AS he walked before thee IN TRUTH AND RIGHTEOUSNESS, and in uprightness of heart with thee, 1 Kings iii. 6.- -He shall pray unto God, and he will be favourable unto him; for he will render unto man, HIS RIGHTEOUSNESS, Job xxxiii. 26.—O man of God, flee these things [hurtful lusts] and follow after RIGHTEOUSNESS, godliness, &c.-Lay hold on eternal life, 1 Tim. vi. 11, 12.-Who, through faith WROUGHT RIGHTEOUSNESS, Heb. xi. 33.—I have fought the good fight, I have kept the faith, [that worketh by righteous love,], &c. HENCEFORTH there is laid up for ME A CROWN OF RIGHTEOUSNESS, 2 Tim. iv. 7, 8.- -Sow To YOURSELVES IN RIGHTEOUSNESS, reap in mercy, Hos. x. 12.-If the man be poor, thou shalt—deliver him his pledge again, that he may sleep in his own raiment and bless thee; and IT shall be RIGHTEOUSNESS UNTO THEE BEFORE THE LORD THY GOD, Deut. xxiv. 12, 13. MY RIGHTEOUSNESS I hold fast, and will not let it go, Job xxvii. Blessed is he-that DOES RIGHTEOUSNESS at all times, Psalm cvi. 3.- Who shall dwell in thy holy bill? He that walketh uprightly, and WORKETH RIGHTEOUSNESS, Psalm xv. 1, 2. delivereth from death.The wicked shall fall by his own wickedness. THE RIHGTEOUSNESS OF THE UPRIGHT shall deliver them, Prov. xi. 4, 5, 6.-Ye are his servants whom ye obey, whether of sin unto death, or of OBEDIENCE UNTO RIGHTEOUSNESS, Rom. vi. 16.—He that ministereth seed to the sower, &c. increase the faith of YOUR RIGHTEOUSNESS, 2 Cor. ix. 10. He hath given to the poor, HIS RIGHTEOUSNESS remaineth for ever, ibid. verse 9.—If the wicked will turn from all his sins, &c. and keep all my statutes, &c. all his transgressions shall not be mentioned unto him: in HIS RIGHTEOUSNESS THAT HE HATH DONE, he shall LIVE, Ezek. xviii. 21, 22.—That ye may be sincere, and without offence, being filled with THE FRUITS OF RIGHTEOUSNESS, which are by Jesus Christ to the glory of God, Phil. i. 10, 11.-Except YOUR RIGHTEOUSNESS shall exceed the righteousness of the pharisees, ye shall in no case enter into the kingdom of heaven, Matt. v. 20.—Little children, let no man deceive you, he that DOES RIGHTEOUSNESS is 6. -RIGHTEOUSNESS |