by the whole catholic church, was of your sentiment; therefore you are a Pelagian; give up your heresy :" should I, upon such an assertion, give up the Godhead of our Saviour? Certainly not. And shall I, upon a similar argument, advanced by the help of a French monk, give up truths with which the practical gospel of Jesus Christ must stand or fall? God forbid.

2. We desire to be confronted with all the pious protestant divines, except those of Dr. Crisp's class, who are a party; but, who would believe it? The suffrage of a papist is brought against us! Astonishing! That our opposers should think it worth their while to raise one recruit against us in the immense city of Paris, where fifty thousand might be raised against the bible itself!

3. So long as Christ, the prophets, and apostles are for us, together with the multitude of the puritan divines of the last century, we shall smile at an army of popish friars. The knotted whips that hang by their side will no more frighten us from our bibles, than the ipse dixit of a Benedictine monk will make us explode, as heretical, propositions which are demonstrated to be scriptural.

4. An argument, which has been frequently used of late against the anti-Calvinist divines, is, "This is downright popery! This is worse than popery itself!" And honest protestants have been driven by it to embrace doctrines which were once no less contrary to the dictates of their conscience, than they are still to the word of God. It is proper, therefore, such persons should be informed, that St. Augustine, the Calvin of the fourth century, is one of the saints whom the popes have in their highest veneration; and that a great number of friars in the church of Rome are champions for Calvinism, and oppose St. Paul's doctrine, that "the grace of God that bringeth salvation has appeared unto all men," as strenuously as some "real protestants" do among us. Now, if good Father Walsh is one of that stamp, what wonder is it that he should so well agree with the gentlemen who consulted him? If Calvinism and protestantism are synonymous terms, as some divines would make us believe, many monks may well say that "their doctrine is a great deal nearer that of the

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SECOND CHECK TO ANTINOMIANISM.

protestants," than the Minutes; for they may even pass for "real protestants."

5. But whether the good friar is a hot Jansenist, or only a warm Thomist, (so they call the popish Calvinists in France,) we appeal from his bar to the tribunal of Jesus Christ, and from the published conversation "to the law and the testimony." What is the decision of a popish monk to the express declarations of the scripture, the dictates of common sense, the experience of regenerate souls, and the writings of a cloud of protestant divines? No more than a grain of loose sand to the solid rock on which the church is founded.

I hope the gentlemen concerned in the Conversation lately published, will excuse the liberty of this postscript. I reverence their piety, rejoice in their labours, and honour their warm zeal for the protestant cause. But that very zeal, if not accompanied with a close attention to every part of the gospel truth, may betray them into mistakes which may spread as far as their respectable names: I think it therefore my duty to publish these strictures, lest any of my readers should pay more regard to the good-natured friar, who has been pressed into the service of Dr. Crisp, than to St. John, St. Paul, St. James, and Jesus Christ; on whose plain declarations I have shown that the Minutes are founded.

1

THIRD CHECK

ΤΟ

ANTINOMIANISM:

IN

A LETTER

ΤΟ

THE AUTHOR OF PIETAS OXONIENSIS.

BY

THE VINDICATOR OF THE REV. MR. WESLEY'S

MINUTES.

"

Reprove, rebuke, exhort, with all long-suffering and [scriptural] doctrine; for the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine."-2 Tim. iv. 2, 3.

'Wherefore rebuke them sharply, that they may be sound in the faith. But let brotherly love continue."-Titus i. 13; Heb. xiii. 1.

A THIRD CHECK TO ANTINOMIANISM.

HONOURED AND DEAR SIR,

ACCEPT my sincere thanks for the Christian courtesy, with which you treat me in your five letters. The titlepage informs me, that a concern for "mourning backsliders, and such as have been distressed by reading Mr. Wesley's Minutes, or the Vindication of them," has procured me the honour of being called to a public correspondence with you. Permit me, dear sir, to inform you in my turn, that a fear lest Dr. Crisp's balm should be applied, instead of the "balm of Gilead," to Laodicean loiterers, who may haply have been brought to penitential distress, obliges me to answer you in the same public manner in which have addressed me. you

Some of our friends will, undoubtedly, blame us for not yet dropping the contested point. But others will candidly consider, that controversy, though not desirable in itself, yet, properly managed, has an hundred times rescued truth groaning under the lash of triumphant error. We are indebted to our Lord's controversies with the pharisees and scribes for a considerable part of the four gospels. And, to the end of the world, the church will bless God for the spirited manner in which St. Paul, in his epistles to the Romans and Galatians, defended the controverted point of a believer's present justification by faith; as well as for the steadiness with which St. James, St. John, St. Peter, and St. Jude, carried on their important controversy with the Nicolaitans, who abused St. Paul's doctrine to antinomian purposes.

Had it not been for controversy, Romish priests would, to this day, feed us with Latin masses and a wafer god. Some bold propositions, advanced by Luther, against the doctrine of indulgences, unexpectedly brought on the Reformation. They were so irrationally attacked by the infatuated papists, and so scripturally defended by the