peculiar favours from heaven, is no less hurtful to the cause of Christ, when people's lives show them to be actuated by a spirit of delusion; and setting up impulses in the room of repentance, faith, hope, charity, obedience, has done no small mischief in the Church of God.

These are the counterfeits and bane of inward religion: these the tares that the enemy sows in the night of ignorance and superstition; and, I repeat it again, you cannot be too much commended, sir, for endeavouring to detect and stop him in this work of darkness. But did you act with all the caution necessary in so important an undertaking, and, while you were pulling out the tares, did not you root up, unawares, some of the wheat also?

I had some fear of it, sir, while I was hearing you; and I beg leave to lay before you the ground of this fear in the following observations, which I humbly entreat you to weigh in the balance of the sanctuary :

I. Is the representing, in general, virtue, benevolence, good nature, and morality, as the way to salvation, agreeable to either the word of God, or the doctrine of our Church? Both show us no other way but Christ alone, Christ "the way, the truth, and the life;" Christ the door, the only door to come to the Father, and receive grace and glory. "If justification comes by obeying the law," says Paul, Gal. ii, 21, "then Christ died in vain;" and to the Ephesians, ii, 8, he says, "By grace you are saved through faith, and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God; not of works, lest any man should boast."

The only means and instrument, on our part, required for salvation, (according to our Church, second sermon on the passion,) is faith, that is to say, a sure trust and confidence in the mercy of God, whereby we persuade ourselves that God both has forgiven and will forgive our sins; that he has taken us again into his favour; that he has released us from the bonds of damnation, and received us again into the number of his elect people, not for our merits and deserts, but only and solely for the merits of Christ's death and passion.

This faith is so far from superseding morality and good works, that it works infallibly by love, and love infallibly by obedience, and consequently produces morality and good works, truly so called. "Do we make void the law through faith?" says Paul: "nay, we establish the law."

Nevertheless, faith unfeigned alone justifieth, if the word of God and the articles of our Church stand for any thing; the eleventh of which runs thus: "We are accounted righteous before God, only for the merit of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, by faith, and not for our own works and deservings; wherefore, that we are justified by faith only, is a most wholesome doctrine, and very full of comfort, as is more largely expressed in the homily on justification:" to which I refer you, sir, or to the enclosed extract of our homilies on this point, if you please to peruse it. II. Does what you said, sir, of reason and free agency, in the second part of your discourse, perfectly agree with what you said in the first? You told us first, (if I understood you rightly,) that since the fall, man's reason is so darkened, that the greatest philosophers staggered even at the fundamental truths of religion, the being of a God, the immortality of the soul, &c; that his passions are so disorderly and impetuous, as to hurry him down the paths of error and vice; that reason, so far from bringing him back, redoubles the cheat, and makes him ingenious to

excuse and satisfy his unruly appetites; that St. Paul's words painted his helplessness with true colours, "The good that I would I do not, and the evil I would not that I do," &c.

This, sir, was a superstructure worthy of the foundation; this agreed with your text with the utmost exactness: "We are not sufficient of ourselves to think any thing, [truly good before God,] as of ourselves, but our sufficiency is of God.'

Who would have expected, after this, to hear you place again reason, and free will to good, upon the throne out of which you had but just forced them? I humbly presume, sir, that this candle of the Lord, shining in the breast of man, did not deserve to be set up quite so high again, since the light it gives can hardly hinder a philosopher, a man who makes it all his business to collect and follow that light, from stumbling at the being of a God.

As for free agency to good, you appealed to experience, sir, (if I am not mistaken,) whether a man has not the same power to enter the paths of virtue as to walk across a room: let then experience decide.

The heathen says, Video meliora proboque, deteriora sequor. The prophet says, "Turn us, and so shall we be turned. Draw me, and I shall run after thee." You say yourself, sir, "The good that I would I do not, and the evil I would not that I do." Our Church says, (Col. for Easter,) "We humbly beseech thee that, as by thy special grace preventing us, thou dost put into our minds good desires, so by thy continual help we may bring the same to good effect." The Bible says, Phil. i, 13, "It is God that worketh in you both to will and to do" that which is truly good in his sight; and the tenth of those articles, which we solemnly took for the rule of our preaching, next to the word of God, says, "The condition of man, after the fall of Adam, is such that he cannot turn and prepare himself, by his own natural strength and good works, to faith and calling upon God; wherefore we have no power to do good works pleasant and acceptable to God, without the grace of God, by Christ, preventing us, that we may have a good will, and working with us when we have that good will."

"What! is man, then, a mere machine?" No, sir, he has a will, but it is contrary to the will of God; his carnal mind, his natural wis. dom," is not subject to the law of God, neither indeed can be," says St. Paul he is a free agent to do evil. Yet, when God prevents him with convictions of sin and good desires, as says our Church, which he always does sooner or later, he may, through the grace of God, yield to them, and enter into life, or through his stubbornness resist them, and remain in his fallen state.

III. You objected, in your discourse, that "the insisting upon these, and the like doctrines, tended to breed disturbances, strife, and confusion." This is accidentally true, sir; but what do you infer from thence? That the doctrines are false, or the preachers in the wrong, because offences arise?

We cannot do this without giving up the Bible. What strife and confusion, yea, what jeering and cruel mockings, attended the ministry of the prophets among the Israel of God! Witness Micaiah, Elias, Jere. miah, &c. Yea, who was so great a disturber as that Jesus of Naza. reth, of whom some of his friends said, "He is mad," whom all Jerusa

lem, in uproar, brought to Pilate, and accused, saying, Luke xxiii, 2, 5, "We found this fellow perverting the nation; for he stirreth up the people, teaching throughout all Jewry, beginning from Galilee to this place?" Or that Saul of Tarsus, who was well nigh torn in pieces by his offended hearers, yea, and by those that had never heard him, while the general cry was, "This is the pestilential fellow, who turneth the world upside down-brethren, help!"

The same causes will produce the same effects. The doctrines of the fall, the new birth, and free justification by faith alone; and their fruits in those that embrace them, godly sorrow, peace, righteousness, and joy in a believing heart, will stir up the hearers in proportion to the clearness, constancy, and power with which they are preached. And this will be the case in all ages, because in all ages men are born in sin, and children of wrath; yea, and in all places too: those that are born on the banks of the Thames, or Severn, are no better, by nature, than those that drink the water of Jordan or of the Ganges.

When a medicine operates by stirring up the peccant humours in order to evacuate them, is it a sign that it is not a good one? Not at all it must work if it be good. I shall conclude this paragraph by a few words of him who had in his breast all the treasures of Divine wisdom and knowledge. John vii, 7, "The world hateth me, because I testify of it that the works thereof are evil." And "shall the servant be above his master?” “I am come to send fire upon the earth--to set [occasionally] a man at variance with his father," &c. While the Gospel gives inward peace, even a peace that the world knoweth not, to those that really embrace it, it declares war, an eternal war, against sin, and must, of course, disturb the peace of the prince of this world and his subjects.

IV. It is agreeable enough to the doctrine of free agency to good, not to insist upon the necessity of being born again of the Spirit of God; but is the discountenancing of the preaching of it agreeable to the tenor of that revelation you did so well defend in the beginning of your discourse? If Ezekiel preached it, chap. xi, 19, and xviii, 31, and xxxvi, 26, if John speaks so often, as well as David and St. Paul, of being born of God, of being "quickened" by his word and Spirit, of the "new heart," the "new creature," the "renewing of the mind," the "life of God," the "eternal life," the "life of Christ" in a believer, &c; if Jesus himself enforced this doctrine in the strongest manner to Nicodemus; if our Church (office for baptism and collect for Ash Wednesday) pleads for it as well as the word of God, can we supersede it in the pulpit as an unintelligible tenet, without wounding, unawares, Christ and his apostles, our Church and the compilers of her liturgy? See Rev. xxii, 19.

V. To set up impulses as the standard of our faith, or rule of our conduct; to take the thrilling of weak nerves, sinking of the animal spirits, or flights of a heated imagination, for the workings of God's Spirit; to pretend to miraculous gifts, and those fruits of the Spirit which are not offered and promised to believers in all ages, or to boast of the graces which that Spirit produces in the heart of every child of God, when the fruits of the flesh appear in our life-this is downright enthusiasm: I detest it as well as you, sir, and I heartily

wish you good luck whenever you shall attack such monstrous delusions.

But is it consistent with the doctrine of our Church to condemn and set aside all feelings in religion, and rank them with unaccountable impulses? Give me leave, sir, to tell you, that either you or the compilers of our liturgy, articles, and homilies, must be mistaken, if I did not mistake you.

They teach us to beseech God to "deliver us from hardness of heart," whereby I cannot conceive they mean any thing, if they mean not a heart past feeling. They bid us pray, (office for the sick,) that every sick person may know and feel that there is no saving name or power but that of Jesus Christ. In the seventeenth of our articles, they speak of godly persons, and such as feel in themselves the workings of God's Spirit. And in the third part of the homily for Rogation Week, they declare that when after contrition we feel our consciences at peace with God through the remission of our sin, it is God that worketh this miracle in us. Compare this with Rom. v, 1. They are so far, therefore, from attributing such feelings to the weakness of good people's nerves, or to a spirit of pride and delusion, that they affirm it is God that worketh them in their hearts.

Yea, they never suffer us to meet together for public worship without beseeching the God of all grace to give us such a "due sense of all his mercies, especially of his inestimable love in our redemption by Jesus Christ, as that our hearts may be unfeignedly thankful;" and if they would have us have a due sense of an inestimable love causing our hearts to be unfeignedly thankful, she is not against our feeling some thankfulness, for the word sense certainly conveys that idea, as well as the Latin word sentire, or the French sentir, whence it is derived, which cannot be Englished more literally than by the word to feel. Therefore the expression, "to feel thankfulness," does not convey a stronger idea than the words of our Church, to be duly, sensibly, unfeignedly thankful in heart, which you daily use yourself, sir. In condemning feelings in general, it would not then have been disagreeable at all to our liturgy to have allowed your hearers at least some feelings of thankfulness for the inestimable love of their dying Lord.

But to proceed: you seemed, sir, to discountenance feelings as not agreeable to sober, rational worship; but if I am not mistaken, reason by no means clashes with feelings of various sorts in religion. I am willing to let any man of reason judge whether feeling sorrow for sin, hunger and thirst after righteousness, peace of conscience, serenity of mind, consolation in prayer, thankfulness at the Lord's table, hatred of sin, zeal for God, love to Jesus and all men, compassion for the distressed, &c; or feeling nothing at all of this, is matter of mere indifference: yea, sir, take for a judge a heathen poet, if you please, and you will hear him say, of a young man who, by his blushes, betrayed the shame he felt for having told an untruth, Erubuit-salva res est.

Does it seem contrary to reason that a spirit should be affected by spiritual objects? If heat and cold, sickness and health, so affect my body as to cause various feelings in it, why cannot fear and hope, love and hatred, joy and sorrow, sin and grace, remorse and peace, so affect my soul as to produce various feelings or sensations there? Can any

thing be more absurd and contrary to nature than the apathy of Stoics? And what is banishing feelings out of religion, but pleading for religious apathy?

If a man may feel sorrow when he sees himself stripped of all, and left naked upon a desert coast, why should not a penitent sinner, whom God has delivered from blindness of heart, be allowed to feel sorrow upon seeing himself robbed of his title to heaven, and left in the wilderness of this world destitute of original righteousness? Again: if it is not absurd to say that a rebel, condemned to death, feels joy upon his being reprieved and received into his prince's favour, why should it be thought absurd to affirm that a Christian who, being justified by faith, has peace with God, and rejoices in hope of the glory to come, feels joy and happiness in his inmost soul on that account? On the contrary, sir, to affirm that such a one feels nothing, (if I am not mistaken,) is no less repugnant to reason than to religion.

But let us go to the law and the testimony, and let the point stand or fall by the oracles of God. Had Adam no feeling when, seeing his nakedness, he tried to hide himself from himself and from God? I believe, sir, he felt remorse, shame, and fear, to a very great degree; and should I be thought an enthusiast for it, I confess I have felt the same upon conviction of sin.

It is probable enough, also, that Jacob felt religious awe and a holy dread when he said, "How dreadful is this place; this is none other than the gate of heaven!" And young King Josiah, contrition of heart, when, upon his hearing the word of the Lord, he rent his clothes and wept, 2 Kings xxii, 11. Nor did the Searcher of hearts say that he was indebted to his constitution, and the weakness of his nerves, for those feelings of sorrow. Just the reverse: "Because thine heart was tender, and thou hast humbled thyself and wept before me, I also have heard thee, says the Lord."

Was Job a low-spirited enthusiast, or did he feel something of the terrors of the Lord in reality, when he cried out, chap. vi, 4, "The arrows of the Almighty are within me; the poison thereof drinketh up my spirits the terrors of God do set themselves in array against

But let us go to the Psalms, which, in all ages of the Church, have been looked upon as the standard of true devotion.

Can we, without uncharitableness, suppose that David had no feelings (or which comes to the same sense, no sensation) of joy and thankfulness in his heart, when he sung, Psalm xxviii, 7, "The Lord is my strength and shield; my heart trusted in him, and I am helped; therefore my heart greatly rejoiceth?"

Was not he a great dissembler, if, feeling no godly sorrow, he said, Psalm xxxi, 10, "My life is spent with grief, and my years with sighing; my strength faileth me because of mine iniquity, and my bones are consumed?"

No

Did he feel no happiness in God, taste nothing of the Lord's goodness, when he said, Psalm xxxiv, 8, 18, "O taste and see that the Lord is good, he is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart?" remorse, no fear of God's wrath, when he cried out, Psalm xxxviii, 1, 3, 4, "O Lord, rebuke me not in thy wrath; there is no rest in my