Ib. p. 123.

 —­as soon as the miraculous gifts, or gift of discerning spirits,
  ceased.

No one point in the New Testament perplexes me so much as these (so called) miraculous gifts.  I feel a moral repugnance to the reduction of them to natural and acquired talents, ennobled and made energic by the life and convergency of faith;—­and yet on no other scheme can I reconcile them with the idea of Christianity, or the particular supposed, with the general known, facts.  But, thank God! it is a question which does not in the least degree affect our faith or practice.  I mean, if God permit, to go through the Middletonian controversy, as soon as I can procure the loan of the books, or have health enough to become a reader in the British Museum.

Ib. p. 126.

And what if, after all, spiritual censures (for of such only I am speaking,) should happen to fall upon such a person, he may be in some measure hurt in his reputation by it, and that is all.  And possibly hereupon his errors, before invincible through ignorance, may be removed by wholesome instruction and admonition, and so he is befriended in it, &c.

Waterland is quite in the right so far;—­but the penal laws, the temporal inflictions—­would he have called for the repeal of these?  Milton saw this subject with a mastering eye,—­saw that the awful power of excommunication was degraded and weakened even to impotence by any the least connection with the law of the State.

Ib. p. 127.

—­who are hereby forbidden to receive such heretics into their houses, or to pay them so much as common civilities.  This precept of the Apostle may he further illustrated by his own practice, recorded by Irenaeus, who had the information at second-hand from Polycarp, a disciple of St. John’s, that St. John, once meeting with Cerinthus at the bath, retired instantly without bathing, for fear lest the bath should fall by reason of Cerinthus being there, the enemy to truth.

Psha!  The ’bidding him God speed’,—­[Greek:  legon auto chairein],—­(2 ‘John’, 11,) is a spirituality, not a mere civility.  If St. John knew or suspected that Cerinthus had a cutaneous disease, there would have been some sense in the refusal, or rather, as I correct myself, some probability of truth in this gossip of Irenaeus.

Ib. p. 128.

  They corrupted the faith of Christ, and in effect subverted the
  Gospel.  That was enough to render them detestable in the eyes of all
  men who sincerely loved and valued sound faith.

O, no, no, not ‘them!’ ’Error quidem, non tamen homo errans, abominandus’:  or, to pun a little, ‘abhominandus’.  Be bold in denouncing the heresy, but slow and timorous in denouncing the erring brother as a heretic.  The unmistakable passions of a factionary and a schismatic, the ostentatious display, the ambition and dishonest arts of a sect-founder, must be superinduced on the false doctrine, before the heresy makes the man a heretic.