‘Si sic omnia’!  All this is just and forcible; and surely nothing can be easier than to confute the Methodist by shewing that his very ‘no-doing’, when he comes to explain it, is not only an act, a work, but even a very severe and perseverant energy of the will.  He is therefore to be arraigned of nonsense and abuse of words rather than of immoral doctrines.

Ib. p. 84.

The sacred volume of Holy Writ declares that ‘true’ (pure?) ’religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this, to visit the fatherless and widow in their affliction, and to keep himself unspotted from the world’.  James i. 27

This is now at least, whatever might have been the meaning of the word ‘religion’ in the time of the Translators, a false version.  St. James is speaking of persons eminently zealous in those public or private acts of worship, which we call divine service, [Greek:  thraeskeia].  It should be rendered, ‘True worship’, &c.  The passage is a fine burst of rhetoric, and not a mere truism; just as when we say;—­“A cheerful heart is a perpetual thanksgiving, and a state of love and resignation the truest utterance of the Lord’s Prayer.”  St. James opposes Christianity to the outward signs and ceremonial observances of the Jewish and Pagan religions.  But these are the only sure signs, these are the most significant ceremonial observances by which your Christianity is to be made known,—­’to visit the fatherless’, &c.  True religion does not consist ‘quoad essentiam’ in these acts, but in that habitual state of the whole moral being, which manifests itself by these acts—­and which acts are to the religion of Christ that which ablutions, sacrifices and Temple-going were to the Mosaic religion, namely, its genuine [Greek:  thraeskeia].  That which was the religion of Moses is the ceremonial or cult of the religion of Christ.  Moses commanded all good works, even those stated by St. James, as the means of temporal felicity; and this was the Mosaic religion; and to these he added a multitude of symbolical observances; and these formed the Mosaic cult, (’cultus religionis’, [Greek:  thraeskeia]).  Christ commands holiness out of perfect love, that is, Christian religion; and adds to this no other ceremony or symbol than a pure life and active beneficence; which (says St. James) are the ‘true cult’. [2]

Ib. p. 86.

  There is no one whose writings are better calculated to do good, (than
  those of Paley) by inculcating the essential duties of common life,
  and the sound truths of practical Christianity.

Indeed!  Paley’s whole system is reducible to this one precept:—­“Obey God, and benefit your neighbour, because you love yourself above all.”  Christ has himself comprised his system in—­“Love your neighbour as yourself, and God above all.”  These “sound truths of practical Christianity” consist in a total subversion, not only of Christianity, but of all morality;—­the very words virtue and vice being but lazy synonymes of prudence and miscalculation,—­and which ought to be expunged from our vocabularies, together with Abraxas and Abracadabra, as charms abused by superstitious or mystic enthusiasts.