and we have been enabled to put something into the Bank; and this I freely offer to the blessed cause of our Lord and Saviour.’  This is the second donation of this same poor man to the same amount!” Whatever these Evangelists may think of such conduct, they ought to be ashamed of thus basely taking advantage of this poor ignorant enthusiast, &c.

Is it possible to read this affecting story without finding in it a complete answer to the charge of demoralizing the lower classes?  Does the Barrister really think, that this generous and grateful enthusiast is as likely to be unprovided and poverty-stricken in his old age, as he was prior to his conversion?  Except indeed that at that time his old age was as improbable as his distresses were certain if he did live so long.  This is singing ‘Io Paean’! for the enemy with a vengeance.

Part II. p. 14.

  It behoved him (Dr. Hawker in his Letter to the Barrister) to show in
  what manner a covenant can exist without terms or conditions.

According to the Methodists there is a condition,—­that of faith in the power and promise of Christ, and the virtue of the Cross.  And were it otherwise, the objection is scarcely appropriate except at the Old Bailey, or in the Court of King’s Bench.  The Barrister might have framed a second law-syllogism, as acute as his former.  The laws of England allow no binding covenant in a transfer of goods or chattels without value received.  But there can be no value received by God:—­’Ergo’, there can be no covenant between God and man.  And if Jehovah should be as courteous as the House of Commons, and acknowledge the jurisdiction of the Courts at Westminster, the pleading might hold perhaps, and the Pentateuch be quashed after an argument before the judges.  Besides, how childish to puff up the empty bladder of an old metaphysical foot-ball on the ‘modus operandi interior’ of Justification into a shew of practical substance; as if it were no less solid than a cannon ball!  Why, drive it with all the vehemence that five toes can exert, it would not kill a louse on the head of Methodism.  Repentance, godly sorrow, abhorrence of sin as sin, and not merely dread from forecast of the consequences, these the Arminian would call means of obtaining salvation, while the Methodist (more philosophically perhaps) names them signs of the work of free grace commencing and the dawning of the sun of redemption.  And pray where is the practical difference?

Ib. p. 26.

Jesus answered him thus—­’Verily, I say unto you, unless a man be born of water and of the spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God’.—­The true sense of which is obviously this:—­Except a man be initiated into my religion by Baptism, (which ‘at that time’ was always ‘preceded by a confession of faith’) and unless he manifest his sincere reception of it, by leading that upright and ‘spiritual’