life which it enjoins, ‘he cannot enter the kingdom of heaven’, or be a partaker of that happiness which it belongs to me to confer on those who believe in my name and keep my sayings.

Upon my faith as a Christian, if no more is meant by being born again than this, the speaker must have had the strongest taste in metaphors of any teacher in verse or prose on record, Jacob Behmen himself not excepted.  The very Alchemists lag behind.  Pity, however, that our Barrister has not shown us how this plain and obvious business of Baptism agrees with ver. 8. of the same chapter:  ’The wind bloweth where it listeth’, &c.  Now if this does not express a visitation of the mind by a somewhat not in the own power or fore-thought of the mind itself, what are words meant for?

Ib. p. 29.

The true meaning of being ‘born again’, in the sense in which our Saviour uses the phrase, implies nothing more or less, in plain terms, than this:—­to repent; to lead for the future a religious life instead of a life of disobedience; to believe the Holy Scriptures, and to pray for grace and assistance to persevere in our obedience to the end.  All this any man of common sense might explain in a few words.

Pray, then, (for I will take the Barrister’s own commentary,) what does the man of common sense mean by grace?  If he will explain grace in any other way than as the circumstances ‘ab extra’ (which would be mere mockery and in direct contradiction to a score of texts), and yet without mystery, I will undertake for Dr. Hawker and Co. to make the new birth itself as plain as a pikestaff, or a whale’s foal, or Sarah Robarts’s rabbits.

Ib. p. 30.

  So that they go on in their sin waiting for a new birth, &c.

“So that they go on in their sin!”—­Who would not suppose it notorious that every Methodist meeting-house was a cage of Newgate larks making up their minds to die game?

Ib.

The following account is extracted from the Methodist Magazine for 1798:  “The Lord astonished ‘Sarah Roberts’ with his mercy, by ’setting her at liberty, while employed’ in the necessary business of ‘washing’ for her family, &c.

N. B. Not the famous rabbit-woman.—­She was Robarts.

Ib. p. 31.

A washerwoman has ‘all her sins blotted out’ in the twinkling of an eye, and while reeking with suds is received in the family of the Redeemer’s kingdom.  Surely this is a most abominable profanation of all that is serious, &c.

And where pray is the absurdity of this?  Has Christ declared any antipathy to washerwomen, or the Holy Ghost to warm suds?  Why does not the Barrister try his hand at the “abominable profanation,” in a story of a certain woman with an issue of blood who was made free by touching the hem of a garment, without the previous knowledge of the wearer?

  ’Rode, caper, vitem:  tamen hinc cum stabis ad aras, In tua quod fundi
  cornua possit, erit’.