evidence which is not universally adequate or communicable at will to others.  “Well! to be sure he has behaved badly hitherto, but I have faith in him.”  If it were otherwise, how could it be imputed as righteousness?  Can morality exist without choice;—­nay, strengthen in proportion as it becomes more independent of the will?  “A very meritorious man! he has faith in every proposition of Euclid, which he understands.”

Ib. p. 41.

“I could as easily create a world (says Dr. Hawker) as create either faith or repentance in my own heart.”  Surely this is a most monstrous confession.  What! is not the Christian religion a ‘revealed’ religion, and have we not the most miraculous attestation of its truth?

Just look at the answer of Christ himself to Nicodemus, ‘John’ iii. 2, 3.  Nicodemus professed a full belief in Christ’s divine mission.  Why?  It was attested by his miracles.  What answered Christ?  “Well said, O believer?” No, not a word of this; but the proof of the folly of such a supposition.  ’Verily, verily, I say unto thee; except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God’,—­that is, he cannot have faith in me.

Ib. p. 42.

How can this evangelical preacher declaim on the necessity of seriously searching into the truth of revelation, for the purpose either of producing or confirming our belief of it, when he has already pronounced it to be just as possible to arrive at conviction as to create a world?

Did Dr. Hawker say that it was impossible to produce an assent to the historic credibility of the facts related in the Gospel?  Did he say that it was impossible to become a Socinian by the weighing of outward evidences?  No! but Dr. Hawker says,—­and I say,—­that this is not, cannot be, what Christ means by faith, which, to the misfortune of the Socinians, he always demands as the condition of a miracle, instead of looking forward to it as the natural effect of a miracle.  How came it that Peter saw miracles countless, and yet was without faith till the Holy Ghost descended on him?  Besides, miracles may or may not be adequate evidence for Socinianism; but how could miracles prove the doctrine of Redemption, or the divinity of Christ?  But this is the creed of the Church of England.

It is wearisome to be under the necessity, or at least the constant temptation, of attacking Socinianism, in reviewing a work professedly written against Methodism.  Surely such a work ought to treat of those points of doctrine and practice, which are peculiar to Methodism.  But to publish a ‘diatribe’ against the substance of the Articles and Catechism of the English Church, nay, of the whole Christian world, excepting the Socinians, and to call it “Hints concerning the dangerous and abominable absurdities of Methodism,” is too bad.

Ib. p. 43.