Ib. p. 17.

  Religion has for its object the moral care and the moral cultivation
  of man.  Its beauty is not to be sought in the regions of mystery, or
  in the flights of abstraction.

What ignorance!  Is there a single moral precept of the Gospels not to be found in the Old Testament?  Not one.  A new edition of White’s ‘Diatessaron’, with a running comment the Hebrew, Greek, and Roman writers before Christ, and those after him who, it is morally certain, drew no aids from the New Testament, is a grand ‘desideratum’; and if anything could open the eyes of Socinians, this would do it.

Ib. p. 24.

  The masculine strength and moral firmness which once distinguished the
  great mass of the British people is daily fading away.  Methodism with
  all its cant, &c.

Well! but in God’s name can Methodism be at once the effect and the cause of this loss of masculine strength and moral firmness?—­Did Whitfield and Wesley blow them out at the first puff—­these grand virtues of masculine strength and moral firmness?  Admire, I pray you, the happy antithesis.  Yet “feminine” would be an improvement, as then the sense too would be antithetic.  However, the sound is sufficient, and modern rhetoric possesses the virtue of economy.

Ib. p. 27.

So with the Tinker; I would give him the care of kettles, but I would not give him ‘the cure of souls’.  So long as he attended to the management and mending of his pots and pans, I would wish success to his ministry:  but when he came to declare ‘himself’ a “chosen vessel,” and demand permission to take the souls of the people into his holy keeping, I should think that, instead of a ‘licence’, it would be more humane and more prudent to give him a passport to St. Luke’s.  Depend upon it, such men were never sent by Providence to rule or to regulate mankind.

Whoo!  Bounteous Providence that always looks at the body clothes and the parents’ equipage before it picks out the proper soul for the baby!  Ho! the Duchess of Manchester is in labour:—­quick, Raphael, or Uriel, bring a soul out of the Numa bin, a young Lycurgus.  Or the Archbishop’s lady:—­ho! a soul from the Chrysostom or Athanasian locker.—­But poor Moll Crispin is in the throes with twins:—­well! there are plenty of cobblers’ and tinkers’ souls in the hold—­John Bunyan!!  Why, thou miserable Barrister, it would take an angel an eternity to tinker thee into a skull of half his capacity!

Ib. p. 30, 31.

“A ‘truly’ awakened conscience,” (these anti-moral editors of the Pilgrim’s Progress assure us,) “can never find relief from the law:  (that is, the ’moral law’.) The more he looks for peace ’this way, his guilt’, like a heavy burden, becomes more intolerable; when he becomes ‘dead’ to the ’law’,—­as to ’any dependence upon it for salvation’,—­by the body of Christ, and married to him, who was raised from the dead, then, and not till then, his heart is set at liberty, to run the way of God’s commandments.”

  Here we are taught that the ‘conscience’ can never find relief from
  obedience to the law of the Gospel.