pounds from a man thus reduced by accident to utter ruin, and who had not a shilling left in the world, would be ‘as foolish as it was tyrannical’.

But this is rank sophistry.  The question is:—­Does a thief (and a fraudulent debtor is no better) acquire a claim to impunity by not possessing the power of restoring the goods?  Every moral act derives its character (says a Schoolman with an unusual combination of profundity with quaintness) ’aut voluntate originis aut origine voluntatis’.  Now the very essence of guilt, its dire and incommunicable character, consists in its tendency to destroy the free will;—­but when thus destroyed, are the habits of vice thenceforward innocent?  Does the law excuse the murder because the perpetrator was drunk?  Dr. Hawker put his objection laxly and weakly enough; but a manly opponent would have been ashamed to seize an hour’s victory from what a move of the pen would render impregnable.

Ib. p. 102, 3.

When at this solemn tribunal the sinner shall be called upon to answer for the transgression of those ‘moral’ laws, on obedience to which salvation was made to depend, will it be sufficient that he declares himself to have been taught to believe that the Gospel ’had neither terms nor conditions’, and that his salvation was secured by a covenant which procured him pardon and peace, ‘from all eternity’:  a covenant, the effects of which no folly or ‘after-act whatever’ could possibly destroy?—­Who could anticipate the sentence of condemnation, and not weep in agony over the deluded victim of ignorance and misfortune who was thus taught a doctrine so fatally false?

What then!  God is represented as a tyrant when he claims the penalty of disobedience from the servant, who has wilfully incapacitated himself for obeying,—­and yet just and merciful in condemning to indefinite misery a poor “deluded victim of ignorance and imposture,” even though the Barrister, spite of his antipathy to Methodists, would “weep in agony” over him!  But before the Barrister draws bills of imagination on his tender feelings, would it not have been as well to adduce some last dying speech and confession, in which the culprit attributed his crimes—­not to Sabbath-breaking and loose company,—­but to sermon-hearing on the ‘modus operandi’ of the divine goodness in the work of redemption?  How the Ebenezerites would stare to find the Socinians and themselves in one flock on the sheep-side of the judgment-seat,—­and their cousins, and fellow Methodists, the Tabernaclers, all caprifled—­goats every man:—­and why?  They held, that repentance is in the power of every man, with the aid of grace; while the goats held that without grace no man is able even to repent.  A. makes grace the cause, and B. makes it only a necessary auxiliary.  And does the Socinian extricate himself a whit more clearly?  Without a due concurrence of circumstances no mind can improve itself into a state susceptible of spiritual happiness:  and