Ib. p. 224.

But this is not the worst.  You consequently anathematize all Papists by your sentence:  for heresies by your own sentence cut off men from heaven:  but Popery is a bundle of heresies:  therefore it cuts off men from heaven.  The minor I prove, &c.

This introduction of syllogistic form in a letter to a young Lady is whimsically characteristic.

Ib. p. 225.

You say, the Scripture admits of no private interpretation.  But you abuse yourself and the text with a false interpretation of it in these words.  An interpretation is called private either as to the subject person, or as to the interpreter.  You take the text to speak of the latter, when the context plainly sheweth you that it speaks of the former.  The Apostle directing them to understand the prophecies of the Old Testament, gives them this caution;—­that none of these Scriptures that are spoken of Christ the public person must be interpreted as spoken of David or other private person only, of whom they were mentioned but as types of Christ, &c.

It is strange that this sound and irrefragable argument has not been enforced by the Church divines in their controversies with the modern Unitarians, as Capp, Belsham and others, who refer all the prophetic texts of the Old Testament to historical personages of their time, exclusively of all double sense.

Ib. p. 226.

As to what you say of Apostles still placed in the Church:—­when any shew us an immediate mission by their communion, and by miracles, ‘tongues’, and a spirit of revelation and infallibility prove themselves Apostles, we shall believe them.

This is another of those two-edged arguments which Baxter and Jeremy Taylor imported from Grotius, and which have since become the universal fashion among Protestants.  I fear, however, that it will do us more hurt by exposing a weak part to the learned Infidels than service in our combat with the Romanists.  I venture to assert most unequivocally that the New Testament contains not the least proof of the ‘linguipotence’ of the Apostles, but the clearest proofs of the contrary:  and I doubt whether we have even as decisive a victory over the Romanists in our Middletonian, Farmerian, and Douglasian dispute concerning the miracles of the first two centuries and their assumed contrast ‘in genere’ with those of the Apostles and the Apostolic age, as we have in most other of our Protestant controversies.

N.B.  These opinions of Middleton and his more cautious followers are no part of our real Church doctrine.  This passion for law Court evidence began with Grotius.

Ib. p. 246.