Two only of the writers in this badly managed controversy deserve any special notice—­viz., Fletcher on the Arminian and Toplady on the Calvinist side.

Fletcher’s ‘Checks to Antinomianism’ are still remembered by name (which is more than can be said of most of the literature connected with this controversy), and may, perhaps, still be read, and even regarded as an authority by a few; but they are little known to the general reader, and occupy no place whatever in theological literature.  Perhaps they hardly deserve to do so.  Nevertheless, anything which such a man as Fletcher wrote is worthy at least of respectful consideration, if for nothing else, at any rate for the saintly character of the writer.  He wrote like a scholar and a gentleman, and, what is better than either, like a Christian.  Those who accuse him of having written bitterly against the Calvinists cannot, one would imagine, have read his writings, but must have taken at second hand the cruelly unjust representation of them given by his opponents.[789] ‘If ever,’ wrote Southey, with perfect truth, ’true Christian charity was manifested in polemical writing, it was by Fletcher of Madeley.’  There is but one passage[790] in which Fletcher condescends to anything like personal scurrility, in spite of the many grossly personal insults which were heaped upon him and his friends.

This self-restraint is all the more laudable because Fletcher possessed a rich vein of satirical humour, which he might have employed with telling effect against his opponents.

He also showed an excellent knowledge of Scripture and great ingenuity in explaining it on his own side.  He was an adroit and skilful disputant, and, considering that he was a foreigner, had a great mastery over the English language.

What, in spite of these merits, makes the ‘Checks’ an unsatisfactory book, is the want of a comprehensive grasp of general principles.  In common with all the writers on both sides of the question.  Fletcher shows a strange lack of philosophical modesty—­a lack which is all the stranger in him because personally he was conspicuous for extreme modesty and thoroughly genuine humility.  But there is no appearance, either in Fletcher’s writings or in those of any others who engaged in the controversy, that they adequately realised the extreme difficulty of the subject.  Everything is stated with the utmost confidence, as if the whole difficulty—­which an archangel might have felt—­was entirely cleared away.  If one compares Fletcher’s writings on Calvinism with the scattered notices of the subject in Waterland’s works, the difference between the two writers is apparent at once; there is a massiveness and a breadth of culture about the older writer which contrasts painfully with the thinness and narrowness of the younger.  Or, if it be unfair to compare Fletcher with an intellectual giant like Waterland, we may compare his ‘Checks’ with Bishop Tomline’s ‘Refutation of Calvinism.’  Bishop Tomline is even more unfair to the Calvinists than Fletcher, but he shows far greater maturity both of style and thought.  All the three writers took the same general view of the subject, though from widely different standpoints.  But Tomline is as much superior to Fletcher as he is inferior to Waterland.