improved by staging them to the eyes of the multitude under some peculiar designation of monastic devotedness, than if, intrusted to their own virtuous prudence, they should silently and unostentatiously perform, as at present, their visits of mercy.

Contending for the liberty of pursuing this "more excellent way" of celibacy, you take occasion to remark, that "a more generous course, which would have interposed, when necessary, the guidance of authority, and led, but not inhibited, might have made Wesley and Whitfield useful members of the church, instead of leaving them to plunge thousands into schism, and to train off into a delusive doctrine many of the best members of our church." And can you really believe that it was practicable, by any accommodation, to retain in connexion with the established church these two distinguished leaders, who could not be induced by their common zeal in the cause of religion to co-operate one with the other? Or could either of them have been held in that connexion, without compromising the moderation of our seventeenth article, and maintaining explicitly, as the doctrine of our church, either that of Arminius or that of Calvin, instead of looking to the oracles of divine truth, and shunning the peremptory decisions of human interpretation?

I have now gone through the several articles of

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your vindication, I hope with candour, I am sure with a sincere desire of affording to your principles a fair consideration. Of any disposition to adopt formally the abuses of the church of Rome, I most willingly acquit you, for I have entire confidence in your godly sincerity; but I cannot, and do not, consider you as free from the very same influences which, in that church, have actually generated those abuses. I am not your accuser, for I respect your zeal and your piety; but I am anxious to warn yourself against errors, in which they have already involved you, and others against those, into which they may too easily be led by the admiration of that, which is really estimable in your association.

With these views I have endeavoured to shew that, in shunning the extreme of dissent and separation, you have so much magnified the authority of the church as to destroy the reasonable liberty of a Christian; that, in guarding your notion of justification against abuse, you have substituted an unintelligible and mischievous mysticism for the simple doctrine of the gospel, that we are justified by our faith and for the merits of a redeemer ; that, în your anxiety to maintain a godly sorrow for sin, you have so confounded the actual forgiveness, granted upon sincere repentance, with our own assurance of forgiveness, as to take away from sinners the encouragement presented by the gospel in its gracious promises of mercy; that, in treating of sacraments, you have manifested a desire of

extending a sacramental character to other ordinances, besides those instituted by the authority of our Lord, and thus countenanced much of the superstition of Rome; that, in your doctrine of the eucharist, you have recurred to that doctrine of consubstantiation, which is scarcely distinguishable from the Romish transubstantiation, rejecting the notion of a simply spiritual presence of our Lord, and a spiritual influence of his ordinance; that you have claimed for the traditions and rites of the church an authority which can justly be ascribed only to ordinances authorised by the sacred scripture; that you have advocated, though under a limitation, the practice of praying for the dead, which, in the church of Rome, has been the source of much and gross superstition, and must ever tend to generate in the minds of men a fatal dependence on the intercession of their fellow-sinners; that you have unscripturally recommended celibacy and monastic associations as presenting "a more excellent way" of salvation, to be, indeed, adopted and maintained only by the choice of each individual, but constraining that choice by the very pretension of superior excellence; and that in all these instances you have departed from the moderation and simplicity of the articles of our church, to which you acknowledge yourself bound to conform, and upon an agreement with which, so far

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as they were applicable, you have proposed to rest your vindication.

In addition to this detail of particulars, I have to remark, that your own description of the manner in which your teaching has acted, "even where it has been embraced without any consciousness of sacrifices involved," appears to present a very different aspect of the religion of Christ from that which is offered to us in the gospel. "It wound itself around them" (your new adherents), "encircled them with its solemn rounds of duties and devotions and abstinences, thwarting the natural will, and subduing self, calming the passions, and elevating the affections; not acting turbidly, but rather unloosing limb by limb from their enthralments, and gently moulding and fashioning them to perform the fuller measures of the duties of the gospel." In this description I discover no vestiges of the christian law of liberty; but, on the contrary, a system of ordinances; "which things have, indeed, a show of wisdom in will-worship, and humility, and neglecting of the body," but are not recognised by the apostle as belonging to genuine religion. Nor can I perceive in it any thing of that "faith which worketh by love," but a severe asceticism, powerful, indeed, to subdue the natural affections of humanity, and so leave in us a void which the heart would seek to supply; but unfitted

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to generate in it that kindly disposition which has been represented to us as of the very essence of christianity.

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Perhaps there is not any thing in your entire system from which my mind, at least, more decidedly recoils, than the cold and forbidding aspect with which you regard the two most important events in the history of our church, its renunciation of the abuses of Rome at the reformation, and its full and final establishment, in strict conjunction with that of constitutional freedom, at the revolution. Of the former you have spoken even as of a sort of fatality not now to be remedied, but of which it might be desired that it had never occurred. “Individuals among us," you say, "are bound to remain in the church, through whose ministry they have been made members of Christ." And is this all? Have you no commendation to bestow on those illustrious martyrs, who perished in the flame of persecution, that they might light up in England the flame of genuine religion, one of them at the time expressing his pious confidence that it should never be extinguished? Of the revolution you have spoken expressly as a sin; as you have, it is generally reported, dedicated an anniversary to be religiously celebrated in honour of bishop Ken, who refused

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