is not the disposition and pre-arrangement of circumstances as dependent on the divine will as those spiritual influences which the Methodist holds to be meant by the word grace?  Will not the Socinian find it as difficult to reconcile with mercy and justice the condemnation to hell-fire of poor wretches born and bred in the thieves’ nests of St. Giles, as the Methodists the condemnation of those who have been less favoured by grace?  I have one other question to ask, though it should have been asked before.  Suppose Christ taught nothing more than a future state of retribution and the necessity and sufficiency of good morals, how are we to explain his forbidding these truths to be taught to any but Jews till after his resurrection?  Did the Jews reject those doctrines?  Except perhaps a handful of rich men, called Sadducees, they all believed them, and would have died a thousand deaths rather than have renounced their faith.  Besides, what is there in doctrines common to the creed of all religions, and enforced by all the schools of philosophy, except the Epicurean, which should have prevented their being taught to all at the same time?  I perceive, that this difficulty does not press on Socinians exclusively:  but yet it presses on them with far greater force than on others.  For they make Christianity a mere philosophy, the same in substance with the Stoical, only purer from errors and accompanied with clearer evidence:—­while others think of it as part of a covenant made up with Abraham, the fulfilment of which was in good faith to be first offered to his posterity.  I ask this only because the Barrister professes to find every thing in the four Gospels so plain and easy.

Ib. p. 106.

  The Reformers by whom those articles were framed were educated in the
  Church of Rome, and opposed themselves rather to the perversion of its
  power than the errors of its doctrine.

An outrageous blunder.

Ib. p. 107.

  Lord Bacon was the first who dedicated his profound and penetrating
  genius to the cultivation of sound philosophy, &c.

This very same Lord Bacon has given us his ‘Confessio Fidei’ at great length, with full particularity.  Now I will answer for the Methodists’ unhesitating assent and consent to it; but would the Barrister subscribe it?

Ib. p. 108.

We look back to that era of our history when superstition threw her victim on the pile, and bigotry tied the martyr to his stake:—­but we take our eyes from the retrospect and turn them in thankful admiration to that Being who has opened the minds of many, and is daily opening the minds of more amongst us to the reception of these most important of all truths, that there is no true faith but in practical goodness, and that the worst of errors is the error of the ‘life’.

Such is the conviction of the most enlightened of our Clergy:  the conviction, I trust, of