r in the throng be told that
they will stand 'justified' before God; that the 'righteousness' of
'Christ' will be imputed to 'them', &c.

Well, do so.--Nay, nay! it has been done; the effect has been tried; and
slander itself cannot deny that the effect has been the conversion of
thousands of those very sinners whom the Barrister's fancy thus
convokes. O shallow man! not to see that here lies the main strength of
the cause he is attacking; that, to repeat my former illustration, he
draws the attention to patients in that worst state of disease which
perhaps alone requires and justifies the use of the white pill, as a
mode of exposing the frantic quack who vends it promiscuously! He fixes
on the empiric's cures to prove his murders!--not to forget what ought
to conclude every paragraph in answer to the Barrister's Hints; "and
were the case as alleged, what does this prove against the present
Methodists as Methodists?" Is not the tenet of imputed righteousness the
faith of all the Scotch Clergy, who are not false to their declarations
at their public assumption of the ministry? Till within the last sixty
or seventy years, was not the tenet preached Sunday after Sunday in
every nook of Scotland; and has the Barrister heard that the morals of
the Scotch peasants and artizans have been improved within the last
thirty or forty years, since the exceptions have become more and more
common?--Was it by want of strict morals that the Puritans were
distinguished to their disadvantage from the rest of Englishmen during
the reigns of Elizabeth, James I. Charles I. and II.? And that very
period, which the Barrister affirms to have been distinguished by the
moral vigor of the great mass of Britons,--was it not likewise the
period when this very doctrine was preached by the Clergy fifty times
for once that it is heard from the same pulpits in the present and
preceding generation? Never, never can the Methodists be successfully
assailed, if not honestly, and never honestly or with any chance of
success, except as Methodists;--for their practices, their alarming
theocracy, their stupid, mad, and mad-driving superstitions. These are
their property 'in peculio'; their doctrines are those of the Church of
England, with no other difference than that in the Church Liturgy, and
Articles, and Homilies, Calvinism and Lutheranism are joined like the
two hands of the Union Fire Office:-the Methodists have unclasped them,
and one is Whitfield an