runk? Dr. Hawker put his objection laxly and weakly enough; but a
manly opponent would have been ashamed to seize an hour's victory from
what a move of the pen would render impregnable.

Ib. p. 102, 3.

When at this solemn tribunal the sinner shall be called upon to answer
for the transgression of those 'moral' laws, on obedience to which
salvation was made to depend, will it be sufficient that he declares
himself to have been taught to believe that the Gospel 'had neither
terms nor conditions', and that his salvation was secured by a
covenant which procured him pardon and peace, 'from all eternity': a
covenant, the effects of which no folly or 'after-act whatever' could
possibly destroy?--Who could anticipate the sentence of condemnation,
and not weep in agony over the deluded victim of ignorance and
misfortune who was thus taught a doctrine so fatally false?

What then! God is represented as a tyrant when he claims the penalty of
disobedience from the servant, who has wilfully incapacitated himself
for obeying,--and yet just and merciful in condemning to indefinite
misery a poor "deluded victim of ignorance and imposture," even though
the Barrister, spite of his antipathy to Methodists, would "weep in
agony" over him! But before the Barrister draws bills of imagination on
his tender feelings, would it not have been as well to adduce some last
dying speech and confession, in which the culprit attributed his
crimes--not to Sabbath-breaking and loose company,--but to
sermon-hearing on the 'modus operandi' of the divine goodness in the
work of redemption? How the Ebenezerites would stare to find the
Socinians and themselves in one flock on the sheep-side of the
judgment-seat,--and their cousins, and fellow Methodists, the
Tabernaclers, all caprifled--goats every man:--and why? They held, that
repentance is in the power of every man, with the aid of grace; while
the goats held that without grace no man is able even to repent. A.
makes grace the cause, and B. makes it only a necessary auxiliary. And
does the Socinian extricate himself a whit more clearly? Without a due
concurrence of circumstances no mind can improve itself into a state
susceptible of spiritual happiness: and 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