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Answ. I do not agree with my friend Rowland in these assertions. Providence must have a hand in all this. If a man subscribes to a meeting, God must give him money and inclination. The gold and silver is the Lord's, and so is a heart to do good therewith. A man cannot pay tithes unless God enable him to keep a farm, give him crops, and a good market. And, if he pays his debts, God's providence must favour him; for Moses says, it is God that gives him power to get wealth. Read Deut. Chap. viii.

Quot. Where I preach one sermon upon justification, I hope I shall preach half a dozen upon sanctification.

Answ. If you were to preach twelve dozen, sir, upon the subject, unless you are more explicit than you are in this, there is not a soul living that would understand your meaning. Without a distinction in the sounds, we cannot tell what is piped or harped. A man may as well preach upon multiplication as mortification, unless he gives us the explication or signification.

What I have here quoted is pretty nearly all the matter that is drawn from the text. The other parts will hardly bear transcribing. Smiting the empty sugar-tub, which makes a famous fine sound; sending the cleanly person into the pigs pound; the card-player's dexterity at the sight of friend Rowland; and the man in a comfortable frame tumbling over the threshold, drunk, into the meeting, which I take to be an oblique throw at

the comforts of the gospel, are things that will not bear public inspection: and therefore, to let friend Rowland know that I bear lighter upon his folly than he does on my character, I only touch them. But, if he proceeds with his false charges and unjust slander, I may in time send the whole of them forth, and my dissection of them; for he that sins openly, is to be rebuked before all, that others may fear. And I ask further, whether the above-mentioned stories can be called sound speech, that cannot be condemned; or speaking as the oracles of God, or doing the work of an evangelist? By no means. And I think friend Rowland himself was aware of this; otherwise, why should he threaten me with a prosecution for a libel, but from a consciousness that what he has said in secret would not bear the house-top?

To conclude, friend Rowland. Should you, at any future period, happen to come out of any street or lane, and unexpectedly clap your eyes upon me, as you once did by St. Paul's church, do not leap up and run from me at that distracted rate you then did. Never fly, sir, unless you are pursued. As yet I do not understand the way in which you go; and, till I do, you may depend upon it that I never shall become a follower of you: "The wisdom of the wise is to understand his way." That you may discover less pepper, and more purity; less heat, and more holiness; that you may perform more good works, and say less about them; that you may part with your

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tea-table stories for heavenly tidings, and your old wives' fables for gospel doctrines; that you may sound the gospel trumpet more, and your own trumpet less-is the desire and prayer of him who frankly forgives you all that is past, and hopes to take patiently all that's to come.

W. H. S.S.

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WORD TO THE READER.

CHRISTIAN READER,

THOU art here presented with another discourse on the old subject; which I believe will ever be the controversy of Zion, as long as freeborn sons and bond children are together. It began between Cain and Abel; it appeared in Noah's family; in Sarah and Hagar, Ishmael and Isaac; between Esau and Jacob; between the Apostles and the Jewish Scribes; and it will be ended when the lamp of the law affords no oil to the foolish virgins, and when the lamp of salvation will burn to eternity in the hearts of the wise.

If my reader be one of Paul's living epistles, known and read of all men; on the fleshly tables of whose heart the Spirit of the living God has written the laws of faith, truth, love, and liberty, he will know by happy experience what Paul means by the law's being abolished, 2 Cor. iii. 13. He will feel and enjoy the blessed effects of it in his own experience; by finding revealed wrath, and his carual enmity; legal bondage, and servile

fear; the dread of damnation, and a train of torments; the galling yoke of precept, and the terrifying sentence, abolished from his heart, blotted out in the Saviour's atonement, and banished from his soul by the wonderful operations of the Spirit of love, which casteth out all fear, and which is the fulfilling of the law. Such a soul, once shut up in unbelief, and now enlarged by the Spirit of liberty, will prize the Saviour's yoke, and understand the Apostle's meaning, and none else. Such a soul is delivered from the destroying power of the law of sin, and from the penal power of the law of death: “Sin shall not have dominion over you; for you are not under the law, but under grace." Nevertheless, we being born under the law, and shut up under it, and being habituated to a legal way of working for life, we are prone to lean this way, when we lose sight of our interest in Christ. This Satan is aware of. Hence it is that he has furnished the world and pestered the church from age to age with ministers to revile the gospel, and cry up the law; traducing the former as a licentious doctrine, and extolling the works of the latter as consummate holiness: whose work is to beguile the unstable, entangle the unwary, deceive the simple, and call passengers back to the law, who go right on their way. For my own part, I never knew a child of God yet, who stood so fast in his liberty, as never to take a second trip to Horeb. Let any one simple soul,

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