there is time and opportunity, yet our works have no part in meriting or purchasing our justification, either in whole or in part." Mr. Shirley declared himself satisfied with this declaration, and the interview was concluded with prayer, and professions of peace and love. These were but fallacious appearances: the old question had been mooted, and the * dispute broke out with greater violence than ever. On the part of the Arminians it was carried on by Walter Sellon, who was originally a baker, then one of Wesley's lay-preachers, and had afterwards, by means of lady Huntingdon's influence, obtained orders; by Thomas Olivers, who, like a sturdy and honest Welshman as he was, refused, at the Conference, to subscribe the declaration; and by Mr. Fletcher. On the part of the Calvinists, the most conspicuous writers were the brothers Richard (afterwards Sir Richard) and Rowland Hill, and Augustus Montague Toplady, vicar of Broad Hembury, in Devonshire. Never were any writings more thoroughly saturated with the essential acid of Calvinism, than those of the predestinarian champions. It would scarcely be credible, that three persons, of good birth and education, and of unquestionable goodness and piety, should have carried on controversy in so vile a manner, and with so detestable a spirit,-if the hatred of theologians had not, unhappily, become proverbial. Berridge, of Everton, also, who was buffoon as well as fanatic, engaged on their side: and even Harvey's nature was so far soured by his opinions, that he wrote in an acrimonious style against Mr. Wesley, whose real piety he knew, and whom he had once regarded as his spiritual father. The ever-memorable Toplady, as his admirers call *The sort of recantation which was made in this declaration gave occasion to the following verses by one of the hostile party: Whereas the religion, and fate of three nations, And words have been construed to mean what they say; him, and who, they say, "stands paramount in the plenitude of dignity above most of his contemporaries," was bred at Westminster, and, according to his own account, converted at the age of sixteen, by the sermon of an ignorant lay-preacher, in a barn in Ireland. He was an injudicious man, hasty in forming conclusions, and intemperate in advancing them; but his intellect was quick and lively, and his manner of writing, though coarse, was always vigorous, and sometimes fortunate. A little before that Conference which brought out the whole Calvinistic force against Wesley, Mr. Toplady published a Treatise upon absolute Predestination, chiefly translated from the Latin of Zanchius. Mr. Wesley set forth an analysis of this treatise, for the purpose of exposing its monstrous doctrine, and concluded in these words: "The sum of all this :-one in twenty (suppose) of mankind are elected; nineteen in twenty are reprobated. The elect shall be saved, do what they will; the reprobate shall be damned, do what they can. Reader, believe this, or be damned. Witness my hand, A— T." Toplady denied the consequences, and accused Mr. Wesley of intending to palm the paragraph on the world as his. "In almost any other case," said he, "a similar forgery would transmit the criminal to Virginia or Maryland, if not to Tyburn. The satanic guilt of the person who could excogitate and publish to the world a position like that, baffles all power of description, and is only to be exceeded (if exceedable) by the satanic shamelessness which dares to lay the black position at the door of other men." Most certainly Mr. Wesley had no intention that this passage should pass for Mr. Toplady's writing. He gave it as the sum of his doctrine; and, stripping that doctrine of all disguise, exposed it thus in its naked monstrosity. After vindicating himself by stating this, he left Olivers to carry on the contest with his incensed antagonist. This provoked Toplady the more. "Let Mr. Wesley," said he, "fight his own battles. I am as ready as ever to meet him with the sling of reason and the stone of God's word in my hand. But let him not fight by proxy; let his cobblers keep to their stalls; let his tinkers mend their brazen vessels; let his barbers confine themselves to their blocks and basins; let his blacksmiths blow more suitable coals than those of nice controversy: every man in his own order." And, because Olivers had been a shoemaker, he attacked him on that score with abusive ridicule, both in prose and in rhyme. But when he spoke of Wesley him. self, and Wesley's doctrines, it was with a bitterer temper. The very titles which he affixed to his writings were in the manner of Martin Marprelate, More Work for Mr. John Wesley;"-" An Old Fox tarred and feathered:" it seemed as if he had imbibed the spirit of sectarian scurrility, from the truculent libellers of the puritanical age, with whom he sympathized almost as much in opi * He makes Wesley speak of him thus, in a doggrel dialogue : (No stall in England holds a nobler,) Hem handkerchief, and scrape the fiddle; And then when he philosophizes, No son of Crispin half so wise is. Of all my ragged regiment, This cobbler gives me most content; My barber, champion, and shoe-mender. In private, however, Toplady did justice to this antagonist. After a chance interview with him, which, for its good humour, was creditable to both parties, he says, to a correspondent, "To say the truth, I am glad I saw Mr. Olivers, for he appears to be a person of stronger sense, and better behaviour, than I imagined. Had his understanding been cultivated by a liberal education, I believe he would have made some figure in life." I have never seen Olivers's pamphlet, but he had the right side of the argument; and, if he had not maintained his cause with respectable ability, his treatise would not have been sanctioned (on such an occasion) by Wesley, and praised by Fletcher. VOL. II. 35 nions as in temper. Blunders and blasphemies, he said, were two species of commodities in which Mr. Wesley had driven a larger traffic, than any other blunder-merchant this country had produced. Considered as a reasoner, he called him one of the most contemptible writers that ever set pen to paper.— And, "abstracted from all warmth, and from all prejudices," says he, "I believe him to be the most rancorous hater of the Gospel system that ever appeared in this island." The same degree of coolness and impartiality appeared when he spoke of the doctrines which he opposed. He insisted that Socinus and Arminius were the two necessary supporters of a free-willer's coat of arms; "for," said he, in his vigorous manner, "Arminianism is the head, and Socinianism the tail of one and the self-same serpent; and, when the head works itself in, it will soon draw the tail after it." A tract of Wesley's, in which the fatal doctrine of Necessity is controverted and exposed, he calls "the famous Moorfields powder, whose chief ingredients are an equal portion of gross Heathenism, Pelagianism, Mahometanism, Popery, Manichæism, Ranterism, and Antinomianism, culled, dried, and pulverized, and mingled with as much palpable Atheism as you can scrape together." And he asserted, and attempted to prove, that Arminianism and Atheism came to the same thing. A more unfair reasoner has seldom entered the lists of theological controversy, and yet he was not so uncharitable as his writings, nor by any means so bad as his opinions might easily have made him. He much questioned whether an Arminian could go to heaven; and of course must have supposed that Wesley, as the Arch-Arminian of the age, bore about him the stamp of reprobation. Nevertheless, in one of his letters, he says, "God is witness how earnestly I wish it may consist with the Divine will, to touch the heart and open the eyes of that unhappy man! I hold it as much my duty to pray for his conversion, as to expose the futulity of his railings against the truths of the Gospel." And, upon a report of Wesley's death, he would have stopped the publication of one of his bitter diatribes, for the purpose of expunging whatever reflected with asperity upon the dead. There was no affectation in this; the letters in which these redeeming feelings appear were not intended or expected to go abroad into the world. The wise and gentle Tillotson has observed, that we shall have two wonders in heaven; the one, how many come to be absent whom we expected to find ▾ there; the other, how many are there whom we had no hope of meeting. Toplady said of Mr. Fletcher's works, that, in the very few pages which he had perused, the serious passages were dulness double-condensed, and the lighter passages impudence double-distilled: "So hardened was" his own "front," to use one of his own expressions, " and so thoroughly was he drenched in the petrifying water of a party." If ever true Christian charity was manifested in polemical writing, it was by Fletcher of Madely. Even theological controversy never, in the slightest degree, irritated his heavenly temper. On sending the manuscript of his first Check to Antinomianism to a friend much younger than himself, he says, "I beg, as upon my bended knees, you would revise and correct it, and take off quod durius sonat in point of works, reproof, and style. I have followed my light, which is but that of smoking flax; put yours to mine. I am charged hereabouts with scattering fire-brands, arrows, and death. Quench some Quench some of my brands; blunt some of my arrows; and take off all my deaths, except that which I design for Antinomianism.". "For the sake of candour," he says, in one of his prefaces, "of truth, of peace,-for the Reader's sake, and, above all, for the sake of Christ, and the honour of Christianity, whoever ye are that shall next enter the lists against us, do not wire-draw the controversy, by uncharitably attacking our persons, and absurdly judging our spirits, instead of weighing our arguments, and considering the scriptures which we produce; nor pass over fifty solid reasons, and a hundred plain passages, to cavil about non-essentials, and to lay the stress of your answer upon mistakes, 1 |