My Dear
Friend,
Are you
willing I should still call you so, or are you quite weary of me? Your silence
makes me suspect the latter. However, it is my part to fulfil my promise, and
then leave the event to God. As I have but an imperfect remembrance of what I
have already written, I may be liable to some repetitions. I cannot stay to
comment upon every line in your letter, but I proceed to notice such passages
as seem most to affect the subject in debate. When you speak of the Scriptures
maintaining one consistent sense, which, if the Word of God, it certainly must
do, you say you read and understand it in this one consistent sense; nay, you
cannot remember the time when you did not. It is otherwise with me and with
multitudes; we remember when it was a sealed book, and we are sure it would
have been so still, had not the Holy Spirit opened our understandings.
But when you
add, though I pretend not to understand the whole, yet what I do understand
appears perfectly consistent. I know not how far this exception may extend; for
perhaps the reason why you allow you do not understand some parts, is because
you cannot make them consistent with the sense you put upon other parts. You
quote my words, "That when we are conscious of our depravity, reasoning
stands us in no stead." Undoubtedly reason always will stand rational
creatures in some stead; but my meaning is, that when we are deeply convinced
of sin, all our former reasonings upon the ways of God, while we make our
conceptions the standard by which we judge what is befitting Him to do, as if
He were altogether such an one as ourselves- all those cobweb reasonings are
swept away, and we submit to His autoV efh (authority) without reasoning,
though not without reason. For we have the strongest reason imaginable to
acknowledge ourselves vile and lost, without righteousness and strength, when
we actually feel ourselves to be so.
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You speak of
the Gospel term of justification. This term is faith, Mark xvi. I6; Acts xiii.
39. The Gospel propounds, admits no other term. But this faith, as I
endeavoured to show in my former letter, is very different from rational
assent. You speak likewise of the law of faith, by which if you mean what some
call the remedial law, which we are to obey as well as we can, and such
obedience, together with our faith, will entitle us to acceptance with God, I
am persuaded the Scripture speaks of no such thing. Grace and works of any
kind, in the point of acceptance with God, are mentioned by the apostle not
only as opposites or contraries, but as absolutely contradictory to each other,
like fire and water, light and darkness; so that the affirmation of one is the
denial of the other, Rom. iv. 5, and xi. 6. God justifies freely, justifies the
ungodly, and him that worketh not.
Though justifying faith be indeed an active
principle, it worketh by love, yet not for acceptance. Those whom the apostle
exhorts to work out their own salvation with "fear and trembling," he
considers as justified already; for he considers them as believers, in whom he
supposed God had already begun a good work, and if so, was confident he would
accomplish it (Phil. i. 6). To them, the consideration that God (who dwells in
the hearts of believers) wrought in them to will and to do, was a powerful
motive and encouragement to them to work, that is, to give all diligence to His
appointed means; as a right sense of the sin that dwelleth in us, and the
snares and temptations around us, will teach us still to work with fear and
trembling.
You suppose a
difference between Christians (so called) who are devoted to God in baptism,
and those who in the first ages were converted from abominable superstitions
and idolatrous vices.-It is true, in Christian countries we do not worship
heathen divinities eo nomine (by those names). And this is the principal
difference I can find. Neither reason nor observation will allow me to think
that human nature is a whit better now than it was in the apostle's time. I
know no kinds or degrees of wickedness which prevailed among heathens, which
are not prevalent among nominal Christians, who have perhaps been baptized in
their infancy; and, therefore, as the streams in the life are equally worldly,
sensual, devilish, I doubt not but the fountain of the heart is equally
polluted and poisonous; and that it is as true as it was in the days of Christ
and His apostles, that unless a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of
God.
