51.
Whatever these new Evangelists may teach to the contrary, the present state of public morals and of public happiness would assume a very different appearance if the thieves, swindlers, and highway robbers, would 'do their best' towards maintaining themselves by honest labour, instead of perpetually planning new systems of fraud, and new schemes of depredation.
That is, if these thieves had a different will--not a mere wish, however anxious:--for this wish "the libertine" doubtless has, as described in p.

50,--but an effective will.

Well, and who doubts this?
The point in dispute is, as to the means of producing this reformation in the will; which, whatever the Barrister may think, Christ at least thought so difficult as to speak of it, not once or twice, but uniformly, as little less than miraculous, as tantamount to a re-creation.

This Barrister may be likened to an ignorant but well-meaning Galenist, who writing against some infamous quack, who lived by puffing and vending pills of mercurial sublimate for all cases of a certain description, should have no stronger argument than to extol 'sarsaparilla', and 'lignum vitae', or 'senna' in contempt of all mercurial preparations.
Ib.p.

56.
Not for the revenues of an Archbishop would he exhort them to a duty 'unknown in Scripture', of adding their five talents to the five they have received, &c.
All this is mere calumny and wilful misstatement of the tenets of Wesley, who never doubted that we are bound to improve our 'talents', or, on the other hand, that we are equally bound, having done so, to be equally thankful to the Giver of all things for the power and the will by which we improved the talents, as for the original capital which is the object of the improvement.