42.
How can this evangelical preacher declaim on the necessity of seriously searching into the truth of revelation, for the purpose either of producing or confirming our belief of it, when he has already pronounced it to be just as possible to arrive at conviction as to create a world?
Did Dr.Hawker say that it was impossible to produce an assent to the historic credibility of the facts related in the Gospel?
Did he say that it was impossible to become a Socinian by the weighing of outward evidences?
No! but Dr.Hawker says,--and I say,--that this is not, cannot be, what Christ means by faith, which, to the misfortune of the Socinians, he always demands as the condition of a miracle, instead of looking forward to it as the natural effect of a miracle.

How came it that Peter saw miracles countless, and yet was without faith till the Holy Ghost descended on him?
Besides, miracles may or may not be adequate evidence for Socinianism; but how could miracles prove the doctrine of Redemption, or the divinity of Christ?
But this is the creed of the Church of England.
It is wearisome to be under the necessity, or at least the constant temptation, of attacking Socinianism, in reviewing a work professedly written against Methodism.

Surely such a work ought to treat of those points of doctrine and practice, which are peculiar to Methodism.

But to publish a 'diatribe' against the substance of the Articles and Catechism of the English Church, nay, of the whole Christian world, excepting the Socinians, and to call it "Hints concerning the dangerous and abominable absurdities of Methodism," is too bad.
Ib.p.

43.
But this Calvinistic Evangelist tells us, by way of accounting for the utter impossibility of producing in himself either faith or repentance, that both are of divine origin, and like the light, and the rain, and the dew of heaven, which tarrieth not for man, neither waiteth for the sons of men, are from above, and come down from the Father of lights, from whom alone cometh every good and perfect gift! Is the Barrister--are the Socinian divines--inspired, or infallibly sure that it is a crime for a Christian to understand the words of Christ in their plain and literal sense, when a Socinian chooses to give his paraphrase,--often, too, as strongly remote from the words, as the old spiritual paraphrases on the Song of Solomon?
Ib.p.