As well might we say of a poor scrofulous innocent: "See the effect of the bad example of his father on him!" I blame no man for disbelieving, or for opposing with might and main, the dogma of Original Sin; but I confess that I neither respect the understanding nor have confidence in the sincerity of him, who declares that he has carefully read the writings of St.Paul, and finds in them no consequence attributed to the fall of Adam but that of his bad example, and none to the Cross of Christ but the good example of dying a martyr to a good cause.

I would undertake from the writings of the later English Socinians to collect paraphrases on the New Testament texts that could only be paralleled by the spiritual paraphrase on Solomon's Song to be found in the recent volume of "A Dictionary of the Holy Bible, by John Brown, Minister of the Gospel at Haddington:" third edition, in the Article, Song.
Ib.p.63, 64.
Call forth the robber from his cavern, and the midnight murderer from his den; summon the seducer from his couch, and beckon the adulterer from his embrace; cite the swindler to appear; assemble from every quarter all the various miscreants whose vices deprave, and whose villainies distress, mankind; and when they are thus thronged round in a circle, assure them--not that there is a God that judgeth the earth--not that punishment in the great day of retribution will await their crimes, &c.

&c .-- Let every sinner in the throng be told that they will stand 'justified' before God; that the 'righteousness' of 'Christ' will be imputed to 'them', &c.
Well, do so .-- Nay, nay! it has been done; the effect has been tried; and slander itself cannot deny that the effect has been the conversion of thousands of those very sinners whom the Barrister's fancy thus convokes.

O shallow man! not to see that here lies the main strength of the cause he is attacking; that, to repeat my former illustration, he draws the attention to patients in that worst state of disease which perhaps alone requires and justifies the use of the white pill, as a mode of exposing the frantic quack who vends it promiscuously! He fixes on the empiric's cures to prove his murders!--not to forget what ought to conclude every paragraph in answer to the Barrister's Hints; "and were the case as alleged, what does this prove against the present Methodists as Methodists ?" Is not the tenet of imputed righteousness the faith of all the Scotch Clergy, who are not false to their declarations at their public assumption of the ministry?
Till within the last sixty or seventy years, was not the tenet preached Sunday after Sunday in every nook of Scotland; and has the Barrister heard that the morals of the Scotch peasants and artizans have been improved within the last thirty or forty years, since the exceptions have become more and more common ?--Was it by want of strict morals that the Puritans were distinguished to their disadvantage from the rest of Englishmen during the reigns of Elizabeth, James I.Charles I.and II.?
And that very period, which the Barrister affirms to have been distinguished by the moral vigor of the great mass of Britons,--was it not likewise the period when this very doctrine was preached by the Clergy fifty times for once that it is heard from the same pulpits in the present and preceding generation?
Never, never can the Methodists be successfully assailed, if not honestly, and never honestly or with any chance of success, except as Methodists;--for their practices, their alarming theocracy, their stupid, mad, and mad-driving superstitions.

These are their property 'in peculio'; their doctrines are those of the Church of England, with no other difference than that in the Church Liturgy, and Articles, and Homilies, Calvinism and Lutheranism are joined like the two hands of the Union Fire Office:-the Methodists have unclasped them, and one is Whitfield and the other Wesley.
Ib.p.