Now the very essence of guilt, its dire and incommunicable character, consists in its tendency to destroy the free will;--but when thus destroyed, are the habits of vice thenceforward innocent?
Does the law excuse the murder because the perpetrator was drunk?
Dr.Hawker put his objection laxly and weakly enough; but a manly opponent would have been ashamed to seize an hour's victory from what a move of the pen would render impregnable.
Ib.p.102, 3.
When at this solemn tribunal the sinner shall be called upon to answer for the transgression of those 'moral' laws, on obedience to which salvation was made to depend, will it be sufficient that he declares himself to have been taught to believe that the Gospel 'had neither terms nor conditions', and that his salvation was secured by a covenant which procured him pardon and peace, 'from all eternity': a covenant, the effects of which no folly or 'after-act whatever' could possibly destroy ?--Who could anticipate the sentence of condemnation, and not weep in agony over the deluded victim of ignorance and misfortune who was thus taught a doctrine so fatally false?
What then! God is represented as a tyrant when he claims the penalty of disobedience from the servant, who has wilfully incapacitated himself for obeying,--and yet just and merciful in condemning to indefinite misery a poor "deluded victim of ignorance and imposture," even though the Barrister, spite of his antipathy to Methodists, would "weep in agony" over him! But before the Barrister draws bills of imagination on his tender feelings, would it not have been as well to adduce some last dying speech and confession, in which the culprit attributed his crimes--not to Sabbath-breaking and loose company,--but to sermon-hearing on the 'modus operandi' of the divine goodness in the work of redemption?
How the Ebenezerites would stare to find the Socinians and themselves in one flock on the sheep-side of the judgment-seat,--and their cousins, and fellow Methodists, the Tabernaclers, all caprifled--goats every man:--and why?
They held, that repentance is in the power of every man, with the aid of grace; while the goats held that without grace no man is able even to repent.

A.
makes grace the cause, and B.makes it only a necessary auxiliary.

And does the Socinian extricate himself a whit more clearly?
Without a due concurrence of circumstances no mind can improve itself into a state susceptible of spiritual happiness: and is not the disposition and pre-arrangement of circumstances as dependent on the divine will as those spiritual influences which the Methodist holds to be meant by the word grace?
Will not the Socinian find it as difficult to reconcile with mercy and justice the condemnation to hell-fire of poor wretches born and bred in the thieves' nests of St.Giles, as the Methodists the condemnation of those who have been less favoured by grace?
I have one other question to ask, though it should have been asked before.

Suppose Christ taught nothing more than a future state of retribution and the necessity and sufficiency of good morals, how are we to explain his forbidding these truths to be taught to any but Jews till after his resurrection?
Did the Jews reject those doctrines?
Except perhaps a handful of rich men, called Sadducees, they all believed them, and would have died a thousand deaths rather than have renounced their faith.
Besides, what is there in doctrines common to the creed of all religions, and enforced by all the schools of philosophy, except the Epicurean, which should have prevented their being taught to all at the same time?
I perceive, that this difficulty does not press on Socinians exclusively: but yet it presses on them with far greater force than on others.

For they make Christianity a mere philosophy, the same in substance with the Stoical, only purer from errors and accompanied with clearer evidence:--while others think of it as part of a covenant made up with Abraham, the fulfilment of which was in good faith to be first offered to his posterity.