and every preacher that does not bind this griev ous burden upon men's shoulders; that does not turn aside to vain jangling; that refuses to tempt God by putting this yoke upon the disciples' necks, which none are able to bear; is an erroneous man; a man of a bad spirit; one that makes void the law; and is, as I have been often called, a stinking Antinomian. God be merciful to such men! I have no other glass to view them in but the scriptures of truth and my own experience. And, as God liveth, I do believe, if fifteen out of twenty of our present preachers, who are called gospel ministers, were to see themselves as I see them in the light of God's word, that they would wish they had never been born; curse the day in which they took upon them the office of the ministry, and wish it to be blotted out from the number of the months, Job iii. 6. But, alas, alas! there are none who think themselves sufficient for these things but those of no understanding! A blind man knows not how to go to the city, Eccl. x. 15. A blind man beholdeth not the way of the vineyards, Job xxiv. 18.

This very polite letter of yours, sir, has drawn into public print what I never intended to make public. I have suffered so much by what I have before advanced, that I intended to have kept these truths close between God and my own soul; who was pleased, unless I am deceived, without the help of any author, to lead me into them. I have suffered a deal for what I have already ad

vanced from the pulpit and the press of these matters; and, for my part, I have not one single doubt of the whole of them being the truths of the everlasting gospel of Christ Jesus. But I have been termed a man of a bad spirit; a dangerous man; an erroneous man; a stinking Antinomian ; a contentious man; a man of controversy; a man of pride and reservedness, putting his own constructions upon scripture; a bully; a singular man, who wants to represent all other ministers as neuters, and himself all in all.

Old women have pursued me with twopenny, fourpenny, and sixpenny pamphlets, of their own manufactory; a boy crying them from one chapel door, where I preached, to the other; and their squibs have been sent to Portsmouth, Bristol, &c. wherever they heard that my books were sold. Ministers, behind the curtain, who pretended friendship to me, have told these old wives what brandy, meaning strength, to put into their fables; what sugar, meaning candour, to use; and what gaul, bitterness, or wormwood, to withhold.

I was asked to go to Bristol by a gentleman (whom I cautioned to have nothing to do with me, as I was so dangerous a man,) who would insist upon my going thither; and without my desire, had me down. The poor people had been prejudiced to that degree that they expected to find me a minister of Satan. The parsonmaker levelled his artillery from the pulpit till he was quite out of breath, and set off for London. Another, in obe

dience to the Rev. R. H. refused to invite me to his pulpit, or to give me the right hand of fellowship. I wrote to Bristol since, offering to preach them a sermon, being engaged to go into Dorsetshire, but was denied; and all this sprung from a reverend gentleman of Plymouth, who has settled the matters of Bristol tabernacle so as to secure the pulpit against Antinomians. And the same gentleman, I shall not mention his name, has not acted like a brother, nor has he done the KINSMAN'S part by me, but took some people to task for bringing my books into Plymouth; and a reverend gentleman, who is now settled at Walthamstow, when he lived at Plymouth, made it his business to ridicule what I had written, in order to imbitter the people's minds against the doctrines; and no wonder, for, if these doctrines be true, what becomes of theirs? The Bishop of Spa-fields Chapel lampooned me in public, till he got into the smoke of Sinai, insomuch, that some discerning people quite lost sight of him. Some of his people he excluded from the society because they came to hear me. His mandates went to Bristol, that they might not be infected; and to Lewes in Sussex also. Mr. Barnet refused me his pulpit, and threatened to leave the people if I were admitted; but a Baptist minister kindly threw open his meeting, which God filled with people, and my mouth with arguments. The congregation at Woking, which God raised by me, must send me their final dismission before they could get any assistance from

the Evangelical Association in London. The Rev. R. H. left his prelatic commands at Chatham, and twice since at Greenwich, never to admit me on peril of his final leave. If any of these charges are false, let them plead their innocence; and if the doctrine be false, let them be overthrown.

My friend may well ask, What is my sin? What have I done? Seeing some cry one thing and some another, the assemblies are confused, and no account given of the cause of this concourse; and I can give none, unless it be for this one voice that I cried among them; touching the law, I said it is not the believer's rule of life. And this I do insist upon, that bondage, hardness of heart, revealed wrath, enmity against God, desperation, curses, hell and damnation, are the best things that men can fetch from the killing letter of the law of Moses; whether the man be a believer or an infidel it matters not. The law will pursue the believer if he goes there, Christ alone is his refuge; it will entangle the believer, and yoke him again if he looks for help there. The law is not of faith, but of works; it is not of believing, but of doing: "he that doth these things shall live in them," is its language to the end of the chapter. Works are works, and grace is grace; the one is a covenant of works, the other a covenant of grace: one was given by Moses, the other came by Jesus Christ. The covenant of works was made with man; it belongs to Adam, and all his children in the flesh that bear his image; the covenant of grace was

made with Christ, and all his seed in him. The one is established upon unconditional promises, the other upon the conditions of dead men's performances; and who would call this law the believer's only rule of life? he is to walk and live by faith; he is to worship and serve God in the newness of the Spirit, not in the oldness of the letter; he is to walk in love as Christ hath loved him. And it is plain that faith worketh by love, and is attended with divine life, which are all the gifts of God in Christ Jesus; they are received from his fulness, and wrought in us, and are no less than the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus, which makes us free from the law of sin and death. If faith, life, holiness, and love, come from the law of the Spirit, why are they ingrafted upon the killing letter? and why is the believer sent to fetch his rule of life from that law which was once his death warrant? why this confusion? why this turning things upside down? The man that has got the law of the Spirit of life in him is the man to whom the Lord speaks by his Son. He speaks not to the believer out of the cloudy pillar, nor out of thick darkness. He has spoken to us in these last days by his Son; and it is to the believer that he thus speaks; "Ilearken unto me, ye that know righteousness, the people in whose heart is my law." A believer is a righteous man, made so by imputation; and the law is not made for the righteous, but for the lawless and disobedient, 1 Tim. i. 9. God speaks to the children of the