you will have need of new watchfulness. Still redeem the time; be steadily serious; and follow your own conscience in all things. I am, my dear sister,

Your affectionate brother.

In my return from the Highlands, I expect to spend a day at Newcastle-upon-Tyne, the 18th or 19th of June.

CLXIII. To the Same.

LONDON, August 2, 1776.

MY DEAR SISTER,-I know not that you differ from me at all. You are certainly in your place at present; and it seems one providential reason of your ill health was, to drive you thither. Now, use all the ability which God giveth, and he will give more: Unto him that hath shall be given, and he shall have more abundantly; it is the hand of the diligent that maketh rich. If you can persuade honest Alice Brammah to be cleanly as well as gentle, she will be tenfold more useful; and so will Billy Brammah, if he will be teachable and advisable; otherwise there is a fly in the pot of ointment. You are sent to Leeds chiefly for the sake of those that enjoy, or thirst after perfect love. Redeem the time! Go on in His name! And let the world and the devil fall under your feet! I am, my dear sister,

Your affectionate brother.

CLXIV. To the Same.

OCTOBER, 1776.

MY DEAR SISTER,-You have abundant reason. to praise God, who has dealt so mercifully with you, and to encourage all about you never to rest till they attain full salvation.

As to the question you propose, if the leader himself desires it, and the class be not unwilling, in that case there can be no objection to your meeting a class even of men. This is not properly assuming or exercising any authority over them. You do not act as a superior, but an equal; and it is an act of friendship and brotherly love.

I am glad you had a little conversation with Miss Ritchie. She is a precious soul. Do her all the good you can, and incite her to exert all the talents which God has given her. I am

Your affectionate brother.

CLXV. To the Same.

LONDON, December 1, 1781.

MY DEAR SISTER,-Never be afraid that I should think your letters troublesome: I am never so busy as to forget my friends.

Mr. and Mrs. Fletcher made an excellent beginning, and I trust they will increase with all the increase of God. Now, let all of you that remain in the neighbourhood arise up and supply her lack of service. Be instant in season, out of season; that all may know you have caught her mantle !

But pray do not suffer my poor Miss Ritchie to work herself to death. Let her do all she can, and not more than she can. I am Your affectionate brother.

CLXVI. To the Same.

NEAR LONDON, November 21, 1783. MY DEAR SISTER,-Through the blessing of God, I find no difference at all between the health and strength which are now given me, and that which I had forty years ago. Only I had then many pains which I have not now.

You are enabled to give a very clear and standing proof that weakness of nerves cannot prevent joy in the Lord. Your nerves have been remarkably weak, and that for many years: but still your soul can magnify the Lord, and your spirit rejoice in God your Saviour!

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Your affectionate brother,

CLXVII.-To Dr. Robertson.

BRISTOL, September 24, 1753.

DEAR SIR, I have lately had the pleasure of reading Mr. Ramsay s Principles of Religion," with the notes you have annexed to them. Doubtless he was a person of a bright and strong understanding, but I think not of a very clear apprehension. Perhaps it might be owing to this, that, not distinctly perceiving the strength of some of the objections to his hypothesis, he is very peremptory in his assertions, and apt to treat his opponent with an air of contempt and disdain. This seems to have been a blemish even in his moral character. I am afraid the using guile is another; for surely it is a mere artifice to impute to the Schoolmen the rise of almost every opinion which he censures; seeing he must have known that most, if not all, of those opinions, preceded the Schoolmen several hundred years.

The treatise itself gave me a stronger conviction than ever I had before, both of the fallaciousness and unsatisfactoriness of the mathematical method of reasoning on religious subjects. Extremely fallacious it is; for if we slip but in one line, a whole train of errors may follow : and utterly unsatisfactory, at least to me, because I can never be sufficiently assured that this is not the case.

The two first books, although doubtless they are a fine chain of reasoning, yet gave me the less satisfaction, because I am clearly of Mr. H's judgment, that all this is beginning at the wrong end; that we can have no idea of God, nor any sufficient proof of his very being, but from the creatures; and that the meanest plant is a far stronger proof hereof, than all Dr. Clarke's or the Chevalier's demonstrations.

Among the latter, I was surprised to find a demonstration of the manner how God is present to all beings; (page 57;) how he begat the Son from all eternity; (page 77;) and how the Holy Ghost proceeds from the Father and the Son. (Page 85.) Quanto satius est fateri nescire quæ nescias, quam ista effutientem nauseare, et ipsum tibi displicere? How much better to keep to his own conclusion, (page 95,) "Reason proves that this mystery is possible!" Revelation assures us that it is true; Heaven alone can show us how it is.

*This quotation from Cicero on the Nature of the Gods is thus translated by Dr. Franklin:"How much more laudable would it be, to acknowledge you do not know what you do not know, than to follow that blunderer, whom you must surely despise."-EDIT.

There are several propositions in his second book which I cannot assent to; particularly with regard to the Divine foreknowledge. I can by no means acquiesce in the twenty-second proposition, "That it is a matter of free choice in God, to think of finite ideas." I cannot recon cile this with the assertion of the Apostle, "Known unto God are all his works, an' aiavos, from eternity." And if any one ask, "How is God's foreknowledge consistent with our freedom?" I plainly answer, I cannot tell.

In the third book, (page 209,) I read, "The desire of God, purely as beatifying, as the source of infinite pleasure, is a necessary consequence of the natural love we have for happiness." I deny it absolutely. My natural love for happiness was as strong thirty years ago as at this instant. Yet I had then no more desire of God, as the source of any pleasure at all, than I had of the devil or of hell. So totally false is that, "That the soul inevitably loves what it judges to be the best."

Equally false is his next corollary; that "if ever fallen spirits see and feel that moral evil is a source of eternal misery, they cannot continue to will it deliberately." (Ibid.) I can now show living proofs of the contrary. But I take knowledge, both from this and many other of his assertions, that Mr. R. never rightly understood the height and depth of that corruption which is in man, as well as diabolical nature.

The doctrine of pure love, as it is stated in the fourth book and elsewhere, (the loving God chiefly is not solely for his inherent perfections,) I once firmly espoused. But I was at length unwillingly convinced that I must give it up, or give up the Bible. And for near twenty years I have thought, as I do now, that it is at least unscriptural, if not antiscriptural: for the Scripture gives not the least intimation, that I can find, of any higher, or indeed any other, love of God, than that mentioned by St. John: "We love him, because he first loved us." And I desire no higher love of God, till my spirit returns to him.

Page 313: "There can be but two possible ways of curing moral evil; the sensation of pleasure in the discovery of truth, or the sensation of pain in the love of error."

So here is one who has searched out the Almighty to perfection! who knows every way wherein he can exert his omnipotence!

I am not clear in this. I believe it is very possible for God to act in some third way. I believe he can make me as holy as an archangel, without any sensation at all preceding.

Page 324: "Hence it is that the chaos mentioned in the first chapter of Genesis cannot be understood of the primitive state of nature."

Why not, if God created the world gradually, as we are assured he did?

In the fifth book, (page 334,) I read a more extraordinary assertion than any of the preceding: "The infusion of such supernatural habits, by one instantaneous act, is impossible. We cannot be confirmed in immutable habits of good, but by a long continued repetition of free acts." I dare not say so. I am persuaded God can this moment confirm me immutably good.

Page 335: Such is the nature of finite spirits, that, after a certain degree of good habits contracted, they become unpervertible and immuVOL. VI.

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table in the love of order." If so, "after a certain degree of evil nabits contracted, must they not become unconvertible and immutable in the hatred of order?" And if Omnipotence cannot prevent the one, neither can it prevent the other.

Page 343: "No creature can suffer, but what has merited punishment." This is not true; for the man Christ Jesus was a creature. But he suffered; yet he had not merited punishment, unless our sins were imputed to him. But, if so, Adam's sin might be imputed to us; and on that account even an infant may suffer.

Now, if these things are so, if a creature may suffer for the sin of another imputed to him, then the whole frame of reasoning for the preexistence of souls, raised from the contrary supposition, falls to the ground.

Page 347: "There are but three opinions concerning the transmission of original sin." That is, there are but three ways of accounting how it is transmitted. I care not if there were none. The fact I know, both by Scripture and by experience. I know it is transmitted ; but how it is transmitted, I neither know nor desire to know.

Page 353: "By this insensibility and spiritual lethargy in which all souls remain, ere they awake into mortal bodies, the habits of evil in some are totally extinguished."

Then it seems there is a third possible way of curing moral evil. And why may not all souls be cured this way, without any pain or suffering at all?

"If any impurity remains in them, it is destroyed in a middle state after death." (İb.)

I read nothing of either of these purgations in the Bible. But it appears to me, from the whole tenor of his writings, that the Chevalier's notions are about one quarter Scriptural, one quarter Popish, and two quarters Mystic.

Page 360: "God dissipated the chaos, introduced into the solar system by the fall of angels." Does Sacred Writ affirm this? Where is it written, except in Jacob Behmen?

Page 366" Physical evil is the only means of curing moral evil.” This is absolutely contrary both to Scripture, experience, and his own words, page 353. And "this great principle," as he terms it, is one of those fundamental mistakes which run through the whole Mystic divinity.

Almost all that is asserted in the following pages may likewise be confuted by simply denying it.

Page 373: "Hence we see the necessity of sufferings and expiatory pains in order to purify lapsed beings; the intrinsic efficacy of physical, to cure moral, evil."

Expiatory pains is pure, unmixed Popery; but they can have ne place in the Mystic scheme. This only asserts, "the intrinsic efficacy of physical, to cure moral, evil, and the absolute necessity of sufferings to purify lapsed beings:" neither of which I can find in the Bible; though I really believe there is as much of the efficacy in sufferings, as in spiritual lethargy.

Page 374: "If beasts have any souis, they are either material or

immaterial, to be annihilated after death; or degraded intelligences." No; they may be immaterial, and yet not to be annihilated.

If you ask, "But how are they to subsist after death?" I answer, He that made them knows.

The sixth book, I fear, is more dangerously wrong than any of the preceding, as it effectually undermines the whole Scriptural account of God's reconciling the world unto himself, and turns the whole redemption of man by the blood of Christ into a mere metaphor. I doubt whether Jacob Behmen does not do the same. I am sure he does if

Mr. Law understands him right.

I have not time to specify all the exceptionable passages: if I did, I must transcribe part of almost every page.

Page 393: "The Divinity is unsusceptible of anger." I take this to be the prov Judos [fundamental error] of all the Mystics. But I demand the proof. I take anger to have the same relation to justice, as love has to mercy.

But if we grant them this, then they will prove their point. For if God was never angry, his anger could never be appeased; and then we may safely adopt the very words of Socinus, Tota redemptionis nostra per Christum metaphora; [the whole of our redemption by Christ is a metaphor;] seeing Christ died only to "show to all the celestial choirs God's infinite aversion to disorder."

Page 394: "He suffered, because of the sin of men, infinite agonies, as a tender father suffers to see the vices of his children. He felt all that lapsed angels and men should have suffered to all eternity. Without this sacrifice, celestial spirits could never have known the horrible deformity of vice. In this sense, he substituted himself as a victim to take away the sins of the world; not to appease vindictive justice, but to show God's infinite love of justice."

This is as broad Socinianism as can be imagined. Nay, it is more. It is not only denying the satisfaction of Christ, but supposing that he died for devils as much, and for the angels in heaven much more, than he did for man.

Indeed, he calls Him an expiatory sacrifice, a propitiatory victim; but remember it was only in this sense: for you are told again, (page 399,) "See the deplorable ignorance of those who represent the expi atory sacrifice of Christ as destined to appease vindictive justice, and avert divine vengeance. It is by such frivolous and blasphemous notions that the Schoolmen have exposed this divine mystery."

These "frivolous and blasphemous notions," do I receive as the precious truths of God. And so deplorable is my ignorance, that I verily believe all who deny them deny the Lord that bought them.

Page 400: "The immediate, essential, necessary means of reuniting men to God are prayer, mortification and self-denial." No; the immediate, essential, necessary mean of reuniting me to God, is living faith; and that alone: Without this, I cannot be reunited to God; with this, I cannot but be reunited.

Prayer, mortification, and self-denial, are the fruits of faith, and the grand means of continuing and increasing it.

But I object to the account Mr. R., and all the Mystics, give of those. It is far too lax and general. And hence those who receive all he says