“In the Press. An Equal Check to Pharisaism and Antinomianism; and the Scripture Scales to weigh Gospel Truth; both by the Rev. Mr. John Fletcher, Vicar of Madeley, Shropshire.”

“I. The first piece of this Check was designed for a preface to the Discourse that follows it; but as it swelled far beyond my intention, I present it to the reader under the name of An Historical Essay, which makes way for the tracts that follow.

“II. With respect to the Discourse, I must mention what engages me to publish it. In 1771, I saw the propositions called the ‘Minutes.’ Their author invited me to ‘review the whole affair.’ I did so; and soon found that I had ‘leaned too much toward Calvinism,’ which, after mature consideration, appeared to me exactly to coincide with speculative Antinomianism; and the same year I publicly acknowledged my error.^[305]

“When I had thus openly confessed that I was involved in the guilt of many of my brethren, and that I had so leaned towards speculative as not to have made a proper stand against practical Antinomianism, who could have thought that one of my most formidable opponents^[306] would have attempted to screen his mistakes behind some passages of a manuscript sermon which I preached twelve years ago, and of which, by some means or other, he has got a copy?

“I am very far from recanting that old discourse. I still think the doctrine it contains excellent, in the main, and very proper to be enforced, though in a more guarded manner, in a congregation of hearers violently prejudiced against the first gospel axiom.^[307] Therefore, out of regard for the grand, leading truth of Christianity, and in compliance with Mr. Hill’s earnest entreaty (‘Finishing Stroke,’ p. 45), I send my sermon into the world upon the following reasonable conditions: 1. That I shall be allowed to publish it, as I preached it a year ago in my church, namely, with additions in brackets, to make it at once a fuller Check to Pharisaism, and a finishing Check to Antinomianism. 2. That the largest addition shall be in favour of free grace. 3. That nobody shall accuse me of forgery, for thus adding my present light to that which I had formerly; and for thus bringing out of my little treasure of experience things new and old. 4. That the press shall not groan with the charge of disingenuity, if I throw into Notes some unguarded expressions, which I formerly used without scruple, and which my more enlightened conscience does not suffer me to use at present. 5. That my opponent’s call to print my sermon will procure me the pardon of the public, for presenting them with a plain, blunt, discourse, composed for an audience chiefly made up of colliers and rustics. And, lastly, that, as I understand English a little better than I did twelve years ago, I shall be permitted to rectify a few French idioms, which I find in my old manuscript; and to connect my thoughts a little more like an Englishman, where I can do it without the least misrepresentation of the sense.

“III. With regard to the ‘Scriptural Essay’ upon the rewardableness or evangelical worthiness of works, I shall just observe that it attacks the grand mistake of Solifidians countenanced by three or four words of my old sermon. I pour a flood of Scriptures upon it; and, after receiving the fire of my objector, I return it in a variety of scriptural and rational answers, about the solidity of which the public must decide.

“IV. The ‘Essay on Truth’ will, I hope, reconcile judicious moralists to the doctrine of salvation by faith, and considerate Solifidians to the doctrine of salvation by the works of faith; reason and Scripture concurring to show the constant dependence of works upon faith; and the wonderful agreement of the doctrine of present salvation by TRUE faith, with the doctrine of eternal salvation by GOOD works.

“I hope that I do not dissent, in my observations upon faith, either from our Church, or approved Gospel ministers. In their highest definitions of that grace, they consider it only according to the fulness of the Christian dispensation; but my subject has obliged me to consider it also according to the dispensations of John the Baptist, Moses, and Noah. Believers under these inferior dispensations have not always assurance, nor is the assurance they sometimes have so bright as that of adult Christians, Matt. xi. 11. But, undoubtedly, assurance is inseparably connected with the faith of the Christian dispensation, which was not fully opened till Christ opened His glorious baptism on the Day of Pentecost, and till His spiritual kingdom was set up with power in the hearts of His people. Nobody, therefore, can truly believe, according to this dispensation, without being immediately conscious both of the forgiveness of sins, and of peace and joy in the Holy Ghost. This is a most important truth, derided indeed by fallen Churchmen, and denied by Laodicean Dissenters; but, of late years gloriously revived by Mr. Wesley and the Ministers connected with him.”

“The substance of the following Discourse was committed to paper many years ago, to convince the Pharisees and papists of my parish that there is no salvation by the faithless works of the law, but by a living faith in Jesus Christ. With shame I confess that I did not then see the need of guarding the doctrine of faith against the despisers of works. I was chiefly bent upon pulling up the tares of Pharisaism: those of Antinomianism were not yet sprung up in the field, which I began to cultivate: or my want of experience hindered me from discerning them. But since, what a crop of them have I perceived and bewailed!

“Alas! they have, in a great degree, ruined the success of my ministry. I have seen numbers of lazy seekers, enjoying the dull pleasure of sloth on the couch of wilful unbelief, under pretence that God was to do all in them without them. I have seen some lie flat in the mire of sin, absurdly boasting that they could not fall; and others make the means of grace means of idle gossiping or sly courtship. I have seen some turn their religious profession into a way of gratifying covetousness or indolence; and others, their skill in church music, their knowledge, and their zeal, into various nets to catch esteem, admiration, and praise. Some I have seen making yesterday’s faith a reason to laugh at the cross to-day; and others drawing, from their misapprehensions of the atonement, arguments to be less importunate in secret prayer, and more conformable to this evil world than once they were. Nay, I have seen some professing believers backward to do those works of mercy, which I have sometimes found persons, who made no profession of godliness, quite ready to perform. And—oh! tell it in Sion, that watchfulness may not be neglected by believers, that fearfulness may seize upon backsliders, and that trembling may break the bones of hypocrites and apostates—I have seen those who had equally shined by their gifts and graces strike the moral world with horror by the grossest Antinomianism, and disgrace the doctrine of salvation through faith by the deepest plunges into scandalous sins.”

“My Lady,—Because I think it my duty to defend the works of faith against the triumphant errors of the Solifidians, some of your ladyship’s friends conclude that I am an enemy to the doctrine of salvation by faith, and their conclusion amounts to such exclamations as these: ‘How could a lady, so zealous for God’s glory and the Redeemer’s grace, commit the superintendency of a seminary of pious learning to a man that opposes the fundamental doctrine of Protestantism! How could she put her sheep under the care of such a wolf in sheep’s clothing!’ This conclusion, my lady, has grieved me for your sake; and, to remove the blot that it indirectly fixes upon you, as well as to balance my ‘Scriptural Essay on the Rewardableness’ of the works of faith, I publish, and humbly dedicate to your ladyship, this last piece of my ’Equal Check to Pharisaism and Antinomianism.’ May the kindness which enabled you to bear for years with the coarseness of my ministrations incline you favourably to receive this little token of my unfeigned attachment to Protestantism, and of my lasting respect for your ladyship!

“Your aversion to all that looks like controversy can never make you think that an Equal Check to the two grand delusions, which have crept into the Church, is needless in our days. I flatter myself, therefore, that though you may blame my performance, you will approve of my design. And indeed what true Christian can be absolutely neuter in this controversy? If God has a controversy with all Pharisees and Antinomians, have not all God’s children a controversy with Pharisaism and Antinomianism? Have you not, for one, my lady? Do you not check in private what I attempt to check in public? Does not the religious world know that you abhor, attack, and pursue Pharisaism in its most artful disguises? And have I not frequently heard you express, in the strongest terms, your detestation of Antinomianism, and lament the number of sleeping professors, whom that Delilah robs of their strength? Nor would you, I am persuaded, my lady, have countenanced the opposition which was made against the ‘Minutes,’ if your commendable, though (as it appears to me) at that time, too precipitate zeal against Pharisaism had not prevented your seeing that they contain the Scripture truths, which are fittest to stop the rapid progress of Antinomianism.

“However, if you still think, my lady, that I mistake with respect to the importance of those propositions, you know I am not mistaken when I declare, before the world, that a powerful, practical, actually saving faith is the only faith I ever heard your ladyship recommend, as worthy to be contended for. And so long as you plead only for such a faith, so long as you abhor the winter-faith that saves the Solifidians, in their own conceit, while they commit adultery, murder, and incest, if they choose to carry Antinomianism to such a dreadful length; so long as you are afraid to maintain, either directly or indirectly, that the evidence and comfort of justifying faith may be suspended by sin, but that the righteousness of faith, and the justification which it instrumentally procures, can never be lost, no, not by the most enormous and complicated crimes,—whatever diversity there may be between your ladyship’s sentiments and mine, it can never be fundamental. I preach salvation by a faith that actually works by obedient love, and your ladyship witnesses salvation by an actually operative faith; nor can I, to this day, see any material difference between those phrases in the present controversy. I remain, with my former respect and devotedness, my lady, your ladyship’s most obliged and obedient servant in the Gospel,

“Madeley, March 12, 1774.”

Saving faith. “What is saving faith?^[308] I dare not say that it is ‘believing heartily’ my sins are forgiven me for Christ’s sake; for, if I live in sin, that belief is a destructive conceit, and not saving faith. Neither dare I say, that ‘saving faith is only a sure trust and confidence that Christ loved me, and gave Himself for me;’^[309] for, if I did, I should almost damn all mankind for four thousand years. Such definitions of saving faith are, I fear, too narrow to be just, and too unguarded to keep out Solifidianism.^[310] To avoid such mistakes; to contradict no Scriptures; to put no black mark of damnation upon any man, that in any nation fears God and works of righteousness; to leave no room for Solifidianism, and to present the reader with a definition of faith adequate to the everlasting Gospel, I would choose to say, that justifying or saving faith is believing the saving truth with the heart unto internal, and (as we have opportunity) unto external righteousness, according to our light and dispensation. To St. Paul’s words, Rom. x. 10, I add the epithets internal and external, in order to exclude, according to 1 John iii. 7, 8, the filthy imputation, under which fallen believers may, if we credit the Antinomians, commit internal and external adultery, mental and bodily murder, without the least reasonable fear of endangering their faith, their interest in God’s favour, and their inamissableinamissable title to a throne of glory.”

Faith the gift of God, and the act of man. “How is faith the gift of God? Some persons think that faith is as much out of our power as the lightning that shoots from a distant cloud; they suppose that God drives sinners to the fountain of Christ’s blood, as irresistibly as the infernal legion drove the herd of swine into the sea of Galilee.”

“Having thus exposed the erroneous sense in which some people suppose that faith is the gift of God, I beg leave to mention in what sense it appears to me to be so. Believing is the gift of the God of Grace, as breathing, moving, and eating are the gifts of the God of Nature. He gives me lungs and air, that I may breathe; He gives me life and muscles, that I may move; He bestows upon me food and a mouth, that I may eat; but He neither breathes, moves, nor eats for me. Nay, when I think proper, I can accelerate my breathing, motion, and eating: and, if I please, I may fast, lie down, or hang myself, and, by that means, put an end to my eating, moving, and breathing. Faith is the gift of God to believers, as sight is to you. The parent of good freely gives you the light of the sun, and organs proper to receive it. Everything around you bids you use your eyes and see; nevertheless, you may not only drop your curtains, but close your eyes also. This is exactly the case with regard to faith. Free grace removes, in part, the total blindness which Adam’s fall brought upon us; free grace gently sends us some beams of truth, which is the light of the sun of righteousness; it disposes the eye of our understanding to see those beams; it excites us, in various ways, to welcome them; it blesses us with many, perhaps with all the means of faith, such as opportunities to hear, read, enquire, and power to consider, assent, consent, resolve, and re-resolve to believe the truth. But, after all, believing is as much our own act as seeing. We may in general do, suspend, or omit the act of faith. Nay, we may do by the eye of our faith, what some report Democritus did by his bodily eyes. Being tired of seeing the follies of mankind, to rid himself of that disagreeable sight, he put his eyes out. We may be so averse from the light, which enlightens every man that comes into the world; we may so dread it because our works are evil, as to exemplify, like the Pharisees, such awful declarations as these: Their eyes have they closed, lest they should see: wherefore God gave them up to a reprobate mind, and, they were blinded.”

“I make no more difference between the faith of a righteous heathen, and the faith of a father in Christ, than I do between daybreak and meridian light:—That the light of a sincere Jew is as much one with the light of a sincere Christian, as the light of the sun in a cold, cloudy day in March is one with the light of the sun in a fine day in May:—And that the difference between the saving faith peculiar to the sincere disciples of Noah, Moses, John the Baptist, and Jesus Christ, consists in a variety of degrees, and not in a diversity of species; saving faith, under all the dispensations, agreeing in the following essentials: 1. It is begotten by the revelation of some saving truth presented by free grace, impressed by the Spirit, and received by the believer’s prevented free agency. 2. It has the same original cause in all, that is, the mercy of God in Jesus Christ. 3. It actually saves all, though in various degrees. 4. It sets all upon working righteousness; some bearing fruit thirty, some sixty, and some a hundredfold. And 5. Through Christ, it will bring all that do not make shipwreck of it to one or another of the ‘many mansions,’ which our Lord is gone to prepare in heaven for His believing, obedient people.

“And here honesty obliges me to lay before the public an objection, which I had for some time against the appendages of the Athanasian Creed. I admire the scriptural manner in which it sets forth the Divine Unity in Trinity, and the Divine Trinity in Unity; but I can no longer use its damnatory clauses. It abruptly takes us to the very top of the Christian dispensation, considered in a doctrinal light. This dispensation it calls the Catholic faith; and, without mentioning the faith of the inferior dispensations, as our other Creeds do, it makes us declare, that ‘except everyone keep that faith’ (the faith of the highest dispensation) ‘whole and undefiled, he cannot be saved; without doubt, he shall perish everlastingly.’ This dreadful denunciation is true with regard to proud, ungodly infidels, who, in the midst of all the means of Christian faith, obstinately, maliciously, and finally set their hearts against the doctrine of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost; equally despising the Son’s atonement, and the Spirit’s inspiration. But I will no more invade Christ’s tribunal, and pronounce that the fearful punishment of damnation shall ‘without doubt’ be inflicted upon ‘every’ Unitarian, Arian, Jew, Turk, and heathen, that fears God and works righteousness, though he does not hold the faith of the Athanasian Creed whole. For, if you except the last Article, thousands, yea, millions, are never called to hold it at all; and therefore shall never perish for not holding it whole. At all hazards, then, I hope I shall never use again those damnatory clauses, without taking the liberty of guarding them agreeably to the doctrine of the dispensations. And if Zelotes presses me with my subscriptions, I reply beforehand, that the same Church, who required me to subscribe to St. Athanasius’s Creed, enjoins me also to believe this clause of St. Peter’s Creed, ‘In every nation, he that feareth God and worketh righteousness is accepted of Him.’ And, if those two creeds are irreconcilable, I think it more reasonable that Athanasius should bow to Peter, warmed by the Spirit of love, than that Peter should bow to Athanasius, heated by controversial opposition.”

“I do not repent having engaged in the present controversy, for, though I think my little publications cannot reclaim those who are given up to believe the lie of the day, yet, they may here and there stop one from swallowing it at all, or from swallowing it so deeply as otherwise he might have done. In preaching, I do not meddle with the points discussed, unless my text leads me to it, and then I think them important enough not to be ashamed of them before my people.

“I am just finishing an ‘Essay on Truth,’ which I dedicate to Lady Huntingdon, wherein you will see my latest views of that important subject. My apprehensions of things have not changed since I saw you last; save that in one thing I have seen my error. An over-eager attention to the doctrine of the Spirit has made me, in some degree, overlook the medium by which the Spirit works—I mean the Word of Truth, which is the word by which the heavenly fire warms us. I rather expected lightning, than a steady fire by means of fuel. I mention my error to you lest you should be involved therein.

“My controversy weighs upon my hands; but I must go through with it; which I hope will be done in two or three pieces more: one of which, ‘Scripture Scales to Weigh the Gold of Gospel Truth,’ may be more useful than the Checks, as being more literally scriptural.

“I have exchanged a couple of friendly letters with Lady Huntingdon, who gives me leave to see her publicly; but I think it best to postpone that honour till I have cleared my mind.”^[312]

“I am glad you did not altogether disapprove my ‘Essay on Truth.’ The letter, I grant, profiteth little, until the Spirit animate it. I had, some weeks ago, one of those touches which realize, or rather spiritualize the letter; and it convinced me more than ever that what I say in that tract, of the Spirit and of faith, is truth. I am also persuaded that the faith and Spirit, which belong to perfect Christianity, are at a very low ebb, even among believers. When the Son of Man cometh to set up His kingdom, shall He find Christian faith upon the earth? Yes; but, I fear, as little as He found of Jewish faith, when He came in the flesh. I believe you cannot rest with the easy Antinomian, or the busy Pharisee. You and I have nothing to do but to die to all that is of a sinful nature, and to pray for the power of an endless life. God make us faithful to our convictions, and keep us from the snares of outward things. You are in danger from music, children, poetry; and I from speculation, controversy, sloth, etc. Let us watch against the deceitfulness of self and sin in all their appearances.

“What power of the Spirit do you find among the believers in London? What openings of the kingdom? Is the well springing up in many hearts? Are many souls dissatisfied, and looking for the kingdom of God in power? Watchman! what of the night? What of the day? What of the dawn?

“I feel the force of what you say about the danger of so encouraging the inferior dispensations, as to make people rest short of the faith which belongs to perfect Christianity. I have tried to obviate it in some parts of the ‘Equal Check,’ and hope to do it more effectually in my reply to Mr. Hill’s Creed for Perfectionists. Probably, I shall get nothing by my polemic labours, but loss of friends, and charges of ‘novel chimeras’ on both sides. I expect a letter from you on the subject. Write with openness, and do not fear to discourage me by speaking your disapprobation of what you dislike. My aim is to be found at the feet of all, bearing and forbearing until truth and love bring better days.

“I am, rev. and dear Sir, your most affectionate brother and son in the Gospel,