Our proposal, then, is to meet you either one day on each subject, as you please; or one week on each subject, as you please: the discussion to be conducted in speeches of one hour or half an hour each, as you please.
And now, trusting that this proposed arrangement may prove satisfactory to you, and to all who take an interest in this controversy, and fervently praying the great Head of the Church to overrule our purposes to the advancement of His kingdom and the promotion of His glory,
I remain, Gentlemen,
Yours for the Lord’s sake,
| February 5, 1839. | Fielding Ould. |
To the Reverend Fielding Ould.
Reverend Sir,—It would have been gratifying to us to receive from you an answer to our offer of a discussion, through the press, before being called upon to consider a proposal, altogether new, for a platform controversy.
You give us an invitation to talk, and call this an acceptance of our offer to write. The two proposals are so distinct, that it is not easy to see how the one could be transformed into the other; nor is the mistake explained on turning to the words of our invitation, appealed to by you, and contained in our letter to the Trinitarian laity. They are these:—“We have tendered discussion through the press, in any form whatever, with the single condition that the statements of both parties shall be presented to the same readers.” You leave the impression, that an oral debate is comprised within the terms of this offer; but, in doing so, you widen its scope, by striking out the phrases which restrict it to printing and publication, and describe it thus; “Your letter to the Trinitarian laity invites discussion in any shape which shall effectually bring the statements of both parties before the same individuals.” You will at once perceive the misrepresentation; will acknowledge that the idea of settling historical and philological controversies, by popular debate, has neither origin nor sanction from us;—and will permit us to recal you to our first proposal of discussion through the press,—a proposal to which, though now made for the third time, we have yet received no answer.
Meanwhile, we will not delay the reply which is due to this new suggestion of a platform controversy. We decline it altogether; and for this answer you must have been prepared, by the sentiment we expressed in an early stage of this correspondence: “We are not of opinion that a miscellaneous audience, assembled in a place of worship, constitutes the best tribunal to which to submit abstruse theological questions respecting the canon, the text, the translation of Scripture,—questions which cannot be answered by any defective scholarship.” To assemble a similar audience in an amphitheatre, where the sanctities of worship are not present to calm and solemnize the mind, is evidently not to improve the tribunal. The scholar knows that such exhibitions are a mockery of critical theology: the devout, that they are an injury to personal religion. We are surprised that any serious and cultivated man can think so lightly of the vast contents of the questions on which we differ, as to be able to dispense with calm reflection on the evidence adduced, and to answer off-hand all possible arguments against him, within the range of biblical and ecclesiastical literature. We are not accustomed to treat your system with such contempt, however trivial an achievement it may seem to you to subvert ours. In reverence for truth, in a spirit of caution inseparable from our desire to discharge our trust with circumspect fidelity, and from a belief that, to think deeply, is the needful pre-requisite to speaking boldly, we offered you the most responsible method of discussion, in which we might present to each other, and fix ineffaceably before the world, the fruits of thought and study. To this offer we adhere; but cannot join you, on an occasion thus solemn, in an appeal to the least temperate of all tribunals. We recollect that one of the clergymen associated with you refused an oral discussion of the Roman Catholic controversy. We approved of his decision; and, in like circumstances, adopt it.