In concluding his Treatise, Fletcher remarks:—
“If I have addressed my Three Checks to the Rev. Mr. Shirley and yourself” (Mr. Richard Hill), “God is my witness it was not to reflect upon two of the most eminent characters in the circle of my religious acquaintance. Forcible circumstances have over-ruled my inclinations. Decipimur specie recti. Thinking to attack error, you have attacked the very truth which Providence calls me to defend: and the attack appears to me so much the more dangerous as your laborious zeal and eminent piety are more worthy of public regard, than the boisterous rant and loose insinuations of twenty practical Antinomians. The tempter is not so great a novice in anti-Christian politics as to engage only such to plead for doctrinal Antinomianism. This would soon spoil the trade. It is his masterpiece of wisdom to get good men to do him that eminent service. He knows that their good lives will make way for their bad principles. Nor does he ever deceive with more decency and success than under the respectable cloak of their genuine piety.
“If a wicked man pleads for sin, foenun habet in cornu, he carries the mark on his forehead; we stand upon our guard. But when a good man gives us to understand that there are no lengths God’s people may not run, nor any depths they may not fall into, without losing the character of men after God’s own heart, that many will praise God for our denial of Christ, that sin and corruption work for good, that a fall into adultery will drive us nearer to Christ, and make us sing louder to the praise of free grace; when he quotes Scripture too, in order to support these assertions, calling them the pure Gospel, and representing the opposite doctrine as the Pelagian heresy, worse than popery itself,—he casts the Antinomian net on the right side of the ship, and is likely to enclose a great multitude of unwary men; especially if some of the best hands in the kingdom drive the frighted shoal into the net, and help to drag it to shore.
“This is, honoured Sir, what you have done, not designedly, but thinking to do God service. Hence the steadiness with which I have looked in the face a man of God, whose feet I should be glad to wash at any time, under a lively sense of my great inferiority. I beg you not to consider the unceremonious plainness of a Swiss mountaineer as the sarcastic insolence of an incorrigible Arminian.
“By a mistake, fashionable among religious people, you have unhappily paid more regard to Dr. Crisp than to St. James. And, as you have pleaded the dangerous cause of the impenitent monarch, I have addressed you with the honest boldness of the expostulating prophet. I have said to my honoured opponent, ‘Thou art the man!’
“I owe much respect to you, but more to truth, to conscience, and to God. If, in trying to discharge my duty towards them, I have inadvertently betrayed any want of respect to you, I humbly ask your pardon; and I can assure you, in the face of the whole world, that notwithstanding your strong attachment to the peculiarities of Dr. Crisp, as there is no family in the world to which I am under greater obligations than yours, so there are few gentlemen for whom I have so peculiar an esteem, as for the respectable author of Pietas Oxoniensis.”
“Before I lay down my pen,” says Fletcher, in a “Postscript,” “I beg leave to address, a moment, the true believers who espouse Calvin’s sentiments. Think not, honoured brethren, that I have no eyes to see the eminent services which many of you render to the Church of Christ; no heart to bless God for the Christian graces which shine in your exemplary conduct; no pen to testify, that, by letting your light shine before men, you adorn the Gospel of God our Saviour, as many of your predecessors have done before you. I am not only persuaded that your opinions are consistent with a genuine conversion but I take heaven to witness how much I prefer a Calvinist who loves God to a Remonstrant who does not. If I have, therefore, taken the liberty of exposing your favourite mistakes, do me the justice to believe that it was not to pour contempt upon your respectable persons; but to set your peculiarities in such a light as might either engage you to renounce them, or check the forwardness with which some have lately recommended them as the only doctrines of grace, and the pure Gospel of Jesus Christ; unkindly representing their remonstrant brethren as enemies to free grace, and abettors of a dreadful heresy.
“And you, my remonstrant brethren, permit me to offer you some seasonable advices. 1. More than ever, let us confirm our love to our Calvinist brethren. If our arguments gall them, let us not envenom the sore by maliciously triumphing over them. Nothing is more likely to provoke their displeasure, and drive them from what we believe to be the truth. 2. Do not rejoice in the mistakes of our opponents, but in the detection of error. Desire not that we, but that truth may prevail. Let us not only be willing that our brethren should win the day if they have truth on their side; but let us make it matter of solemn, earnest, and constant prayer. 3. Let us strictly observe the rules of decency and kindness, taking care not to treat any of our opponents in the same manner that they have treated Mr. Wesley. The men of the world sometimes hint that he is a papist, and a Jesuit; but good, mistaken men have gone much farther in the present controversy. They have published to the world, that they verily believe his principles are too rotten for even a papist to rest upon; that he wades through the quagmires of Pelagianism, deals in inconsistencies, manifest contradictions, and strange prevarications; that if a contrast were drawn from his various assertions upon the doctrine of sinless perfection, a little piece might extend into a folio volume; and that they are more than ever convinced of his prevaricating disposition. Not satisfied with going to a Benedictine monk, in Paris, for help against his dreadful heresy, they have wittily extracted an argument, ad hominem, from the comfortable dish of tea he drinks with Mrs. Wesley; and, to complete the demonstration of their respect for that grey-headed, laborious minister of Christ, they have brought him upon the stage of controversy in a dress of their own contriving, and made him declare to the world, that, whenever he and fifty-three of his fellow-labourers say one thing, they mean quite another. And what has he done to deserve this usage at their hands? Which of them has he treated unjustly or unkindly? Even in the course of this controversy, has he injured any man? May he not say to this hour, Tu pugnas; ego vapulo tantum? Let us avoid this warmth, my brethren; remembering that personal reflections will never pass for convincing arguments with the judicious and humane.
“I have endeavoured to follow this advice with regard to Dr. Crisp; nevertheless, lest you should rank him with practical Antinomians, I once more gladly protest my belief that he was a good man; and desire that none of you would condemn all his sermons, much less his character, on account of his unguarded antinomian propositions.
“4. If you would help us to remove the prejudices of our brethren, not only grant with a good grace, but strongly insist upon the great truths for which they make so noble a stand. Steadily assert, with them, that the scraps of morality and formality, by which Pharisees and deists pretend to merit the Divine favour, are only filthy rags in the sight of a holy God; and that no righteousness is current in heaven but the righteousness which is of God by faith. If they have set their hearts upon calling it the imputed righteousness of Christ, though the expression is not strictly scriptural, let it pass; but give them to understand, that as Divine imputation of righteousness is a most glorious reality, so human imputation is a most delusive dream; and that of this sort is undoubtedly the Calvinian imputation of righteousness to a man, who actually defiles his neighbour’s bed, and betrays innocent blood. A dangerous contrivance this! not less subversive of common heathenish morality, than of St. James’s pure and undefiled religion.