“Richard Hill.”

The Christian spirit of this letter cannot be excelled. What a contrast to that of the “Finishing Stroke,” published at the beginning of the year! Mr. Hill gave Fletcher full permission to make known the facts that the controversy had done him no good; that he desired to be humbled before God, and to ask forgiveness of Fletcher and Wesley for everything that had “savoured of wrong,” or of his “own spirit,” in his writings; that he had stopped the sale of his publications; and that he regarded many of Wesley’s people as “the excellent of the earth.”

There can be no doubt that Fletcher availed himself of Mr. Hill’s permission. The facts did honour to Mr. Hill; but, as is often the case, in the course of circulation, the facts were perverted. By no fault of Fletcher, it was reported that Mr. Hill had recanted the doctrines he had so stoutly maintained. This was utterly untrue; and led Mr. Hill to send his three letters to the press.[[295]] No one could have found fault with this; but, unfortunately, Mr. Hill prefixed a preface to his letters, and appended an appendix.

In his preface, he remarks, that when Wesley heard from Fletcher that he (Mr. Hill) had suppressed the sale of his publications, he wrote Mr. Hill “a short and civil letter,” in which he said, he himself intended to write nothing more on the controversy between them, and expressed the hope that all, in the future, would be love and peace. This communication gratified Mr. Hill, and soon afterwards, when he went to London, he had an interview with Wesley at West-street chapel, and assured him of his intentions to retire from the warfare, and said he wished that nothing more should be said on the subject by any one. Wesley took him by the hand; showed a loving, pacific disposition; and, says Mr. Hill, “we parted very good friends.”

Besides this personal narrative, however, the preface renewed the slanderous attacks on Fletcher, accusing him of misrepresenting facts, of using “artifices in his manner of making quotations;” and “declamation, chicanery, evasion, false glosses, and pious frauds, to throw dust into the eyes of his readers.” Not content with this, he made an onslaught on Thomas Olivers, Wesley’s trenchant Itinerant, who (in 1774) had just published a 12mo book of 168 pages, entitled “A Scourge to Calumny. In Two Parts. Inscribed to Richard Hill, Esq.” He sneeringly calls him “one Thomas Oliver, alias Olivers, a journeyman cordwainer, who had written a pamphlet against him (Mr. Hill), which, though in itself black in the grain, was afterwards lacquered up, new soled, and heel-tapped by his master before it was exposed for sale.”

“I shall not,” continues Mr. Hill, “take the least notice of him, or read a line of his composition,[[296]] any more than, if I was travelling on the road, I would stop to lash, or even order my footman to lash, every impertinent little quadruped in a village, that should come out and bark at me; but would willingly let the contemptible animal have the satisfaction of thinking he had driven me out of sight.”

This was despicable bombast; for the Welsh shoemaker, as a controversial writer, was quite equal to him who, in due time, became a Shropshire baronet. Mr. Hill proceeds to say that he cannot read any more of Fletcher’s books, and, therefore, cannot write any more answers to them; but, because it was now currently reported that he had recanted the doctrines which he had defended, he had revoked his orders to stop the sale of his publications, and that his “Five Letters to Fletcher,” his “Review of Wesley’s Doctrines,” his “Farrago Double Distilled,” his “Paris Conversation,” and his “Finishing Stroke,” might now be bought as heretofore.

The Appendix to Mr. Hill’s Three Letters suggests a proposed title to Fletcher’s works, and sets forth “A Creed for Arminians and Perfectionists,” as follows:—

“Article I.

“I believe that Jesus Christ died for the whole human race, and that He had no more love towards those who now are, or hereafter shall be, in glory, than for those who now are, or hereafter shall be, lifting up their eyes in torments; and that the one are no more indebted to His grace than the other.