CHAPTER XVIII.
PUBLICATIONS IN THE YEAR
1776.

EXCEPT his posthumous works, the remainder of Fletcher’s writings were issued during the next two years, 1776 and 1777. These will be briefly noticed in the present chapter. During the last four years, his antagonists had been Walter Shirley, Richard Hill, Rowland Hill, and John Berridge. Now he encountered three others—Augustus Montague Toplady, the well-known Vicar of Broad Hembury, in Devonshire; Caleb Evans, an eminent Baptist minister at Bristol; and, in connection with Mr. Evans, the celebrated Rev. Richard Price, D.D., an Arian minister, at Hackney, London.

Methodist readers are so familiar with the life and character of Toplady, as to render it unnecessary to refer to them in the present pages. Suffice it to say, that this remarkable and strangely constituted man seems to have been almost as much prejudiced against Fletcher as he was against Wesley. “I was lately asked,” said he, “what my opinion is of Mr. John Fletcher’s writings. My answer was, that, in the very few pages I had perused, the serious passages were dulness double condensed; and the lighter passages, impudence double distilled.”[[331]]

In 1770, Wesley published his tract, entitled, “The Doctrine of Absolute Predestination Stated and Asserted.” This was a faithful abridgment of Toplady’s translation of Zanchius’s once famous book,[[332]] and concluded with the well-known paragraph:—

“The sum of all is this: one in twenty (suppose) of mankind are elected; nineteen in twenty are reprobated. The elect shall be saved, do what they will; the reprobate shall be damned, do what they can. Reader, believe this, or be damned. Witness my hand,

“A—— T——.”

Toplady was terribly enraged, and immediately published “A Letter to the Rev. Mr. John Wesley: relative to his pretended Abridgment of Zanchius on Predestination.” In 1771, Wesley replied to this, in his tract entitled, “The Consequence Proved,”—the object of which was to establish the paragraph which had occasioned Toplady such huge offence. A year later, Toplady published his “More Work for Mr. John Wesley; or, A Vindication of the Decrees and Providence of God from the Defamation of a late printed paper, entitled, ‘The Consequence Proved.’” Wesley had no time and no inclination to continue the controversy; but handed over the angry Vicar of Broad Hembury to the tender mercies of Thomas Olivers and Fletcher. Olivers’ tart pamphlet need not be further mentioned; but, in reference to Fletcher, it may be added, that, in a letter to Mr. Richard Hill, dated “March 12, 1773,” Toplady wrote:—

“I am told that Mr. Fletcher has it in contemplation to make an attack on me too. He is welcome. I am ready for him. Nor shall I, in that case, altogether imitate the examples of yourself and your brother; unless Mr. Fletcher should treat me with more decency than he has, hitherto, observed towards others. Tenderness, ’tis very evident, has no effect on Mr. Wesley and his pretended family of love. Witness the rancour with which Mr. Hervey’s[[333]] memory and works are treated by that lovely family. For my own part, I shall never attempt to hew such millstones with a feather. They must be served as nettles; press them close, and they cannot sting. Yet have they my prayers and my best wishes for their present and future salvation. But not one hair’s breadth of the Gospel will I ever offer at their shrine, or sacrifice to their idol.”[[334]]

Toplady’s information that Fletcher intended to “attack” him was quite correct; but, for the present, Fletcher was so occupied with his “Checks to Antinomianism,” that two years elapsed before he could devote attention to his new antagonist.