Ib.
But methinks yet I should have hope of reviving your charity. You cannot be a Papist indeed, but you must believe that out of their Church (that is out of the Pope's dominions) there is no salvation; and consequently no justification and charity, or saving grace. And is it possible you can so easily believe your religious father to be in hell; your prudent, pious mother to be void of the love of God, and in a state of damnation, &c.
This argument
ad affectum
is beautifully and forcibly stated; but yet defective by the omission of the point;—not for unbelief or misbelief of any article of faith, but simply for not being a member of this particular part of the Church of Christ. For it is possible that a Christian might agree in all the articles of faith with the Roman doctors against those of the Reformation, and yet if he did not acknowledge the Pope as Christ's vicar, and held salvation possible in any other Church, he is himself excluded from salvation! Without this great distinction Lady Ann Lindsey might have replied to Baxter:—"So might a Pagan orator have said to a convert from Paganism in the first ages of Christianity; so indeed the advocates of the old religion did argue. What! can you bear to believe that Numa, Camillus, Fabricius, the Scipios, the Catos, that Cicero, Seneca, that Titus and the Antonini, are in the flames of Hell, the accursed objects of the divine hatred? Now whatever you dare hope of these as heathens, we dare hope of you as heretics."
Ib. p. 224.
But this is not the worst. You consequently anathematize all Papists by your sentence: for heresies by your own sentence cut off men from heaven: but Popery is a bundle of heresies: therefore it cuts off men from heaven. The minor I prove, &c.
This introduction of syllogistic form in a letter to a young Lady is whimsically characteristic.