I am less pleased with this volume than with any of the preceding. Ask your own heart and conscience whether (for instance,) they are satisfied with this defence

duri per durius

: or whether frightening a modest query into silence by perverting it into an accusation of the Almighty, by virtue of a conclusion borrowed from the Calvinistic theory of Predestination, is not more in the spirit of Job's comforters, than becomes a minister of the Apostolic Church of England and Ireland? Such arguments are but edge-tools at the safest, but more often they may rather be likened to the two-edged blade of Parysatis's knife, the one of which was poisoned. Leave them to Calvin, or those who dare appropriate Calvin's words, that "God's absolute will is the only rule of his justice;"—thus dividing the divine attributes. Yet Calvin himself distinguishes the hidden from the revealed God, even as the Greek Fathers distinguished the

the absolute ground of all being, from the

as the cause and disposing providence of all existence.

But I disapprove of the plan and spirit of this work, (Deism Revealed.) The cold-hearted, worldly-minded, cunning Deist, or the coarse sensual Infidel, is of all men the least likely to be converted; and the conscientious, inquiring, though misled and perplexed, Sceptic will throw aside a book at once, as not applicable to his case, which treats every doubt as a crime, and supposes that there is no doubt at all possible but in a bad heart and from wicked wishes. Compare this with St. Paul's language concerning the Jews.

So again, pp. 225, &c. of this volume. Do not the plainest intuitions of our moral and rational being confirm the positions here attributed to the Deist, Dechaine? Are they not the same by which Melancthon de-Calvinized, at least de-Augustinized, the heroic Luther;— those which constitute one of the only two essential differences between the Augsburg Confession and the Calvinistic Articles of Faith? And can anything be more flittery and special-pleading than Skelton's objections? And again, p. 507, "and that prayer which he (Tindal) is reported to have used a little before his death, 'If there is a God, I desire he may have mercy on me;'"—was it Christian-like to publish and circulate a blind report—so improbable and disgusting, as to demand the strongest and most unsuspicious testimony for its reception?