LETTER II.
MY GOOD FRIEND—I am sorry that Quashee should intrude upon you unreasonably. The old man, I suppose, knows the pleasure I take in your letters, and therefore feels anxious to procure his master the gratification. I cannot, however, express sorrow, for I do not feel it, at the impression which you tell me my last letter made upon you. May it lead to the same happy consequences that I have experienced, which I now feel in that sunshine of the heart, which the peace of God, that passeth all understanding, alone can bestow.
Your imputing such sentiments to a heated imagination, does not surprise me, who have been bred in the school of Hobbes, and Bayle, and Shaftesbury, and Bolingbroke, and Hume, and Voltaire, and Gibbon; who have cultivated the sceptical philosophy from my vain-glorious boyhood—I might almost say childhood; and who have felt all that unutterable disgust which hypocrisy, and cant, and fanaticism, never fail to excite in men of education and refinement, superadded to our natural repugnance to Christianity. I am not, even now, insensible to this impression; but as the excesses of her friends (real or pretended) can never alienate the votary of liberty from a free form of government, and enlist him under the banners of despotism, so neither can the cant of fanaticism, or hypocrisy, or of both—for so far from being incompatible, they are generally found united in the same character, (may God in his mercy preserve and defend us from both!) disgust the pious with true religion.
Mine has been no sudden change of opinion. I can refer to a record showing, on my part, a desire of more than nine years standing to partake of the sacrament of the Lord's Supper; although, for two and twenty years preceding, my feet had never crossed the threshold of the house of prayer. This desire I was restrained from indulging, by the fear of eating and drinking unrighteously; and although that fear hath been cast out by perfect love, I have never yet gone to the altar—neither have I been present at the performance of divine service, unless indeed I may so call my reading the Liturgy of our Church and some chapters of the Bible to my poor negroes on Sundays. Such passages as I think require it, and which I feel competent to explain, I comment upon, enforcing as far as possible, and dwelling upon those texts especially that enjoin the indispensable accompaniment of a good life as the touchstone of the true faith. The sermon from the mount, and the Evangelists generally—the Epistle of Paul to the Ephesians, chap. vi,—the general Epistle of James, and the first Epistle of John—these are my chief texts.
The consummation of my conversion—I use the word in its strictest sense—is owing to a variety of causes, but chiefly to the conviction, unwillingly forced upon me, that the very few friends which an unprosperous life (the fruit of an ungovernable temper) had left me, were daily losing their hold upon me in a firmer grasp of ambition, avarice, or sensuality. I am not sure that to complete the anti-climax, avarice should not have been last; for although, in some of its effects, debauchery be more disgusting than avarice, yet as it regards the unhappy victim, this last is more to be dreaded. Dissipation, as well as power or prosperity, hardens the heart, but avarice deadens it to every feeling but the thirst for riches. Avarice alone could have produced the slave trade. Avarice alone can drive, as it does drive, this infernal traffic, and the wretched victims of it, like so many post-horses whipped to death in a mail-coach. Ambition has its cover-sluts, in the pride, pomp, and circumstance of glorious war; but where are the trophies of avarice? The handcuff, the manacle, and the blood-stained cowhide! What man is worse received in society for being a hard master? Who denies the hand of a sister or daughter to such monsters?—nay, they have even appeared in “the abused shape of the vilest of women.” I say nothing of India, or Amboyna—of Cortes, or Pizarro.
When I was last in your town I was inexpressibly shocked, (and perhaps I am partly indebted to the circumstance for accelerating my emancipation,) to hear, on the threshold of the temple of the least erect of all the spirits that fell from heaven, these words spoken:
“I don't want the Holy Ghost (I shudder while I write,) or any other spirit in me. If these doctrines are true, [St. Paul's] there was no need for Wesley and Whitfield to have separated from the church. The Methodists are right, and the Church wrong. I want to see the old church,” &c. &c.—that is, such as this diocese was under Bishop Terrick, when wine-bibbing and buck-parsons were sent out to preach “a dry clatter of morality,” and not the word of God, for sixteen thousand pounds of tobacco. When I speak of morality, it is not as condemning it. Religion includes it, but much more. Day is now breaking, and I shall extinguish my candles, which are better than no light—or if I do not, in the presence of the powerful king of day they will be noticed only by the dirt and ill-savor that betray all human contrivances—the taint of humanity. Morality is to the Gospel not even as a farthing rush-light to the blessed sun.
By the way, this term Methodist in religion is of vast compass and effect—like Tory in politics—or Aristocrate in Paris, “with the lamp-post for its second,” some five or six and twenty years ago. Dr. Hoge?—“a Methodist parson.” Frank Key?—“a fanatic,” (I heard him called so not ten days ago,) “a Methodistical whining,” &c. &c. Wilberforce?—“a Methodist.” Mrs. Hannah More?—“ditto.” It ought never to be forgotten, that real converts to Christianity on opposite sides of the globe, agree at the same moment to the same facts. Thus Dr. Hoge and Mr. Key, although strangers, understand perfectly what each other feels and believes.
If I were to show a MS. in some unknown tongue to half a dozen persons, strangers to each other, and natives of different countries, and they should all give me the same translation, could I doubt their acquaintance with the strange language? On the contrary, can I, who am but a smatterer in Greek, believe an impostor, who pretends to a knowledge of that tongue, and who yet cannot tell the meaning of τυπτο?