LETTER LXXIV.

MR WHALLEY.

Lichfield, Nov 19, 1801.

IN the kind and extended letter before me, there is expiation for a long and regretted silence. I wish the state of your health had been less answerable for that my deprivation; yet so enchantingly humorous is the description of its mutability, that it mingles smiles with my sighs..

Indeed, I have every honour for Mrs H. More's talents and virtues. It was entirely owing to my recollection how much she had, in the year 1791, when I was your guest, distressed the feelings of that dear saint, that genuine Christian, Mr Inman, by introducing into his pulpit the rank Mehodist, Mr Newton, which induced me to believe, that her endeavours to promote Methodist principles were continued in her neighbourhood. Mrs H. More expressed to me, at her own house, admiration of the despicable rant we had heard, the preceding Sunday, from Newton; of which Mr Inman, yourself, and all our party, had expressed our horror. That good man imputed to

Mrs More the increase of those pernicious principles in your county. I have read nothing of the late controversy on that subject, except from your statement. Notwithstanding your acquittal of the lady, I own I thought it not likely, that she, whom Mr Inman had heretofore so deeply blamed on that subject, should be wholly blameless in the similar arraignment brought against her" by a gownman of a different make.”

The misery, the despair, which the gloomy Calvinistic tenets have produced, makes me abhor them; they are not Christianity; they are not

common sense.

Mrs H. More's ingenious work on education, contains one chapter which proves the continuance of those principles in her mind. It maintains the absurd doctrine of original sin, as if a just God could have made the task of virtue of infinitely increased difficulty to the sons and daughters of Adam, for the sin of their first parents. It is a dreadful, a blasphemous supposition, founded only upon a few dark texts of St Paul, and nowhere authorized by Christ. On the contrary, He repeatedly speaks of the primeval innocence of children, and says, "Of such is the kingdom of heaven."

Every being must be innocent, till, by sin, either of thought or deed, against the light of rea

son committed, and the warnings of conscience, they forfeit that innocence.

Such, and no more, was the innocence of Adam and Eve, who lost it on the first temptation, and that a slight one. There is, therefore, no reason to think their first nature better than ours. Eden was to be theirs conditionally-on their obedience to the will of God. Heaven is to be ours on the same condition. The commission of sin, mentally or corporally, alone renders a Mediator necessary to man. For our nature, if God is just, we cannot be accountable, since our will was not concerned in its formation; and if, indeed, that nature is so inherently corrupt and abominable, as it is represented by Mrs H. More, Mr Wilberforce, &c., the wickedest amongst us is more an object of pity than of just indignation in the eyes of a pure and perfect Being. But the feelings of pity; a strong involuntary sense of justice; of filial obedience due to Him who created us with perceptions of happiness, and powers of enjoyment; of gratitude to that Heavenly Bestower, and to such of our fellow-creatures as have contributed to our welfare; these are innate good properties, and they acquit the Deity of the impiously imputed injustice of having given us a nature utterly depraved, and in itself deserving of damnation, because our first parents sinned.

Our native proneness to sensuality; to commit injustice to man, and disobedience to God, through the prevalence of worldly selfishness, or the temptations to which we may be exposed by penury; these bad propensities are the alloy in our nature, which constitutes our trial. Our first parents received their trial from the same alloy in their nature. They had but one precept to obey, but one temptation to repel, and yet they sinned. We have various temptations to resist, various commands to observe. That our trials are complicated and harder to resist, is not our fault. We have, as they had, competent powers of resistance, if we will exert them; and that our nature is not worse than theirs, the facility with which they committed wickedness, on the first temptation, demonstrates.

Where guilt is incurred, or the wish of incurring it has been indulged, notwithstanding the opposition of our virtuous propensities, our power of renouncing the evil depends on the grace of God, obtained by our prayers; and to procure such assistance, together with pardon for past crimes, we learn from revelation that a Redeemer was necessary. The belief in his expiatory power commits no outrage on our innate sense of justice.

The violent passions, and tendency to evil, often

apparent in the infant-state, are no proofs of a nature more corrupt than Adam's. They are but the prevalence of the bad tendencies which may be expected to prevail before reason acquires strength to resist them, and revelation extends its aid. Till then the human being is no more accountable for its errors, no more obnoxious to just condemnation, than the brute, the idiot, the luna

tic.

It is only by this simple, plain construction, that the justice of God can be ascertained, the free-agency of man established, and the Scriptures be rendered consistent with themselves.

The doctrine of original sin, while it is contrary to the doctrine of Christ, is inimical to the practice of virtue, and leads to nothing good. So far from it, that misery and despair are its natural fruits. Under such belief those fruits cannot be avoided, except by the superstitious presumptuous credulity of having obtained, from a partial Deity, preternatural grace, and individual acceptance, granted only to a few; not as the reward of our endeavours to be virtuous, but from the influence of arbitrary favour.

Jeremy Taylor asserts, that the groundless doctrine of original sin was first made by the fierce uncharitable St Austin. Till then the fathers of the Christian church had abstained from wresting