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.

Ib. p. 225.

You say, the Scripture admits of no private interpretation. But you
abuse yourself and the text with a false interpretation of it in these
words. An interpretation is called private either as to the subject
person, or as to the interpreter. You take the text to speak of the
latter, when the context plainly sheweth you that it speaks of the
former. The Apostle directing them to understand the prophecies of the
Old Testament, gives them this caution;--that none of these Scriptures
that are spoken of Christ the public person must be interpreted as
spoken of David or other private person only, of whom they were
mentioned but as types of Christ, &c.

It is strange that this sound and irrefragable argument has not been
enforced by the Church divines in their controversies with the modern
Unitarians, as Capp, Belsham and others, who refer all the prophetic
texts of the Old Testament to historical personages of their time,
exclusively of all double sense.

Ib. p. 226.

As to what you say of Apostles still placed in the Church:--when any
shew us an immediate mission by their communion, and by miracles,
'tongues', and a spirit of revelation and infallibility prove
themselves Apostles, we shall believe them.

This is another of those two-edged arguments which Baxter and Jeremy
Taylor imported from Grotius, and which have since become the universal
fashion among Protestants. I fear, however, that it will do us more hurt
by exposing a weak part to the learned Infidels than service in our
combat with the Romanists. I venture to assert most unequivocally that
the New Testament contains not the least proof of the 'linguipotence' of
the Apostles, but the clearest proofs of the contrary: and I doubt
whether we have even as decisive a victory over the Romanists in our
Middletonian, Farmerian, and Douglasian dispute concerning the miracles
of the first two centuries and their assumed contrast 'in genere' with
those of the Apostles and the Apostolic age, as we have in most other of
our Protestant controversies.

N.B. These opinions of Middleton and his mo