lid than a cannon ball!
Why, drive it with all the vehemence that five toes can exert, it would
not kill a louse on the head of Methodism. Repentance, godly sorrow,
abhorrence of sin as sin, and not merely dread from forecast of the
consequences, these the Arminian would call means of obtaining
salvation, while the Methodist (more philosophically perhaps) names them
signs of the work of free grace commencing and the dawning of the sun of
redemption. And pray where is the practical difference?

Ib. p. 26.

Jesus answered him thus--'Verily, I say unto you, unless a man be born
of water and of the spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of
God'.--The true sense of which is obviously this:--Except a man be
initiated into my religion by Baptism, (which 'at that time' was
always 'preceded by a confession of faith') and unless he manifest his
sincere reception of it, by leading that upright and 'spiritual' life
which it enjoins, 'he cannot enter the kingdom of heaven', or be a
partaker of that happiness which it belongs to me to confer on those
who believe in my name and keep my sayings.

Upon my faith as a Christian, if no more is meant by being born again
than this, the speaker must have had the strongest taste in metaphors of
any teacher in verse or prose on record, Jacob Behmen himself not
excepted. The very Alchemists lag behind. Pity, however, that our
Barrister has not shown us how this plain and obvious business of
Baptism agrees with ver. 8. of the same chapter: 'The wind bloweth where
it listeth', &c. Now if this does not express a visitation of the mind
by a somewhat not in the own power or fore-thought of the mind itself,
what are words meant for?

Ib. p. 29.

The true meaning of being 'born again', in the sense in which our
Saviour uses the phrase, implies nothing more or less, in plain terms,
than this:--to repent; to lead for the future a religious life instead
of a life of disobedience; to believe the Holy Scriptures, and to pray
for grace and assistance to persevere in our obedience to the end. All
this any man of common sense might explain in a few words.

Pray, then, (for I will take the Barrister's own commentary,) what does
the man of common sense mean by grace? If he will explain grace in any
other way than as the circumstances 'ab extra' (which would be mere
mockery and in direct contradiction to a score of texts), and yet
without mystery, I will undertake for Dr