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THE SNARE.

LETTER XV.

DARKNESS AND LIGHT.

I WISH to bring into one view the subject with which I closed my last; partly because the way of my escape from that snare was so similar to my preservation from Popery; and partly because I doubt not that the great truth of the second advent will again be mixed up with the same, or with other deluding doctrines. We are remarkably warned by our Lord of the " snare that shall be spread, the temptation that cometh upon the whole earth, from which his people will be kept; and as we have no right or warrant to look for any farther revelation than we already have, it becomes deeply important to appreciate the sufficiency of that for the coming hour of trial.

The first thing that aroused my attention to the new doctrines of Mr. Irving was the singular case of Miss Fancourt. Had it been a person unknown to me, I might have thought less about it; but I knew her, and her family; and I was and am perfectly certain that the least attempt at deception was never practised,

never

thought of by them. A sweet, patient, suffering child of God, guileless as a babe, and whose bodily affliction had moved my tenderest sympathy as I sat beside her couch of pain; the intelligence of her instantaneous recovery, of her having walked from her father's house at Hoxton to that of my hospitable friend Mr. Hawtrey in Hackney, and back, with my intimate knowledge alike of the localities and the individuals concerned, came upon me with a reality the most overwhelming. I certainly held it to have been a miraculous answer to faithful prayer; and I was strongly predisposed by it to receive whatever might be placed before me on the same basis.

Just then, within two or three days afterwards, a lady to whom I looked up as a most enlightened, zealous Christian, wrote me a glowing letter, enclosing two little pamphlets or rather tracts, on the subject of miraculous gifts in the church, as set forth in the xiv. chapter, 1 Corinthians, which was quoted in full. She also gave me an account of the 'tongues,' and exhorted me to pray for miraculous gifts, and to devote my pen immediately and wholly to this great cause. She added that her parents were violently opposed, but she hoped to obtain the 'gifts' herself, and by that means to silence all. I was confounded: I read the tracts, and all the scriptures pointed out in them as confirmatory of the view taken, and which certainly made out a strong case; but I felt too that a reference to single texts would not suffice; I had always read the Bible as a continuous book, not as a collection of scraps; and

even the division into chapter and verse annoyed me. I considered that if a man sent me a letter on business of importance I should never be content to look at a sentence here and another there, in order to arrive at his full meaning, but should read the whole: much less would detached verses, called texts, selected from letters of the Apostles, indited by the Holy Ghost, rightly inform me as to the mind of the Spirit. Accordingly I that night took the New Testament up, kneeled and fervently, most fervently prayed to be guided to all truth, kept from presumptuous sin, and led to glorify God by humbly receiving whatever he was pleased to reveal. I then seated myself on the side of my bed, and read the whole of the New Testament from the first chapter of Matthew to the Epistle of Jude, and the first seven chapters of the Revelation; finishing that book on the

morrow,

The result was such as to make me decidedly reject the new pretensions. I cannot go over the subject here, it would be a treatise in itself; and my object is to recommend to you and others the same process, that each may have his own convictions based on the word of God, and not on the convictions of a fellow mortal. I was quite sure that if such an important change was to take place in the character of the dispensation, and women to become public teachers of men, I should find some express warrant for it; since God would never require us to believe a miracle not wrought according to his word. I found that signs and wonders in the last days were the predicted marks of what was not to

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be received or followed; and I began to regard with jealous suspicion this assumption; resolved to watch most narrowly the doctrines they might preach. Miss Fancourt's case was argued at large in the Record newspaper; and I soon came to the conclusion from which I have not swerved, that it was one of nervous, not organic disease; and while ascribing all glory to God as the hearer of her prayer and healer of her sickness, I believed that it had been accomplished by the natural effects, mercifully ordered by him, of a natural cause. In this state of mind I remained, when a letter from a friend in Scotland brought me some account of a meeting where he had heard Mr. Irving expound on the subject of our adorable Lord's human nature, and which, he said, perplexed him. He stated the outline, slightly; but sufficiently to convince me that some great error lay beneath the surface, and this rendered me the more thankful that I had not lightly admitted the claim to supernatural powers, which, once acknowledged, would have given weight to any doctrine associated with them.

A little time brought me better acquainted with the nature of this heresy. Shrouded as it was in much obscurity, and perplexed with many contradictions, so as to enable its unhappy propounder to deny in words what in substance he strongly advanced, nothing could strip it of its blasphemous character. He maintained that the human nature in which our Divine Lord was pleased to become incarnate was not only the likeness of sinful flesh, but flesh inherently sinful: that He was

assailed by every evil passion and corrupt inclination : that his principal suffering consisted in the warring of this unholy, depraved nature against the pure spirit lodged within it; that His conquest over sin was the conquest of his own sinful propensities; that the final triumph was the putting to death of this same wicked nature on the cross; and that having thus overcome in his own person all vile dispositions, it remained for each of us to become equally holy, equally free from sin, and entitled to enter heaven. I do not err in this description, for I took it from the vile book in which Mr. Irving asserted the doctrine, and which with unspeakable horror I was compelled to read, in order, when, brought into daily contact with his devoted followers to maintain the cause of truth against their assaults. A more atrocious outrage on the great mystery of our redemption never was fabricated. Socinianism could desire no more than to see the Deity of Christ thus degraded. Indeed it is very remarkable what an Antichristian character attaches to the whole device: for the heresy is worse than Arian, and the presumed miracles quite Popish.

Great anxiety was shewn to enlist me in this cause; for my natural enthusiasm would have rendered me a zealous adherent, and my pen devoted to its advocacy might have done good service. They wished to test the miracle-working powers of their leader by causing me to hear; and to prove the supernatural character of the utterances by making them audible to me previous to such cure. However, I had not in vain read the