vague charges are what he has to answer. Mr. N. was asked, as he charged me everywhere with falsehood, what it was? He said, saying he denied the unity of the Church, but that was all he alleged. I say so still. And further, I here add, I have no expressions save “intellectual process,” and “eking out an argument” already apologised for, to regret or expunge. Not one. If any, let them be produced with their context. The reader will say, but what of those quoted in this letter, and regularly between inverted commas. I answer, they are dishonestly charged. They are untrue, save that I do not own the table at Ebrington Street. The difficulty in this case is: that people have depended on idle statements of this kind, and it was impossible to answer them without charging the authors with untruth. This made me keep silence month after month. I did not know what to do. But the details I will enter into in their place. Some phrases, though in inverted commas, are not in the tracts to which they are ascribed at all; others quoted and put into sentences which wholly alter their application; an application often expressly guarded against, in the tract referred to. In my judgment, this letter signed by the five, is, perhaps, the worst thing yet put out. But to resume, it is a saddening, and yet an instructive thing, to see at the moment that under the Lord’s special leading, and surely without their own wisdom, the brethren from every quarter were humbling themselves before the Lord for their own individual and common failure, the leaders at Plymouth having refused to come, because it would turn to an investigation on their conduct, were making out a case for themseves. It is an epitome of the whole matter; but I leave it without any remark, to notice one or two statements merely. And first of all, what is the meaning of this joint disclaimer and declaration? Saying, we do not hold such and such doctrines, unless the pure clubbing of a party, hand joining in hand? Who ever charged them with holding such and such doctrines. What has Mr. Clulow, or Mr. Soltau, or Mr. Batten, or even Mr. Dyer, to do with my charging Mr. Newton’s book with denying the
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