possible? An acute mind, spending months of study on the stating of the obnoxious doctrine in as harmless and apparently unobjectionable terms as possible, while it is still maintained and asserted as firmly as ever, might be expected to produce just such a tract as this of Mr. N.’s. But who would trust it? Does he hold the doctrines he did when he wrote his former tracts? Yes, unquestionably. Then let us look to them to know what those doctrines are; or rather to the notes of his lecture prior to any of them, in which, without a thought of reservation or disguise, he speaks out what was in his soul.”
In other words, the tract in which Newton had embodied the results of his reconsideration gave his persecutors too little handle. It was therefore necessary for them to satisfy themselves at all costs that they were justified in still using against him the tracts that he had suppressed, and the unauthorised lecture-notes that he had disowned; as, otherwise, the prosecution seemed likely to collapse. For the rest, Newton’s conduct was invariably to be explained on the assumption that he always acted in the meanest and falsest spirit. Yet this paragraph is not the work of a man who had earned a cheap reputation by a sanctimonious deportment; but of one that had cheerfully sacrificed everything to his principles, and who united to a lofty disinterestedness a gracious benignity that won all hearts. I can well believe that I have rarely read a paragraph written by a better man; but I am certain that I have rarely read a worse paragraph. How is it to be explained ? I have no admiration for Darby’s resort to the diabolus e machina; but it is difficult to resist the feeling that some malignant spell was cast over the mind of such a man, and over the minds of others like him, to make them so far forget, in dealing with Newton, all those principles of humanity and uprightness which they illustriously exemplified in the other relations of life. If Christian
