Fletcher of MadeleyMacdonald, Frederic W. (Frederic William)
Religion
Fletcher of Madeley
Macdonald, Frederic W. (Frederic William)
Fletcher, John, 1729-1785
"But if, because your text was taken out of St. Paul's
epistle, you choose, sir, to let him decide whether feelings
ought to have place in sound religion, or not, I am willing
to stand at the bar before so great a judge, and promise to
find no fault with his sentence.... Where does he exclaim
against feeling the power of God, or the powerful operations
of His Spirit on the heart? Is it where he says that the
kingdom of God is 'not in word, but in power'; that this
kingdom within us (if we are believers), this true, inward
religion consists in peace, righteousness, and joy in the
Holy Ghost; that Christians rejoice in tribulation, because
the love of God is shed abroad in their hearts by the Holy
Ghost given unto them? Is it where he says, he is 'not
ashamed of the gospel of Christ, because it is the power of
God to the salvation of every one that believeth'; that he
desired to 'know nothing but Jesus and the power of His
resurrection'? (2 Cor. ii. 24.) Or is it when he calls the
exerting of this power in him his life; saying, 'I live not,
but Christ lives in me; and the life that I now live in the
flesh, I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me
and gave Himself for me'?
"Can we suppose that he discountenances feelings in
religion, when he prays that 'the God of hope' would fill
the Romans (xv. 13) 'with all joy and peace in believing,
that they might abound in hope through the power of the Holy
Ghost'; when he says that 'they had not received again the
spirit of bondage to fear, but the spirit of adoption,
crying, Abba, Father, and witnessing to their spirits that
they were the children of God,' agreeable to that of St.
John, 'He that believeth hath the witness in himself'?
"One more argument on this subject, and I shall conclude the
whole. If good nature, affability, and morality, with a
round of outward duties, will fit a man for heaven, without
any feeling of the workings of the Spirit of God in the
heart, or without peace, righteousness, and joy in the Holy
Ghost; if such a professor of godliness is really in that
narrow way to the kingdom which few people find, why did our
Lord puzzle honest Nicodemus with the strange doctrine of a
new birth?... why did He trouble the religious centurion
with sending for Peter, that the Holy Ghost might fall upon
him and all that heard the word, while the apostle preached
to them remission of sins, through faith in Jesus?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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