The Doctor has by strength of genius, and great industry, amassed together no small heap of learned decisions of points, doctrines, as well Heathenish, as Christian, much the greatest part of which, the Christian reader will find himself obliged to drive out of his thoughts, as soon as he can in good earnest say, _What must I do to be saved?_――This collection of decisions, he calls his _projected defence of Christianity_, which if it was such, Christianity must have been but poorly provided for its support by the four gospels. I shall make no doubt of his intending, what he says by them. But a project in defence of Christianity, is not more promising, than a trap to catch humility. The nature of things allows no more of the one, than of the other. To be a defender of Christianity, is to be a defender of Christ, but none can defend him in any other degree, than so far as he is his follower. To be with Christ, is _to walk as he walked_, and he _that_ is not so with him, is _against him_. There are two ways of embracing Christianity, the one is as a _sinner_, the other as a _scholar_; the former is the way taught by Christ and his apostles, the latter is the invention of men, fallen from the Christian life under the power of natural reason, and verbal learning.――Now these two ways are not to be considered, as only the one better than the other, but in such a difference, as right and wrong, true and false, bear to one another. For there is no possibility of taking one step in Christianity, but as a sinner, for it has no errand but to the sinner, has no relief but for sin, and nothing can receive it, but the heart wounded, and wearied with the burden of its own sin. All the gospel is but a foreign tale, a dead letter to the most logically learned man in the world, who does not feel in the depth of his soul, that all the reasonableness, and excellency of gospel truth, lies in that fund of sin, impurity, and corrupt tempers, which are inseparable from him, till he is born again. And if the Doctor, in his application to the Deists, had pressed home this affecting truth, which stands at the door of every man’s heart, and is the only ground of Christian redemption, he had shewn a better care and concern for their souls, and had done more to awaken them out of their infidelity, than by all that wit and satyr in his dedication of his book to them. For like begets like; love and seriousness in the speaker, beget love and seriousness in the hearer; and he that has no earnestness towards unbelievers, but that of perswading them not to lose their share of the love and mercy of God in Christ Jesus, towards helpless fallen men, can only do it, in the spirit and language of that love and goodness, in whose arms, he longs to see them embraced.