“4. I have sprinkled with the salt of irony your favourite doctrine (‘Friendly Remarks,’ p. 39), ‘Salvation wholly depends upon the purpose of God according to election, without any respect to what may be in them,’ _i.e._ _the elect_. Now, Sir, as by the doctrine of undeniable consequences, he who receives a guinea with the _king’s head_ on the one side cannot but receive the _lions_ on the other side; so he that admits the preceding proposition, cannot but admit the inseparable counterpart, namely, the following proposition, which every attentive and unprejudiced person sees written in blood upon that side of Calvin’s standard which is generally kept out of sight, ‘Damnation wholly depends upon the purpose of God according to reprobation, without respect to what may be in the reprobates.’ Here is no ‘inventing a monstrous creed,’ but merely turning the leaf of your own, and reading what is written there, namely, _damnation finished_, evidently answering to _finished salvation_.” Footnote 275: The Lock Hospital, where Martin Madan was Chaplain. Fletcher admits that he had used irony in his Checks, not, however, because he liked it, but because he found it needful. He writes:— “If I make use of irony in my Checks, it is not from ‘_spleen_,’ but _reason_. It appears to _me_ that the subject requires it, and that _ridiculous error_ is to be turned out of the temple of truth, not only with scriptural argument, which is _the sword of the Spirit_, but also with _mild irony_, which is a proper scourge for a glaring and obstinate mistake.” Holding such a view, he introduces, in one of the two letters addressed to Richard and Rowland Hill unitedly, an illustration of the absurdities involved in Calvinism, which, perhaps, is as severe as anything that his Checks contain. The extract is long, but must be given unabridged. “You decry ‘illustrations,’ and I do not wonder at it; for they carry light into Babel, where it is not desired. The father of error begets _darkness_ and _confusion_. From darkness and confusion springs _Calvinism_, who, wrapping himself up in some garments he has stolen from the truth, deceives the nations, and gets himself reverenced in a dark temple, as if he were the pure and free Gospel. “To bring him to a _shameful_ end, we need not stab him with the dagger of ‘_calumny_,’ or put him upon the rack of _persecution_. Let him only be dragged out of his obscurity, and brought unmasked to open light. The silent beams of truth will pierce him through! Light alone will torture him to death, as the meridian sun does a bird of night that cannot fly from the gentle operation of its beams.