“The Reformers,” says he, “_protested_ three things in general:—1. That right reason has an important place in matters of faith. 2. That all matters of faith may and must be decided by Scripture, understood reasonably and consistently with the context. 3. That antiquity and fathers, traditions and councils, canons and the Church, lose their authority when they depart from sober reason and plain Scripture. These three general _protests_ are the very ground of our religion when it is contradistinguished from Popery. They who stand to them deserve, in my humble opinion, the title of _true Protestants_. “If the preceding account is just, _true_ Protestants are all _candid_; Christian candour being nothing but a readiness to hear right _reason_ and plain _Scripture_. Of all the tempers which true Protestants abhor, none seems to them more detestable than that of those _gnostics_, those pretenders to superior illumination, who, under the common pretence of _orthodoxy_ or _infallibility_, shut their eyes against the light, think plain Scripture beneath their notice, enter their protest against reason, and steel their breasts against conviction. Alas! how many professors there are who, like St. Stephen’s opponents, judges, and executioners, are neither able to resist nor willing to admit the truth; who make their defence by _stopping their ears, and crying out, ‘The temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord are we!’_ who thrust the supposed heretic out of their sanhedrim; who, from the press, the pulpit, or the doctor’s chair, send volleys of hard insinuations or soft assertions, in hope that they will pass for solid arguments; and who, when they have no more stones or snowballs to throw at the supposed Philistine, prudently avoid drawing ‘_the sword of the Spirit_,’ retire behind the walls of their fancied orthodoxy, raise a rampart of slanderous contempt against the truth that besieges them, and obstinately refuse either candidly to give up, or manfully contend for, the unscriptural tenets which they will impose upon others as pure Gospel.