The justice of God in the damnation of sinners. Illustrated in a sermon

"I am often, and I do not know but pretty ⟨p. 85⟩generally, in the country, represented as of a new and odd opinion with respect to the terms of Christian communion, and as being for introducing a peculiar way of my own. Whereas, I do not perceive that I differ at all from the scheme of Dr Watts, in his book entitled, The rational Foundation of a Christian Church, and the Terms of Christian Communion; which, he says, is the common sentiment and practice of all reformed churches. I had not seen this book of Dr Watt's when I published what I have written on the subject. But yet, I think my sentiments, as I have expressed them, are as exactly agreeable to what he lays down, as if I had been his pupil. Nor do I at all go beyond what Dr Doddridge plainly shows to be his sentiments, in his Rise and Progress of Religion ▪ and his Sermons on Regeneration, and his Paraphrase and Notes on the New Testament. Nor indeed, Sir, when I consider the sentiments you have expressed in your letters to Major Pomroy and Mr Billing, can I perceive but that they come exactly to the same thing that I maintain. You suppose, the sacraments are not converting ordinances: But that, as seals of the covenant, they presuppose conversion, especially in the adult; and that it is visible saintship, or▪ in other words, a credible profession of faith and repentance, a solemn consent to the gospel covenant, joined with a good conversation, and competent measure of Christian knowledge, is what gives a gospel right to all sacred ordinances: ⟨p. 86⟩But that it is necessary to those that come to these ordinances, and in those that profess a consent to the gospel covenant, that they be sincere in their profession, or at least should think themselves so.— The great things which I have scrupled in the established method of this church's proceeding, and which I dare no longer go on in, is their publicly assenting to the form of words rehearsed on occasion of their admission to the communion, without pretending thereby to mean any such thing as an hearty consent to the terms of the gospel-covenant, or to mean any such faith or repentance as belong to the covenant of grace, and are the grand conditions of that covenant:

"I am often, and I do not know but pretty ⟨p. 85⟩