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p437 [H Turner] DEAR BROTHER, - Your friend must be very prejudiced to think it Jesuitism, and not meeting the point that brethren are exclusive, because they will not go on in what they think disobedience, while they receive all true saints: as if my refusing to walk with some of a family who were doing what their father forbad proves surely [the want of] love to the rest of them, when I am free with all who are not disobeying This is a poor piece of reasoning - a want of any clear conception of the case.

I have run over M. Rainsford's: it is better than nine-tenths of what they get in the Establishment, but is as far as possible from clear truth. But his explanation of dead to sin is not sound at all, and leaves a person undelivered: it is a question of living in it or not, not of a penalty. No doubt Christ has taken the penalty, but there is a great deal more. And he leaves the Christian where he finds him, as to the point the apostle is treating, and I think, with a fuller statement of Christ being all, leaves saints where they generally are in the Evangelical world. His explanations and applications of scripture are very commonly incorrect. He knows nothing of the presence and anointing of the Holy Ghost - union is by faith. Nor do I think there is real acquaintance with the exercises of a soul, nor of how scripture truth meets it. If a man is in Christ (and he puts him there at once as the first thing), penalty is gone (sin and sins being confounded), the man is judicially perfect but that is all: as to all else he is left pretty much where he was. Hence the extreme weakness of 13, and the false teaching of 14. Of deliverance from the power of sin in being out of Romans 7, he has not an idea. See again pp. 190, 191, 214. This absolute identifying of "justified from sin" and "freed from sin" (the difference of which he notices to confound them again) characterises his state and doctrine - besides confounding sin, and sins or guilt. Many other things I might remark, but the point of error in his teaching is the upsetting the special teaching of chapter 5:12 to end of 8, specially 6, 7 and 8. That he makes Christ all for any souls is all well. . . .

Chicago, June 3rd, 1875.

[53322E]

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