Of course Fletcher's letters had their reply from Mr. Shirley, and that, in turn, required to be answered. Then Richard Hill entered the field, and him also Fletcher encountered, and as the controversy grew it spread out over the wide area of questions speculative and practical which the term Calvinism covers or suggests, and called fresh combatants into the field. We have no heart to pursue the details of this history. It is complicated and unremunerative in the last degree. It deepened into bitterness and scurrility, till its baser literature becomes unreadable for very shame; it separated brethren; it turned allies into adversaries; it offered to a sceptical and ungodly age the spectacle of good men "smiting one another _un_friendly," and consumed time and strength that were wanted, and more than wanted, for the Christianising of the country.
Through all this strife and confusion we can at least follow Fletcher without shame, if not without regret. We have already quoted Southey's eulogy on him. It is not excessive. He kept his temper through seven years of trying controversy. He lived and wrote "as ever in his great Taskmaster's eye." Love to God is manifest in every page, and only second to it is love for those with whom he must needs contend, a veritable "longing after them in the bowels of Jesus Christ."
Fletcher's "Checks" were the best thing born of the controversy. They did not,--need it be said?--finally dispose of the problems respecting God's foreknowledge and sovereignty, and the free agency and responsibility of man. These problems are perhaps much where they were when first confronted. If they are less discussed in our own day than formerly, it is not that the difficulties they present have been solved, but that a juster estimate of the limits of our powers, together with a deeper sense of the antinomies of Divine law, has in a great measure withdrawn the Christian mind from these questions to more remunerative ones. That the doctrines commonly called Calvinistic logically lead either to presumption or despair, may perhaps fairly be urged; that they do so as matter of fact, and on any wide scale, would be difficult to prove. But whether the vulgar antinomianism of Fletcher's day had or had not its roots in Calvinistic doctrine, his handling of it as a practical matter is vigorous and effective in the highest degree. He pursues it in all its forms. He exposes and refutes those one-sided reasonings which "make for _un_righteousness"; he sets forth law in gospel, and gospel in law, with admirable balance and proportion; he exhibits Christian holiness as the sum of duty and the crown of privilege, and breathes throughout a heavenly spirit, which the warmth of controversy seldom, if ever, disturbs.