“Some of my opponents, who find it easier to pass a jest than to answer an argument, will probably think that to beat me and the doctrine of the dispensations out of the field of truth, they need only laugh at my “inventing” different sorts of faith “by the dozen.”
“To nip this witticism in the bud, I declare, once more, that I make no more difference between the faith of a righteous heathen, and the faith of a father in Christ, than I do between daybreak and meridian light. That the light of a sincere Jew is as much one with the light of a sincere Christian, as the light of the sun in a cold, cloudy day in March, is one with the light of the sun in a fine day in May. And, that the difference between the saving faith peculiar to the sincere disciples of Noah, Moses, John the Baptist, and Jesus Christ, consists in a variety of degrees, and not in a diversity of species; saving faith under all dispensations agreeing in the following essentials: (1.) It is begotten by the revelation of some saving truth, presented by free grace, impressed by the Spirit, and received by the believer’s prevented free agency. (2.) It has the same original cause in all, that is, the mercy of God in Jesus Christ. (3.) It actually saves all, though in various degrees. (4.) Its sets all upon working righteousness; “some bearing fruit thirty, some sixty, and some a hundred fold.” And (5.) Through Christ it will bring all that do not make shipwreck of it, to one or another of “the many mansions,” which our Lord is gone to prepare in heaven for his believing, obedient people.” ~ John Fletcher