Monday evening Sepr. 27th: 1779.
1 Brooks, Correspondence 128-30; Wedd, Love Letters 105-06.
2 Lines from Pope's Essay on Man, Epistle 1, 77-78.
3 Eccles is stating one of the central tenets of Calvinism and the Particular Baptists at that time: God's divine sovereignty is demonstrated by his predestinating some to receive grace and salvation (the elect) and withholding it from others (the non-elect). Even though Eccles attends the Baptist chapel in Gainsford Street, he has clearly rejected this doctrine for a more universalist, free will position, but whether Mary Hays has done so by this date is uncertain; she will by the late 1780s, after her interaction with Robert Robinson.
4 Michael Brown, minister at the Gainsford Street Baptist Chapel, Blackfields, would move into Arianism and Socinianism in the 1780s, and thus reject the Calvinism he appears to have been preaching c. 1779. If Eccles was already more acceptable of an Arminian position on free will, then Mary Hays's movement away from orthodox Calvinism may have begun at this time and not be solely the result of her correspondence with Robert Robinson in the 1780s, but that is not clear from this correspondence. John Dunkin would remain a staunch defender of Calvinism, though more from an evangelical position, as evidenced in his 1783 pamphlet, The Divinity of the Son of God, and the Complete Atonement for Sin . . . in a Letter to a Friend, a response to Joseph Priestley’s An Appeal to the Serious and Candid Professors of Christianity, which appeared that same year. Dunkin appears to have left the Gainsford Street Chapel by that date (he was involved in founding another Baptist chapel in Southwark) which may further suggest Brown's movement into heterodoxy by that date.
5 Miss Dunkin and Elizabeth Hays.