What saves, faith or works?

Should you ask which is most necessary to salvation, faith or works?
I beg leave to propose a similar question: Which is most essential to breathing, inspiration or expiration? If you reply, that “the moment either is absolutely at an end, so is the other; and therefore both are equally important :”
I return exactly the same answer. If humble faith receive the breath of spiritual life, obedient love gratefully returns it, and makes way for a fresh supply. When it does not, the Spirit is grieved: and if this want of cooperation is persisted in to the end of the day of salvation, the sin unto death is committed, the Spirit is quenched in his saving operation, the apostate dies the second death, and his corrupt soul is cast into the bottomless pit, as a putrid corpse into the noisome grave.

- John Fletcher, An Equal Check To Pharisaism and Antinomianism, circa 1773

Something to ponder upon…