A Continuation of morning-exercise questions and cases of conscience practically resolvedA Continuation of morning-exercise questions and cases of conscience practicaly resolved

8. It would certainly make us abstain from mutual Censures of one another as insincere for our remaining differences. Charity that thinks no evil, would make us not need the reproof Rom. 14.4. Who art thou that judgest another's servant? The common aptness hereunto among us shows how little that divine Principle rules in our hearts, that in defiance of our rule, and the authority of the great God and our blessed Redeemer to whom all Judgement is committed, and who hath so expressly forbidden us to judge lest we be judged, Mat. 7.1. we give our selves so vast a liberty! and set no other bounds to our usurped licence of judging, than Nature hath set to our power of thinking, i. e. think all the mischievous thoughts of them that differ from us that we know how to devise or invent, as if we would say our thoughts (and then by an easy advance, our tongues) are our own, who is Lord over us? I animadvert not on this as the fault of one Party, but wheresoever it lies, as God knows how diffused a ⟨p. 89⟩poison this is! Among them that are satisfied with the public constitutions towards them that dissent from them, and with these back again towards them, and with the several parties of both these towards one another. This uniting, knitting love would make us refrain, not merely from the restraint of Gods Laws in this case, but from a benign disposition, as that which the temper of our Spirits would abhor from. So that such as are well content with the public forms and rites of worship, would have no inclination to judge them that apprehend not things with their understandings, nor relish with their taste, as persons that therefore have cut themselves off from Christ, and the body of Christ. They might learn better from the Cassandrian moderation, and from the avowed sentiments of that man^† (whose temper is better to be liked than his terms of union) who speaking of such as being formerly rejected (meaning the Protestants) for finding fault with abuses in the Church, had by the urgency of their Conscience altered somewhat in the way of their teaching, and the form of their service, and are therefore said to have fallen off from the Church, and are numbered among Heretics and Schismatics. It is, saith he, to he enquired how rightly and justly this is determined of them. For there is to be considered, as to the Church, the head, and the body.