Certain disputations of right to sacraments, and the true nature of visible Christianity defending…

Perhaps you will Object, If this be not Notorious ungodliness, what is? The sin was more heinous than Drunkenness, Fornication, yea or Murder it self; to be an Idolater, and to set it up to defile the Land: and it was a sin lived in who knows how long? besides his fleshly life, in having three hundred Concubines and seven hundred wives: If all this may stand with Godliness, then we cannot know any man to be ungodly, & then you will harden all the wicked in their presumption. Answ. 1. If I should but look on it as a thing uncertain whether Solomon had true grace at that time, or whether any intercision were made in his Justification and true Sanctification, I should incur the heavy censure of many Divines. If I question not the certainty of his grace and perseverance, then I am supposed to make every common scandalous sinner to be fit for the reputation of a Saint, and to contradict the Apostle, who saith, If ye live after the flesh ye shall die; and neither Whoremonger, nor Idolater shall inherit the Kingdom of God. What is to be done in this strait? I will tell you plainly what I think safest, and let men think what they please. 1. It is not improbable that Solomon committed much of this sin merely under temptation to please his Wives. 2. And that more of it lay in tolerating their Idolatry, than in his own committing it. 3. And that he did in other things continue his worship of the ⟨p. 322⟩true God. 4. And that he repented and wrote the Book Ecclesiastes on his Repentance, though the History make no mention of it. 5. Yet because the Holy Ghost doth so expressly charge him with having his own heart turned after other gods, and going after them, and building high places to them, and his heart. turning from the Lord] and because the very setting up of so many Idols for others (his 700 Wives) is it self so heinous, I think it is undeniable that he was an Idolater, and lived in that sin, besides his living with 300 Concubines, and taking so fully the pleasure of his flesh, as in Ecclesiastes he doth confess. We are certain that all these are heinous sins, and hazardous to a mans salvation.

Perhaps you will Object, If this be not Notorious ungodliness, what is? The sin was more hainous than Drunkenness, Fornication, yea or Murder it self; to be an Idolater, and to set it up to defile the Land: and it was a sin lived in who knows how long? besides his fleshly life, in having three hundred Concubines and seven hundred wives: If all this may stand with Godliness, then we cannot know any man to be ungodly, & then you will harden all the wicked in their presumption. Answ. 1. If I should but look on it as a thing uncertain whether Solomon had true grace at that time, or whether any intercision were made in his Justification and true Sanctification, I should incur the heavy censure of many Divines. If I question not the certainty of his grace and perseverance, then I am supposed to make every common scandalous sinner to be fit for the reputation of a Saint, and to contradict the Apostle, who saith, If ye live after the flesh ye shall die; and neither Whoremonger, nor Idolater shall inherit the Kingdom of God. What is to be done in this strait? I will tell you plainly what I think safest, and let men think what they please. 1. It is not improbable that Solomon committed much of this sin meerly under temptation to please his Wives. 2. And that more of it lay in tolerating their Idolatry, than in his own committing it. 3. And that he did in other things continue his worship of the