A26892:7442
A Christian Directory
A Christian directory, or, A sum of practical theology and cases of conscience directing Christians how to use their knowledge and faith, how to improve all helps and means, and to perform all duties, how to overcome temptations, and to escape or mortify every sin : in four parts ... / by Richard Baxter.A Christian directory, or, A summ of practical theologie and cases of conscience directing Christians how to use their knowledge and faith, how to improve all helps and means, and to perform all duties, how to overcome temptations, and to escape or mortifie every sin : in four parts ... / by Richard Baxter.
London: printed by Robert White for Nevill Simmons, 1673
Title page typeset from the transcription.
Modern spelling is a reading aid: the words are the author’s, only the spelling is modernized. Original shows the page as printed, with the transcription marks.
II. The Objects tell you what the Acts must be on our part, 1. With the Understanding, to know and believe; 2, With the Will to love, choose, desire and resolve; and 3. Practically to deliver up our selves for the present, and to promise for the time to come. These are the Essentials of the Christian Religion.
8. The Creed is a larger explication of the Credenda, and the Lords Prayer of the Diligenda, or things to be willed, desired and hoped for; and the Decalogue of the Natural part of the Agenda.
9. Suffer not your own Ignorance, or the Papists Cheats to confound the Question, about Fundamentals, as to the Matter, and as to the expressing words. It is one thing to ask, What is the Matter 1Essential to Christianity? And another, What Words, Symbols or Sentences are Essential to it? To the first, I have now answered you. To the second I say, 1. Taking the Christian Religion as it is an Extrinsic Doctrine in signis, so the Essence of it is, Words and Signs expressive or significant of the Material Essence. That they be such in specie is all that is essential. And if they say, But which be those words? I answer, 2. That no particular Words in the world are essential to the Christian Religion. For, 1. No one Language is essential to it. It is not necessary to salvation, that you be baptized, or learn the Creed or Scriptures, in Hebrew, or Greek, or Latin, or English, so you learn it in any Language understood. 2. It is not necessary to salvation that you use the same words in the same Language, as long as it hath more words than one to express the same thing by. 3. It is not necessary to salvation, that we use the same, (or any one single) form, method or order of words, as they are in the Creeds without alteration. And therefore while the Ancients did tenaciously cleave to the same Symbol or Creed, yet they used various words to express it by. (As may be seen in Irens, Tertullian, Origen and Ruffin elsewhere cited by me; so that its plain, that by the same Symbol they