A26892:8249
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.
And even Jerusalem killed the Prophets, and stoned them which were sent to gather them under the gracious wing of Christ, Matth. 23. 37. Which of the Prophets did they not persecute? Act. 7. 52. And if you consider but what streams of blood since the death of Christ and his Apostles have been shed for the sake of Christ and righteousness, it will make you wonder, that so much cruelty can consist with humanity, and men and Devils should be so like! The same man, as Paul, as soon as he ceaseth to shed the blood of others, must look in the same way to lose his own. How many thousands were murdered by Heathen Rome, in the ten persecutions? And how many by the Arian Emperors and Kings! And how many by more Orthodox Princes in their particular distastes! And yet how far hath the pretended Vicar of Christ out-done them all! How many hundred thousands of the Albigenses, Waldenses and Bohemians hath the Papal rage consumed? Two hundred thousand the Irish murdered in a little space: […]o outgo, the thirty or forty thousand which the French Massacre made an end of! The sacrifices offered by their fury in the flames, in the Marian persecution here in England, were nothing to what one day hath done in other parts. What Volumes can contain the particular Histories of them? what a Shambles was their Inquisition in the Low-Countries? and what is the employment of it still! so that a doubting man would be inclined to think, that Papal Rome is the murderous Babylon, that doth but consider, how drunken she is with the blood of the Saints and the Martyrs of Jesus, and that the blood of Saints will be found in her in her day of trial? Rev. 17. 6. & 18. 24. If we should look over all the rest of the World, and reckon up the the torments and murders of the innocent, (in Japan, and most parts of the World, where ever Christianity came) it may increase your wonder, that Devils and men are still so like! Yea though there be as loud a testimony in humane nature against this bloodiness as almost any sin whatsoever; and though the names of persecutors always stink to following Generations, how proudly soever they carried it for a time; and though one would think a persecutor should need no cure but his own pride, that his name may not be left as Pilates in the Creed, to be odious in the mouths of the Ages that come after him;