The cure of church-divisions, or, Directions for weak Christians to keep them from being…

Understand well the different conditions and terms of Communion with the Church as invisible and as visible; and the different privileges of the Members; that so you may not presume to impose any conditions which God hath not imposed; nor yet to grudge at the reception of those that are not sanctified and sincere.

Understand well the different conditions and terms of Communion with the Church as invisible and as visible; and the different priviledges of the Members; that so you may not presume to impose any conditions which God hath not imposed; nor yet to grudge at the reception of those that are not sanctified and sincere.

ALL Christians are agreed that it belongeth to God only to make the conditions of Church-communion; and therefore it belongeth not to us to invent them, nor to our wit to censure what God hath done, but to search the Scripture till we find it out, and then obey it. This is the great controversy which hath troubled the Church: When men know not who should be Members of the Church and who not, and when they have no certain rule or character to know whom they must receive, it is no wonder if confusion and contention be the complexion and practice of such Churches. And here the Pastors have torn the Church, by running into contrary extremes. Some have thought that the Visible Church must be constituted only of such persons as satisfy the Pastors and the people of the truth of their sanctification, by some special account of their conversion or the work of grace upon their hearts, in a distincter manner ⟨p. 46⟩than the ancient Church required of the baptized: Wherein being agreed of no certain terms, to know another's sanctification by, their Churches are diversified according to the measure of the strictness or largeness, censoriousness or charity of the Pastors & the people; while one thinks that person to have true grace, whom another thinks to have done. And so they that will be most uncharitable, do pretend to the reputation of being the most pure; because they are most strict: And multitudes are shut out whom Christ would have to be received, & his children are numbered with the dogs.