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

And both Ministers and private persons must be above the praise and the dispraise even of self-conceited Religious persons, before they can be sit to follow Christ, as tried and firmly settled men. Stand your ground if you are in the right. Truth will bear all your charges at the last, and will defend it self and you: If you please men (whoever they be) contrary to God and conscience, you are servants of men, and verily you have your reward. Math. 6. But you are no longer the servants of Christ. Gal. 1. 10. And you will never be settled, but change as the Moon as the parties or opinions of the censurers change. But if you stick to the words of truth and soberness, at last the sober part of the Religious will be your encouragers, and many of the giddy will come to you by Repentance, when experience hath showed them that which they would not learn of you. That which is vertiginous will at last settle its rest on that which is permanent and firm: As boys when they have made themselves wheel-sick with turning round, will lay hold on the next post, to keep them from falling. Therefore bear the censures of the ignorant. Please them in all things lawful for their good and edification; and become all things to all men in a lawful way: But depart not from the principles or practise of Christian-union, Communion, Charity, or Sobriety, to please a dividing hot-brained party, nor to ⟨p. 142⟩escape their sharpest censures. He is unfit to be a Physician that cannot bear a mad m•ns railing•, or the harsh expressions of his friends, when a frenzy or fever makes them brain-sick. When you have followed them in their violent hea•• a while to avoid their censure, either you must come back with sorrow, or run to the end with them, as many in this age have done to their own, and to the Churches, and the States confusion; or which is worst of all, God may ••stly give you up, to be of their minds, and to think that way right and necessary at last, which at first you only yielded to, in compliance with the heats of other men. And when you have sinned against God to avoid their censures, and keep an interest in them, its two to one, but they will turn on still further and further, till you are forced to let them go, and you shall in the end be more censured and despised by them, than if you had never humoured them at all.