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

DIRECT. XXVI.

Use not your selves needlessly to the familiar company of that sort of Christians, who use to reproach and censure them, that are more sober, Catholic and charitable than themselves: Unless you also be as much or more with the soberer sort, who will show you the sin and mischiefs of uncharitableness, censoriousness, and divisions.

Use not your selves needlesly to the familiar company of that sort of Christians, who use to reproach and censure them, that are more sober, Catholick and charitable than themselves: Unless you also be as much or more with the soberer sort, who will shew you the sin and mischiefs of uncharitableness, censoriousness, and divisions.

Nothing is more experienced, than the power which the converse of chosen familiars hath upon the minds of the injudicious and unsettled. Which maketh education and the converse of our youth, to have so great a hand in choosing mens opinions and Religion: And is the cause that Religion is as Languages are, diversified by the territories or bounds of Countries. They that are bred among such as use to speak of dissenters, as odious, as hypocrites, as heretics, as schismatics, as ungodly, as proud fanatics, are very like to be possessed themselves with the same spirit of malice and detraction. The words of those whom you respect, especially when you hear them not confuted, will make you believe that it is so indeed, and that the persons are as mad or as odious as they make them. And thus, the Papists think odiously of the Protestants, and the Lutherans of the Calvinists; and the Arminians and Anti-Arminians, the Diocesans and