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

Learn to suffer by Ministers and Good people, and not only by Magistrates, nor only by the ungodly.

I Confess it is a thing most unnatural for one true Christian to afflict another; and especially for a Minister, who is the father of the flock, to be a hurter of them, and to do like an enemy; and to fleece them and devour them. But yet it ⟨p. 246⟩is a thing which sometimes must be born. I have observed that Religious people when a Magistrate (though a usurper) persecuteth them, they can in some sort undergo it, as no strange thing. And they are not so forward to cast off the office and abhor the persons by whom they suffer. But if they suffer never so little by a Minister, they fly away from him, and are uncapable of comfortable communion with him, and the breach is hardly ever made up. I confess there is some more colour for this impatience; (to be mentioned in another place.) But yet Gods servants have been tried by this kind of suffering also, and therefore you must not be so tender of it, nor be driven by it into sinful separations, or into a contempt of the Ministers of the Gospel, as too many sects in these times have been. Read what at large is said of the afflicting Shepherds, Ezek. 34. & Zech. 10. & 11. And you will see that it is not a thing to be wondered at, to have Shepherds which fleece and destroy the flocks, and tread down their pasture and muddy their waters, and feed themselves and not the flocks, and gather not that which goeth •stray: Nay their own Shepherds pitied them not. Zech. 11. 5, I know that it is the Magistrates that are often meant by Shepherds in the Prophets: but the Priests also are usually meant with them, and sometime distinctly by the same word. And their falsehood and cruelty oft expressed, as in