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

DIRECT. LVI.

Keep still in your thoughts, the state of all Christs Churches upon Earth: that you may know what a people they are through the world, whom Christ hath communion with; and may not be deceived by ignorance, to separate from almost all Christs Churches, while you think that you separate from none, but the few that are about you.

Keep still in your thoughts, the state of all Christs Churches upon Earth: that you may know what a people they are through the world, whom Christ hath communion with; and may not be deceived by ignorance, to separate from allmost all Christs Churches, while you think that you separate from none, but the few that are about you.

Thousands of well meaning people live as if England were almost all the world. And do boldly separate from their Neighbours here, which they durst not do, if they soberly considered that almost all the Christian world are worse than they. But narrow minds who can look but little further with their Reason than with their eye-sight, do keep out at once both Truth and Love. It is a point that I have often had occasion to repeat, and yet will not forbear to repeat it here again; It is but about one sixth part of the known world who make any profession of Christianity and are baptized: (besides how much peopled the unknown part of the world may be, we know not.) Of this sixth part the Ethiopians, Egyptians, Syrians, Armenians, the Greek Churches, the Muscovites, and all the Papists, are so great a body, that all the Protestants, or Reformed Churches are little more than a sixth part of this sixth: (The Papists being about a fourth or fifth part; and the other