A26932:641
Gildas Salvianus: The Reformed Pastor
Gildas Salvianus, the reformed pastor showing the nature of the pastoral work, especially in private instruction and catechizing : with an open confession of our too open sins : prepared for a day of humiliation kept at Worcester, Decemb. 4, 1655 by the ministers of that county, who subscribed the agreement for catechizing and personal instruction at their entrance upon that work / by their unworthy fellow-servant, Richard Baxter ...Gildas Salvianus, the reformed pastor shewing the nature of the pastoral work, especially in private instruction and catechizing : with an open confession of our too open sins : prepared for a day of humiliation kept at Worcester, Decemb. 4, 1655 by the ministers of that county, who subscribed the agreement for catechizing and personal instruction at their entrance upon that work / by their unworthy fellow-servant, Richard Baxter ...
London: printed by Robert White for Nevil Simmons, 1656
Modern spelling is a reading aid: the words are the author’s, only the spelling is modernized. Original shows the page as printed, with the transcription marks.
17. Moreover, The very diligent practice of this work that we are are upon, would do much to set men right about many controversies that now trouble the Church, and so to put an end to our differences. Especially most of those about the Ministry, Churches and Discipline, would receive more convincing light by practice, then all our idle talking, or writing will afford us. We have fallen of late into parties, and troubled the Church about many controversies concerning excommunication. in such and such cases, which perhaps never will fall out; or if they do, they cannot be so well decided by any man that is not engaged in the practice. It is like the profession of a Physician, a soldier, a Pilot, &c. who can never be worth a straw at his work, by all the precepts in the world, without practise and experience. This will be the only course to make, 1. Sound Divines in the main, which bare studying will not do 2. And recover us again to the Primitive simplicity, to live upon the substantial necessary things. 3. And to direct and resolve us in many of ou• quarrels that will no other way be well resolved. For example; If this work had been set on foot, and it had been but visible what it is to have the oversight of souls durst any Prelates have contended for the sole Oversight of 200. or 400. or 1000 Churches? and that the Presbyters might be but their curates and informers? Durst they have striven with might and main to have drawn upon themselves such impossibilities, and have carried such ⟨p. 338⟩mountains on their backs, and to answer God as Over-seers and Pastors of so many thousand people, whose faces they were never like to see, much less were they ever like to speak one word to them for their everlasting life? Would they not have said, If I must be a Bishop, let me be a Parochial Bishop, or have no more to oversee then I am capable of overseeing, and let me be such as the Primitive Bishops were, that had but one Church, and not hundreds to take care of; and let me not be engaged to natural impossibilities, and that on pain of damnation, and to the certain destruction of the business that I undertake; sure these would rather have been their strivings.