The life of faith in three parts, the first is a sermon on Heb.…

I know you will meet with some who think very highly of their own mistakes, and whose unskilfulness in these things is joined with an equal measure of self conceitedness, who will tell you that this method smells of an undervaluing of the Scripture: But I would advise you not to depart from the way of Christ, and his Apostles and Churches, nor to cast your selves upon causeless hinderances, in so high a matter as Saving Faith is, upon the reverence of the words of any perverted factious wrangler, nor to escape the fangs of censorious ignorance. We cannot better justify the holy Scriptures in the true Method, than they can in their false one: And can better build up, when we have laid the right foundation, than they can who begin in the middle, and omit the foundation, and call the superstructure by that name.

I know you will meet with some who think very highly of their own mistakes, and whose unskilfulness in these things is joyned with an equal measure of self conceitedness, who will tell you that this method smells of an undervaluing of the Scripture: But I would advise you not to depart from the way of Christ, and his Apostles and Churches, nor to cast your selves upon causeless hinderances, in so high a matter as Saving Faith is, upon the reverence of the words of any perverted factious wrangler, nor to escape the fangs of censorious ignorance. We cannot better justifie the holy Scriptures in the true Method, than they can in their false one: And can better build up, when we have laid the right foundation, than they can who begin in the middle, and omit the foundation, and call the superstructure by that name.

2. Suspect not all Church-history or Tradition, in an extreme opposition to the Papists, who cry up a private unproved Tradition of their own. They tell us of Apostolical Traditions, which their own faction only are the keepers of; and of which no true historical evidence is produced: And this they call the Tradition of the Church: But we have another sort of Tradition, which must not be neglected or rejected, unless we will deny humanity, and reject Christianity. Our Traditio tradens, or active Tradition, is primarily nothing but the certain history or usage of the universal