A27015:129
The safe religion, or, Three disputations for the reformed catholic religion against popery proving…The safe religion, or, Three disputations for the reformed catholike religion against popery proving…
The safe religion, or, Three disputations for the reformed catholic religion against popery proving that popery is against the Holy Scriptures, the unity of the catholic church, the consent of the ancient doctors, the plainest reason, and common judgment of sense it self / by Richard Baxter.The safe religion, or, Three disputations for the reformed catholike religion against popery proving that popery is against the Holy Scriptures, the unity of the catholike church, the consent of the antient doctors, the plainest reason, and common judgment of sense it self / by Richard Baxter.
London: printed by Abraham Miller for Thomas Underhill, 1657
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.
To the particular instances of our differences from the former Churches, I answer particularly. 1. For Free will to God, if you mean a natural freedom, which is [the wills self-determining Power] so the Protestants maintain it as well as the Fathers. If you mean a moral freedom from ill-inclining habits, which is properly a right-disposition, so the Fathers maintained it not.
To the particular instances of our differences from the former Churches, I answer particularly. 1. For Free will to God, if you mean a natural freedome, which is [the wills self-determining Power] so the Protestants maintain it as well as the Fathers. If you mean a moral freedom from ill-inclining habits, which is properly a right-disposition, so the Fathers maintained it not.
Obj. Let Scultetus in Medulla Patru• and others of your own Writers be judge who still number this inter naevos Patrum.
Answ. Scultetus and Calvin and others might mistake the Fathers sense and think that they spoke of moral Freedom, when they spoke but of natural, which is inseparable from the will. And its like that they did so, seeing the Fathers maintained Original sin, which is that pravity of humane nature, which is clean contrary to moral Free-will. 2. And if the Fathers were for a Free-will in a moral-Ethical sense, so is one part of the Protestants as much as they were▪ And if they were in the right, so are those Protestants? If in the wrong then the other part of the Protestants are in this, in the right. 3. This is a point that men may differ in, as much as the Fathers did from us, and yet be in a safe way to salvation. 4. The Dominicans and the Jesuits differ about it as much as we and the Fathers; yea, they cannot yet agree, what natural free-will is. 2. For Predestination upon foreseen faith.