A27015:364
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.
3. And why may not another Doctor by these Rules, know the unwritten word, as well as the Pope, and another Church as well as the Roman?
3. And why may not another Doctor by these Rules, know the unwritten word, as well as the Pope, and another Church as well as the Romane?
4. And why may not the Christian people through the world procure from some one charitable Pope, through so many hundred years, a Catalogue of those unwritten verities, that the word of God may be once commonly known, and men may know when they have all, without uncertain dependencies on the Pope, or travailing in vain to Rome to know.
5. And for those few that Bellarmine hath instanced in, viz. The perpetual Virginity of the Virgin Mary, The Baptism of Infants, the validity of Heretics Baptism, the fast of Lent, the inferior orders of the Clergy, the veneration of Images. To the first, I say, It is no Article of Divine Faith, but of humane Ecclesiastical: The second is proved fully out of Scripture: And so is the third, if you take it of ⟨p. 133⟩such Heretics (in a larger sense) as expressly exclude nothing essential to baptism, but expressly include it all: But for the rest, Bellarmine should remember how elsewhere he defendeth the Council that required the rebaptizing of those that were baptized by the Paulinists, because they were Anti-trinitarians. For Lent, I say, no more can be proved of it, but only that it is an ancient Ecclesiastical constitution. And the inferior orders are apparently novelties, introduced after the first age, if not the second too, and not mentioned in any of the first writers, but the sum of Church Officers enumerated without them. Much more novel is the unlawful use of Images in Churches or as immediate instruments to excite devotion in prayer, and for other lawful use, we deny it not.