The Scripture Gospel defended, and Christ, grace, and free justification vindicated against the libertines…

CHAP. II. An Enumeration of the Errors which have corrupted Christianity, and subverted the Gospel.

CHAP. II. An Enumeration of the Errours which have corrupted Christianity, and subverted the Gospel.

Reconcil. Before I give you a Confutation of the Errors of the Anti-Gospellers, I will promise these two things: 1. I will here give you a Catalogue of their Errors which I am Confute. 2. I think it needful to caution you, what to think of the Persons, that you Censure them not too hardly, tho' the Errors as worded, be very great. I. And 1. As the general Fault of their Errors, is the confounding of things which greatly differ; so by this, they corrupt the Doctrine of Adams Communication of sin and guilt to his posterity, and thereby raise more dangerous Errors, ⟨p. 7⟩They feign, that God made a Covenant with Adam, (and all his Posterity say some, as in him) that if he stood, God would continue him and his Posterity; and if he fell, God would take it as if all his Posterity then personally, sinned in him; and so, that either we were all then personally in him, or God by Imputation would take us to have so been: And so that God's Covenant and Imputation, made Adams sin, ours, further than it is by natural propagation; not truly distinguishing between our being Personally in him, and being but Virtually, and Seminally in him: And feigning God to make Adam not only the Natural Father and Root of Mankind, but also Arbitrarily, a Constituted Representer of all the Persons that should spring from him; and so that God made them sinners, that were none, and that, before he made them men. II. Whence they infer, that Christ was by Gods imposition and his own sponsion, made the Legal Representative Person of every one of the Elect taken singularly; so that what he did for them, God reputeth them to have done by him. III. Hereby they falsely make the Person of the Mediator, to be the legal Person of the sinner, and deny the true Mediatorship. IV. But they cannot agree, when this Personating of the Elect began: Some say, It had no beginning, but was from Eternity; because Election was from Eternity, and we were Elected in Christ; and so were Persons from Eternity in him. V. Others say, That it began at the making of the World, Christ being then the first of Gods Works in a Super-angelical Nature, emaning from the Divine, which contained all our Persons in it; as the Beams are of, or in the Sun.