This is the true Case; And now let any sober Person, Christian, or Heathen, judge between us, whether any thing could have hardened you into an impossibility of Conviction, but the great averseness to Humiliation and Repentance, and selfish inclination to be righteous in your own eyes? No wonder if no man be justified as Legally innocent, when a bare Confession of a deliberate printed sin, as visible as a beam in the eye (as Christ meant it) is so hardly obtained with some men: And (because with what measure men meet, it shall be measured to them again.) Wonder not if you meet with Auditors like your self: Suppose that You whose Office is to Preach Men to Repentance, do hear the Perjured, the Drunkards, Blasphemers, the Fornicators say, This man is a Railer, he drops smarting poison upon us in his Sermons; When we hear him, we deal with a Woolf, and put our hands into a Hornets nest; bitterness and reviling is his Dialect; We are innocent, and all that he saith doth not convince us. What would you say to such returns? But too many think that it is their work to preach Repentance, and other mens to Repent. As for Magistrates forbidding faithful Ministers to preach the Christian Faith, where there are not enough more to do the Work: Cannot you be content with the Honour, Comfort, and Reward of approving it, and suffer such to be without it, as refuse it. But when you say [Alas, Church censures without the Magistrate are but brutum fulmen] I will presume to tell you; 1. That you seem to me to come near to Blasphemy, to intimate that Christ ordained so vain a Discipline: What? and yet be the Infallible Teacher and King of the Church. But ⟨p. 10⟩if you think that He did not Institute it, tell us so plainly, and pretend not more to an unalterable Divine Institution, which all of us must swear never to endeavour an alteration of. Or if you think that Christ did institute Church Discipline to be exercised, only when the Sword will second it; say so, that we may know your mind. And then 2ly, Do you not make the Apostles and the Primitive Church for above 300 years, to have abused the World with this brutum fulmen. If you talk of the Apostles power of seconding it by miraculous Penalties. I answer, 1. It cannot be proved that they did so ordinarily, but only extraordinarily. 2. All Pastors and Churches then had not that power, that yet were obliged to exercise Discipline. 3.
This is the true Case; And now let any sober Person, Christian, or Heathen, judge betwen us, whether any thing could have hardned you into an impossibility of Conviction, but the great aversness to Humiliation and Repentance, and selfish inclination to be righteous in your own eyes? No wonder if no man be justified as Legally innocent, when a bare Confession of a deliberate printed sin, as visible as a beam in the eye (as Christ meant it) is so hardly obtained with some men: And (because with what measure men meet, it shall be measured to them again.) Wonder not if you meet with Auditors like your self: Suppose that You whose Office is to Preach Men to Repentance, do hear the Perjured, the Drunkards, Blasphemers, the F•rnicators say, This man is a Rayler, he drops smarting poyson upon us in his Sermons; When we hear him, we deal with a Woolf, and put our hands into a Hornets nest; bitterness and reviling is his Dialect; We are innocent, and all that he saith doth not convince us. What would you say to such returns? But too many think that it is their work to preach Repentance, and other mens to Repent. As for Magistrates forbidding faithful Ministers to preach the Christian Faith, where there are not enough more to do the Work: Cannot you be content with the Honour, Comfort, and Reward of approving it, and suffer such to be without it, as refuse it. But when you say [Alas, Church censures without the Magistrate are but brutum fulmen] I will presume to tell you; 1. That you seem to me to come near to Blasphemy, to intimate that Christ ordained so vain a Discipline: What? and yet be the Infallibe Teacher and King of the Church. But ⟨p. 10⟩if you think that He did not Institute it, tell us so plainly, and pretend not more to an unalterable Divine Institution, which all of us must swear never to endeavour an alteration of. Or if you think that Christ did institute Church Discipline to be exercised, only when the Sword will second it; say so, that we may know your mind. And then 2ly, Do you not make the Apostles and the Primitive Church for above 300 years, to have abused the World with this brutum fulmen. If you talk of the Apostles power of seconding it by miraculous Penalties. I answer, 1. It cannot be proved that they did so ordinarily, but only extraordinarily. 2. All Pastors and Churches then had not that power, that yet were obliged to exercise Discipline. 3.
