A27050:925
A treatise of episcopacy confuting by Scripture, reason, and the churches testimony that sort…
A treatise of episcopacy confuting by Scripture, reason, and the churches testimony that sort of diocesan churches, prelacy and government, which casteth out the primitive church-species, episcopacy, ministry and discipline and confoundeth the Christian world by corruption, usurpation, schism and persecution : meditated in the year 1640, when the et cætera oath was imposed : written 1671 and cast by : published 1680 by the importunity of our superiors, who demand the reasons of our nonconformity / by Richard Baxter.A treatise of episcopacy confuting by Scripture, reason, and the churches testimony that sort of diocesan churches, prelacy and government, which casteth out the primitive church-species, episcopacy, ministry and discipline and confoundeth the Christian world by corruption, usurpation, schism and persecution : meditated in the year 1640, when the et cætera oath was imposed : written 1671 and cast by : published 1680 by the importunity of our superiours, who demand the reasons of our nonconformity / by Richard Baxter.
London: printed for Nevil Simmons, 1681
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.
1 Pet. 1. 2. 3. The Elders which are among you I exhort who am also an Elder, feed the Flock of God which is among you, taking the oversight thereof, not by constraint, &c. that is, saith Doctor Hammond [The Bishops of your several Churches I exhort, take care of your several Churches, and govern them, not as Secular Rulers by force, but as Pastors do their Sheep by calling and going before them, that so they may follow of their own accord.] See also Doctor Hammond's Annot. on Heb. 13. 7, 17. 1 Thess. 5. 12, 13. And saith Doctor Jeremy Taylor, of Repent. Praef. [I am sure we cannot give account of souls of which we have no notice.] (O terrible word to the undertakers of so many hundred Churches, and so many thousand or ten thousand souls which they never knew!)
This made Ignatius (às after cited) say, that The Bishop must look after or take account of each person as much as Servants and Maids.
Object. But there may be more in a Parish than a Minister can know. Answ. If a Parish may be too large for a Bishops work, how little reason have they to make a Church, and take the Pastoral Care of many hundred Parishes? 2. We must judge by the ordinary common case. In a Parish a Minister may know every one, except it be some few strangers or retired persons, or except it be a Parish or Church of too great a swelling bigness: But in a Diocese of many hundred Churches, it is not one of a hundred that the Bishop will ever know. 3. I know by experience what may be done, whatever slothful persons say; I had a Parish of about three of four thousand souls; (A Market Town with twenty Villages) and except three or four Families that refused to come to me, (whom yet I knew by other means) I knew not only the persons but the measures of all or almost all their understandings, in the Town, and my assistants in the Villages knew the rest, by personal conference, each family coming to us by turns. 4. And where a Church is too large for one, there may be and must be assistant Ministers, and that may be done by many, which cannot be done by one alone.