A30136:198
A confession of my faith and a reason of my practice
A confession of my faith and a reason of my practice, or, With who, and who not, I can hold church-fellowship, or the communion of saints
London: printed for Francis Smith, 1672
Title page typeset from the transcription.
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.
I hold therefore to what I said at first; That if there be any Saints in the Antichristian Church, my heart, and the door of our Congregation is open to receive them, into closest fellowship with us.
Object. But how if they yet retain some Antichristian principles?
Answ. If they be such as eat out the bowels of a Church, so soon as they are detected, he must be either be kept out, while out, or cast out, if in: For it must be the prudence of every community, to preserve its own unity with peace and truth: The which the Churches of Christ may do; and yet as I have showed already, receive such persons as differ upon the point of Water-baptism: For the doing or not doing of that, neither maketh nor marreth, the bowels or foundation of Church communion.
Answ. If they be such as eat out the bowels of a Church, so soon as they are detected, he must be either be kept out, while out, or cast out, if in: For it must be the prudence of every community, to preserve its own unity with peace and truth: The which the Churches of Christ may do; and yet as I have shewed already, receive such persons as differ upon the point of Water-baptism: For the doing or not doing of that, neither maketh nor marreth, the bowels or foundation of Church communion.