An expository comment, doctrinal, controversial, and practical upon the whole first chapter to the…An expository comment, doctrinal, controversal, and practical upon the whole first chapter to the…

Now it's very necessary to distinguish this Catholic invisible Church from a visible particular one. The Papists confounding these, and making their Roman particular Church, a Catholic one, and applying such Texts of Scripture, as are spoken of the Universal invisible Church, to their particular, do thereby grossly mistake in pleading for the infallibility and perpetuity of their Church. But

Now it's very necessary to distinguish this Catholick invisible Church from a visible particular one. The Papists confounding these, and making their Roman particular Church, a Catholick one, and applying such Texts of Scripture, as are spoken of the Universal invisible Church, to their particular, do thereby grosly mistake in pleading for the infallibility and perpetuity of their Church. But

Secondly, The Scripture doth use the word Church for a visible company of persons professing faith in Christ, and then it hath several acceptions. For sometimes it is used for the general Company of believers, Act. 8. 3. Thus Paul is said to persecute the Church. Or else more particularly, and for a Church at such a ⟨p. 51⟩place, as the Church at Jerusalem, the Church at Corinth. Again, the word Church is sometimes used more strictly, for the People only, as distinct from Pastors. Thus the Epistles of John are directed, To the Angels of the seven Churches. Thus the Elders are exhorted, Act. 20. 28. To feed the Church of God, over which they were set. And in this sense the Remonstrants speak confidently, That the word Church is most commonly used, and that never, or very seldom, it comprehends the Officers also. But this is not so, for Mat. 18. Tell the Church, by the Church must needs be meant Officers at least with the Church, for they are said to bind and lose, which power is given to Officers only. It's true, they, and so Grotius, by Church understand a multitude, or more, in opposition to those two or three witnesses, that were required before: But the Context may easily be improved to overthrow that