The Doctrine of the Saints' Perseverance

First I am not able to persuade my self, that any man who ever read the writings of the first sort of men mentioned, and knows the constant Doctrine to this day, of the Churches which they planted and watered, or ever did hear of the latter, will entertain this Assertion of Mr Goodwins with any thing but Admiration, upon what grounds he should make it. And

First I am not able to perswade my selfe, that any man who ever read the writings of the first sort of men mentioned, and knowes the constant Doctrine to this day, of the Churches which they planted and watered, or ever did heare of the latter, will entertaine this Assertion of Mr Goodwins with any thing but Admiration, upon what grounds he should make it. And

Secondly, Himself discovering in part on what account he doth it, namely because of their Exhortations to watchfulness, carefulness, and close walking with God, with their denuntiations of threatenings to them, that abide not in the Faith, which he fancies to be inconsistent with the Doctrine of Perseverance, so as by him opposed (which inconsistency we have long since fully manifested, to be the issue & offspring of his own imagination, begotten of it by the cunning Sophistry of his Pelagian Friends) I know not why I should farther insist upon the wiping away of this Reproach, cast upon those Blessed Souls whom God so magnified in the work of the Gospel of his Son in their Generation; I remember Navaret a Dominican Fryer, upon his Observation of the subtleties of the Jesuits, to wrest many sayings of the Ancients in favour of their Opinions, in those Doctrines wherein those two Orders are at variance, Affirms That he was afraid that when he was dead, although he had written & disputed so much against them, they would produce him for a Testimony and Witness on their side. What he feared concerning himself, Mr Goodwin hath attempted, concerning many more worthy Persons: cutting off sentences from what goes before, and follows after, restraining general expressions, imposing his own Hypothesis on his Reader, in making application of what he ⟨p. 311⟩quotes out of any Author, he hath spent one whole Chapter to persuade the world, that men of as great Abilities & Judgments, as any in the world, since the Apostles fell a sleep, have usually expressed themselves, in a direct contradiction, to what they are eminently and notoriously known, as their professed deliberate Judgments, to have maintained.