A53704:445
An enquiry into the original, nature, institution, power, order and communion of evangelical churches.…
An enquiry into the original, nature, institution, power, order and communion of evangelical churches. The first part with an answer to the discourse of the unreasonableness of separation written by Dr. Edward Stillingfleet, Dean of Pauls, and in defence of the vindication of non-conformists from the guilt of schism / by John Owen.An enquiry into the original, nature, institution, power, order and communion of evangelical churches. The first part with an answer to the discourse of the unreasonableness of separation written by Dr. Edward Stillingfleet, Dean of Pauls, and in defence of the vindication of non-conformists from the guilt of schisme / by John Owen.
London: printed by J. Richardson for Nath. Ponder, 1681
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.
1. The foundation of this duty, as was before declared, doth lye in the law and light of Nature. Man cannot exercise the principal Powers and Faculties of his Soul, ⟨p. 156⟩with which he was created, and whereby he is enabled to glorify God, which is the end of him and them, without a consent and conjunction in the Worship of God in Communion and Society, as hath been proved before.
1. The foundation of this duty, as was before declared, doth lye in the law and light of Nature. Man cannot exercise the principal Powers and Faculties of his Soul, ⟨p. 156⟩with which he was created, and whereby he is enabled to glorifie God, which is the end of him and them, without a consent and conjunction in the Worship of God in Communion and Society, as hath been proved before.
2. The way whereby this is to be done, God hath declared and revealed from the beginning, by the Constitution of a Church-state, through the addition of Arbitrary Institutions of Worship, unto what was required by the Law of Nature. For this gives the true state, and is the formal reason of a Church, namely, a Divine Addition of Arbitrary Institutions of Worship, unto the necessary Dictates of the Law of Nature, unto that end. And the especial nature of any Church-state, doth depend on the especial nature of those Institutions, which is constitutive of the difference between the Church-state of the Old Testament and that of the new.
3. Such a Church-state was constituted and appointed under the Old Testament, founded in and on an especial Covenant between God and the People,