A92140:120
A free disputation against pretended liberty of conscience tending to resolve doubts moved
A free disputation against pretended liberty of conscience tending to resolve doubts moved by Mr. John Goodwin, John Baptist, Dr. Jer. Taylor, the Belgic Arminians, Socinians, and other authors contending for lawless liberty, or licentious toleration of sects and heresies. / By Samuel Rutherfurd professor of divinity in the University of St. Andrews.A free disputation against pretended liberty of conscience tending to resolve doubts moved by Mr. John Goodwin, John Baptist, Dr. Jer. Taylor, the Belgick Arminians, Socinians, and other authors contending for lawlesse liberty, or licentious toleration of sects and heresies. / By Samuel Rutherfurd professor of divinity in the University of St. Andrews.
London: printed by R.I. for Andrew Crook, 1649
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.
Fourthly, That no Confessions ought to be but in express words of Scripture, 1shall free all one and consequently all Churches from obedience to that which Peter commands. 1 Pet. 3. 15. Be ready always to give an answer to every man that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you, with ••eeknesse and fear. When Stephen Acts 7. and Paul Acts 26. were accused of heresy and speaking against Moses and the semple, they made a confession of their faith not in words of Scripture, but in deductions and necessary consequences drawn from Scripture and applied to themselves, and these in Nehemiahs time who wrote and sealed or subscribed a Covenant, did not write and seal the express Decalogue and ten Commandments, […] the words of the Covenant of Grace. I will be thy God and the God of thy seed, but entered into a curse and into an Oath to walk in Gods Law which was given by Moses the servant of God and to observe and to do all the Commandments of the Lord our God and his judgements and his statutes and that (say they) we would not give our daughters to the people of the Land, nor take their ⟨p. 30⟩daughters for our sons, and if the people of the Land bring ware or victuals on the Sabbath day to sell, that we would not buy it of them. & Nehemiah c. 10. v. 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34. &c. compared with Nehe. c. 9. v. 38. Which words are not a confession nor Covenant in express Scripture, save that they are historically inserted in the Cannon of the Scripture by the Holy Ghost. In which sense the law and decree of Nebuchadnezzar Daniel 6. And of other heathen Kings as Daniel 3. 29. 30. Ezra. 1. 2, 3. c. 7. 11, 12, 13, 14. &c. Are Scriptures; but they are not the express words of the Law, for there is nothing in the express Law touching the Sabbath, of not buying ware and victual from the heathen of the land that Nehemiah speaks of, which warranteth us to enter in the like Covenant, and make the like Confession of faith to defend and stand to the Protestant Religion, and that Christ was God and man, and man in one person, and that we shall not buy ware or victuals from the Anabaptist and Familists of England who trample on the Sabbath day though these be not express words of Scripture.