A92140:139
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.
Answ. They require that before we come to a Synod where fundamental truths are Synodically determined,1 we be as a razed table and as clean paper in which no thing is written, and so must we be after a Synod hath determined according to the word of God, that is be still Sceptics and believe nothing fixedly, and be rooted in no faith, nay not in the faith of the fundamentals that are most clear in the word of God; for it is unpossible that we can believe the clearest fundamentals, as that God created the world, and Christ God-Man redeemed it, but we must believe them by the intervening and intermediation of •ur own sense or the Churches sense; or the sense of some Godly Doctor;2 now because all these senses are fallible, and we see Familists put one sense on fundamentals, Papists another sense, and all private men may do the like, it is not possible that any man can be rooted in any faith at all by this way, for all senses are fallible, & though the scripture giveth clear & evident senses yet such is the Heretical dullness of men, that reject these infallible senses as false; and those others that by their own confession are fallible and so can neither be established by the word, nor by the interpretations of men, though senses of Scripture rendered by Synods be fallible in the way they come to us, because men delivering them may err, yet being agreeable to the word, they are in themselves infallible. And so the old and new Testament in the way they come to us may be fallible, because Printers are not prophets but may miscarry and dream; but it followeth not they are not the infallible word of life in themselves, when the Spirit witnesseth to us that God, divinity, transforming glory are in these books: as a spouse knoweth the hand-writstill, loveliness of a letter from her husband to be certainly no counterfeit but true, though the bearer be a rogue and can deceive.
Answ. They require that before we come to a Synod where fundamentall truths are Synodically determined,1 we be as a razed table and as cleane paper in which no thing is written, and so must we be after a Synod hath determined according to the word of God, that is be still Scepticks and believe nothing fixedly, and be rooted in no faith, nay not in the faith of the fundamentals that are most cleare in the word of God; for it is unpossible that we can beleeve the clearest fundamentals, as that God created the world, and Christ God-Man redeemed it, but we must beleeve them by the intervening and intermediation of ur own sense or the Churches sense; or the sense of some Godly Doctour;