A92140:249
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.
10 All our practises according to fundamentals or nonfundamentals must be in faith,1 that is, with a persuasion that what we do is according to the revealed will of God, otherwise we sin, Rom. 14. 23. and are condemned in all we do. But if this faith with a reserve, be the rule of our practise, ⟨p. 84⟩we can do nothing in faith, but with a resolve upon doubting: so what you do, may as possibly be murder, idolatry, stealing, lying, as obedience to God, yea, you must believe, that what you do to day is lawful, but yet so, as to morrow you must believe upon a new light, that it is unlawful and sin, yea, and this makes the erroneous conscience the rule of your faith, and practise, for if the holy ghost command you to believe such points, with the faith of a reserve, he must command you to practise, according to the present faith that he commands you to have of those truths. But the present you have, may be the belief of a lye and a blasphemous untruth, and so the ten Commandments should be a rule to no man. But his erroneous conscience, if then he believe that it is such acceptable worship as God craved of Abraham, that you sacrifice your Son to God, you believe it with a reserve, and you are to practise it with a reserve, and obliged to practice what you are obliged to believe: but you are obliged to believe with a reserve, that it is acceptable service to God to sacrifice your child to him; for it is a nonfundamental not clearly determined in the word, as least it is controverted by many that go for godly people. Now if so, God shall oblige men to sin and not to sin; to do his revealed will, and not to do his revealed will, in the same commandment, which were blasphemous, now that we are to practise according to our faith of reserve. I prove by the doctrine of Libertines, for they teach a man is to suffer death, and any torment, rather then that he say, there be three persons in one God, and two natures and one person in Christ, and that Presbyterian Government is lawful, that the Christian Prince is to punish false teachers if he believe in his conscience, though he is to believe with a reserve and doubt somely, that these are truths contrary to the word of God, then is his faith with a reserve, which may be the faith of a lye, his only obliging rule of his practise, according to the way of Libertines.