A92140:431
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.
CHAP. XIV. Cavils against coercive judicial Laws, for punishing false prophets in the Old Testament removed.
CHAP. XIV. Cavils against coercive judiciall Laws, for punishing false prophets in the Old Testament removed.
THE first common Answer made to all these, is: That these were judicial and Old Testament Laws, when God dealt more strictly with the Jews, and hedged them in with severer laws, penalties, and a greater measure of bondage, then now under the meek and gentle reign of the Messiah.1
THE first common Answer made to all these, is: That these were judiciall and Old Testament Laws, when God dealt more strict•y with the Jews, and hedged them in with severer laws, penalties, and a greater measure of bondage, then now under the meek and gentle reign of the Messiah.1
- 1Laws punishing false teachers were moral, not temporary and pedagogical▪Laws punishing false teachers were morall, not temporary and pedagogicall▪
Answ. More severity, and a stricter tutorage to be over the Church in non-age, and under Pedagogy, we grant, Gal. 4. 1, 2, 3. But that is in regard of Ceremonial hedges, laws, and days, but it is to beg the question, to say that moral transgressions are destructive, if not more, to Christian societies now as then, such as blasphemy, idolatry, heresy, that were punished with the sword then, must now be more loosed from all bodily punishment in any kind, then murder, sorcery, adultery, perjury. For the comparison of a milder Government under Jesus, then under Moses, cannot stand in fencing some moral transgressions utterly from the sword, and in leaving others less weighty, under as bloody punishments as ever they were. When no reason from the word of truth, can be given, why the murderer should dye by the sword, now and then, but blasphemy, and offering the sons to Molech, as the Indians do now, was then by the law of Nature, a dis-worship, or a false worship, punishable in Jews and heathen, but now it is not in any punishable by the sword at all. 2. The sword did not force the conscience of any then, more than now, nor could it cudgel an Idolater, or a blasphemer, into the sound faith then, more then now, and weapons of the Prophets in the