A92140:791
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
Chapter 26: Whether punishing of Seducing Teachers be persecution for Conscience.
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.
because they extended too much cruel patience to these. But if Gods patience be a rule, men must not be cut off, because there is hope of their repentance so long as they live, your own Acontius saith by this reason,1 Murderers and adulterers should not be punished by the Magistrate, for there often is more hope of Publicans, Harlots and Murderers that they may be the elect of God, and gained to repentance, then of self-wise, and judicially blinded Pharisees:2 Nor find we any so deserted of God and judicially blinded of God as Libertines, read but the book entitled John the Baptist, sure a wilderness man void of reason wrote it,3 the man tells chap. 9. disclaiming against going to low and wars; (which yet Anabaptists and this Scholar of that Sect practise, whether the Parliament will or no) saith, Are ye wronged in person, estate, good name, or for Christs sake, which is our conscience? our Saviour and his Saints have drunk the same cup. Hence he citeth to no purpose Scriptures but two and forty in number, of the persecutions to follow the Lords Disciples for the Gospel, and that it is proper to the world to persecute, and to the Saints to be persecuted, and hated for righteousness, and that such as are persecuted, and […] ••sallow all persecuting for matters of Religion, 4as the greatest stumbling block to the propagation of the Gospel, must necessarily be the true Church and […] of Christ, none else having a capacity (without Gods infinite mercy, and dispensation) of being ever hewed out and squared as members suitable to such a head: contr•riorum eadem est ratio, since the true Church must needs be persecuted, that must needs be a false Church which persecutes the true one, for though this false Church be persecuted likewise, yet in regard it cannot be both true and false, that persecuted Church must needs be the only true one, which doth not persecute others, but that the argument may be complete and full (it had much need, for it is weak and unstable as water) as in the mouth of two witnesses unto this evidence of reason, Let me add a Scripture proof, Viz. we brethren (true Christians) as Isaac was, are the children