B20729:26
A letter of Mr. John Cottons, teacher of the Church in Boston in New-England,…
A letter of Mr. John Cottons, teacher of the Church in Boston in New-England, to Mr. Williams, a preacher there wherein is showed that those ought to be received into the Church who are Godly, though they do not see nor expressly bewail all the pollutions in church-fellowship, ministry, worship, government.A letter of Mr. John Cottons, teacher of the Church in Boston in New-England, to Mr. Williams, a preacher there wherein is shewed that those ought to be received into the Church who are Godly, though they doe not see nor expressely bewaile all the pollutions in church-fellowship, ministery, worship, government.
London: printed for Benjamin Allen, 1643
Letter: A Letter of Mr. John Cottons, Teacher of the Church in Boston, in New England.
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.
Ans. 2. When you judge that godly persons are not matter fitted for the Church, until first they be illuminated and convinced of the sinfulness of every sipping of the whores cup; you take away with the one hand what you granted with the other, and withal you impose a burden upon the Church of Christ, which Christ never required at their hands nor yours.
Ans. 2. When you judge that godly persons are not matter fitted for the Church, untill first they be illuminated and convinced of the sinfulnesse of every sipping of the whores cup; you take away with the one hand what you granted with the other, and withall you impose a burthen upon the Church of Christ, which Christ never required at their hands nor yours.
For we deny that it is necessary to the admission of members that every one should be convinced of the sinfulness of every sipping of the Whores cup, for every sipping of a drunkards cup is not sinful; and though the cup of the whore do more intoxicate the mind then the drunkards cup doth the body, yet you know bodily drunkenness and ⟨p. 8⟩whoredom are such notorious and gross sins that no man that hath any true repentance in him, cannot but be convinced of the sinfulness of them, and of the necessity of repentance of them in particular. But the Whores cup being a mystery of iniquity, the sinfulness of it, is nothing so evident and notorious as that every true repentant soul doth at first discern the filthiness of it: and therefore as those three thousand Jews and Proselytes were admitted into the fellowship of the first Christian Church, when they repented of their murder of Christ, although they never saw nor confessed all the superstitious leavenings wherewith the Pharisees had bewitched them, Act. 2. 37 to 47. so doubtless may such godly persons be admitted into the fellowship of our Churches, who do truly repent and confess their greatest and most notorious sins, although they be not yet convinced of every passage of Antichristian superstition, wherewith they have been defiled in their former walkings.