Some remarks, on a pretended answer, to a discourse concerning the Common-Prayer worship. With…

AND now, O you Churches of Christ in New-England, Hold fast the Profession of your Faith without Wavering. Be steadfast in your Religion, both as to the Faith, and as to the Order of the Gospel. Buy the Truth, but Sell it not. Remember what it was ⟨p. 23⟩your Fathers came into this Wilderness to see. They did not (as Conformists now do) come into a fruitful Land to get Estates, but they ventured their own Lives and the Lives of their Children over a vast Ocean, to Encounter with the Straits and Difficulties of a Barren Howling Wilderness: An undertaking (as one truly speaks of it) hardly to be paralleled, except in that of their Father Abraham, out of Ur of the Chaldees, or of his Posterity out of Egypt. They Expected nothing but poverty and mean things whilst in this World. And all these Sufferings they very willingly were subject to, for no other reason, but that so they and their Posterity might be freed from the Superstitions of the Common-Prayer Book. An Ignorant Young Man, has the Confidence (I should have said the Impudence) to tell you in Print, that your Fathers did not come hither on any such account. He will also tell you, that your Vulgar Capacities, cannot distinguish between Truth & Falsehood, Like as the Papists, will not allow you to have a judgment of Discretion, and therefore you must Believe as the Church Believes. But if your Fathers did not come to New-England for their Nonconformity, what else was it for? There are many still living who can remember that their Fathers have often informed them, that it was their dissatisfaction with the ⟨p. 24⟩Liturgy and the Worship of it, which induced them to leave their Native Land. My Reverend Father (who was for many years the Renowned Teacher of the Church in Dorchester) did frequently declare it to his Children, both to those he brought with him, and to those born here. And in the Narrative of his Life Printed above 40 Years since, there is inserted the Reasons which he left written with his own hand, that caused him to Transport himself and Family from Old-England to New-England, viz. That it was to remove from a Corrupt Church to a Purer, from a Church where Discipline is Wanting, to a Church where it may be Enjoyed, from a Land where the Truth and the Professors of it were Persecuted, to a Land of more Quietness.

AND now, O you Churches of Christ in New-England, Hold fast the Profession of your Faith without Wavering. Be stedfast in your Religion, both as to the Faith, and as to the Order of the Gospel. Buy the Truth, but Sell it not. Remember what it was