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A51227
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A sermon preach'd before the Lord Mayor, and the Court of Aldermen, at Guild-Hall Chappel, on the 28th of May, 1682 by John Moore ...
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Moore, John, 1646-1714.
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1682
(1682)
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Wing M2552; ESTC R20127
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21,938
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53
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MOORE MAJOR Curia Specialis tent die Lunae xxix no. Maii 1682. Annoque Regni Regis Caroli Secundi Angl ' c. xxxiiii ta This Court doth desire Dr. Moore to Print his Sermon Preached yesterday at the Guild-Hall Chappel before the Lord Mayor and Aldermen of this City Wagstaffe A SERMON Preach'd before the Lord Mayor AND THE Court of ALDERMEN AT GUILD-HALL Chappel ON The 28th of May 1682. By JOHN MOORE D. D. Chaplain to the Right Honorable Heneage Earl of Nottingham Lord High Chancellor of England LONDON Printed for Walter Kittilby at the Bishops Head in St. Paul's Church-Yard 1682. To the Right Honorable Sir John Moore Lord Mayor and the Court of Aldermen of the City of London My LORD THE Meekness Peace and Charity of which our Saviour was so Zealous a Preacher and so great an Example seem to be in a manner lost in the beats bitterness and noise with which men manage their Disputes about his holy Religion as if the Character of a true Christian was to be taken rather from the contentiousness of his Spirit and his skill in Controversy than the Purity of his Mind and Conversation When yet nothing can bring a greater disparagement upon Christianity and prove more fatal to the Professors of it than to make it the occasion of those Evils and Mischiefs among Men and of that disturbance in the World which God purposely intended it should allay and extinguish It was my design in this Discourse which in obedience to your Commands I now make Public to take men off from their furious debates about 〈…〉 often not material to 〈…〉 earnestly to press them unto the ex 〈…〉 of those Primitive Vertues upon which our Religion has always laid so much stress and which our Lord hath so plainly declared to be the indispensable conditions of our Salvation by shewing that all necessary Christian Doctrines have a natural tendency to that Godliness which is now too generally neglected And I am the more bold to perfix your Lordships name to it because you are known to be so fair a Pattern of that Practical Religion I recommend both in your private life as a Christian and in your Public Capacity as a Magistrate I am My Lord Your Lordships most humble and obedient Servant John Moore A SERMON Preached before the Lord Mayor c. May 28. 1682. 1 TIM VI. 3 And to the Doctrine which is according to Godliness WHen we consider there never was any Religion in the World which did so earnestly recommend and so strictly enjoyn Godliness as the Christian Religion has done and yet that so little of it do's appear in the lives of Christians we must conclude that there are either great defects in the Religion or faults in the Professors of it we must either say there is not a sufficiency in the means Christianity do's prescribe and afford towards the attainment of true Piety and Virtue or else that the blame is to be laid upon them who having undertaken the Christian Profession do neglect or despise the means and instruments provided by their Religion to make them Holy here and happy for ever And it will not be hard to determin on which side the fault lies for God and Religion have not been wanting to Men but Men have been wanting to themselves There being nothing required in our Religion as our Duty and a necessary Condition of our Happiness which is above our strength assisted with that Grace which every one may obtaine who sincerely prays to God for it Therefore if men will not make use of that Grace which God so plentifully poures forth upon all it is but fit and equal that they impute their defects to themselves And few have had the boldness directly to charge their Vices upon God as if he had denyed them power and opportunitys to have been better They will lay their faults upon themselves but with some privat reserves and Suggestions that those faults are very pardonable ones as being neither much offensive to God nor plainly repugnant to the state of good men So the Common way has been for men to frame such a model of Religion to themselves as might sute with a vitious life and help to quiet the complaints of an uneasy conscience Thus when Persons are debauch'd in their morals they are apt presently to turn Hereticks in their Faith It having been observed that nothing is more usual than for men to shelter the Monstrous impiety of their lives under some or as notoriously impious Opinion and to depart as far in their belief from the true Doctrins of Christ as they had before Strayed in their practice from his Holy precepts Thus some men have justified a wicked life by denying the differences between Good and Evil and others have excused it by pretending all their actions are under a fatal decree and come necessarily to pass Some again make the performance of Obedience to Gods Laws very needless by disowning his providence and care of the World Others would exempt themselves from the ties of godliness and virtue by fansying their Religion to consist only in true believing and others place it all in outward shew and Ceremony Some again hope they may enjoy both the brutish pleasures of this life and the pure ones of the next and carry their sins a long with them to Heaven by so exalting and extending Gods mercy unto obstinately Impenitent Sinners as to deny both his Justice and Truth and others cut the sinews of Religion by calling in question the Resurrection of the Dead and the rewards of the Life to come So Simon Magus that infamous Magician and Founder of all the Heresys which followed him that he might serve his vain Glory and Ambition did covet the gifts of the Holy Ghost and hoped to purchase them by Money he also boasted that he himself was God and appeared in Samaria as the Father among the Jews as the Son and to the Gentiles as the holy Spirit he also deny'd that Man had any liberty of will or that there was any necssity of good Works So the Nicolaitans for a cover to their abominable Lusts taught there ought to be Community of Wives and that to commit Fornication and to eat meats offer'd to Idols were things indifferent Thus Menander and Marcion disowned Gods being the maker of the World ascribing that work of Omnipotency to Angels Thus also Himenaeus and Philetus denied the Resurrection Some of these ungodly Men lived in the days of the Apostles of whom St. Jude saies they turned the grace of God into lasciviousness denying the only Lord God and our Lord Jesus Christ Now what in the Primitive Church was the disease only of some few Men seems in our unhappy age to have been a plague which has generally infected and spread its malignity over the Face of the Christian World Great numbers in these times as they have given themselves up to the filthiest of the vices among the Ancient Hereticks so have they espoused the worst of their Opinions to defend them If Cerinthus and Ebion of all the Books of the New Testament would only receive the Gospel of St. Mathew because it was writ in
Hebrew we have them who do affirm that the whole Bible derives all its Authority from the Civil Magistrate and that it is the legislative power of the Common w 〈…〉 which giveth it the force of a Law If Carpocrates declared that there was nothing simply and absolutely good or evil in its self but only according to the opinion of Men it is well known who has publisht the very same Doctrine If Basilides and Valentinus contended for the lawfulness of the promiscuous use of Women and many wives there is a Pretender to Reformation among us who that he may give some Reputation to Bastardy and free it from that Illegitimation which constantly the Christian Church has fixt upon it has in Print affirm'd that carnal knowledg between Persons not prohibited by the moral Law tho without Contract Licence Wittnesses or Minister is a Marriage Lawful Holy and Indissoluble according to the Law of God To advance which Assertion he has arraigned not only the Laws of our own Nation but of the whole Christian and I may say Pagan World too And what well becomes the Publishers of false and dangerous Opinions he has managed his bad cause with great confidence of the Truth of it and with as much contempt of all that are of another mind there being scarce a profession of men among us whom he has not treated with disrespect and ill language nay he will not allow that the present Ministers of the Gospel can produce any better evidence of their Divine Commission than those who claim under Mahomet and chargeth it as a Wickedness upon the Translators of the Bible that in their false Translation only the seventh Comandment does forbid Adultry and the tenth the Coveting our Neighbours Wife Now let the People see what a kind of Reformation they are to expect in Church and State if ever the Management of it fall into such mens hands who are daily complaning of the great want of it and quarreling with every thing in the present Establishment If some hundred years ago there appeared in the World Evangelium Aeternum a Blasphemous Book with a specious Title which pretended to be a far more perfect Gospel than that of our Saviours and that in less than fifty years it would cause it to be laid aside we have also a Gospel collected out of the Works of a late Cardinal the Doctrins whereof are as much according to the flesh and the lusts thereof as those of our Lords are according to Godliness If there were false Apostles who would have tied the burden of Jewish Ceremonies about the necks of the first Christians are there not also at this day a considerable party of Men who by superadding a multitude of positive unuseful and Arbitrary Constitutions to Christianity have renderd it almost insupportable The Humility and the Devotion the Patience and the Contentment the Charity and the Contempt of the World and the Forgiveness of Enemies and Injuries which made the Primitive Christians so famous among their very Persecutors being stifled and even buried under so much of pompous Dress and superfluous Garnishment If Simon would have bought the Powers of the Holy Ghost are there not now Men who sell Pardons of Sin insomuch that if a Man have mony enough to answer for his Sins and do not transgress beyond the Proportion of his Estate the precise rate is known at which he can certainly redeem his Iniquities Nay as if these times were the sink in which the very dregs of all Heresies had setled it has in our days been Publisht under the colour of Philosophy that the substance of all things whatsoever is the same in which Assertion God and his Creatures are confounded and that no Substance can produce another the consequence of which Proposition is that every Substance in the World is self existent and Independent Blasphemies surely never before broached among Christians and which are as false and absurd in all Philosophy as they are repugnant to true Religion and as much to be abhor'd for their impiety as they are easy to be confuted for their inconsistency with right reason But now since there are so many Dangerous Rocks upon which the Men of this Age are apt to Split themselves the great Question will be by what compass we are to steer to which we cannot give a better answer than by proposing and recommending to serious consideration this passage of St. Paul in our Text which will prove an effectual Rule whereby to discern useful Christian Doctrines from false and hurtful ones viz. they must be according to Godliness and that which gave occasion to St. Paul to lay down this Rule was the several Errors contrary to the Doctrine of Christ which had stolen into the Church in his days all which he reproveth upon this account that they were not according to Godliness A list of some of these we have in this Epistle he giveth a Caution to Timothy not to give heed to fables and endless Genealogies which migh minister Questions for witty Men to dispute upon but not edify in the Faith nor promote Charity which was the end of the Commandment He reflects upon some such Men as having made a shiprack of the Faith He assureth him the holy Spirit had expresly declared that in the latter times some should depart from the Faith giving heed to seducing Spirits and Doctrines of Devils i.e. by the seducement of the Devil they would again revive the Pagan Religion of the worshiping of Daemons Again St. Paul reprehends and confutes another pernicious Doctrine which had found a welcome entertainment among Servants converted to the Faith who by the craft of false Teachers were easily led into a persuasion that the Christian Religion had dissolved the Bonds they before stood in to their Masters For if their Masters were Infidels then Christian liberty was insisted upon Christ having made them free from their yoke but if they were believers than Christian brotherhood was claimed for Christians are all brethern in Christ and in Consideration of this Spiritual Relation they presumed themselves to be on the same level with their Masters But to the first St. Paul replies that notwithstanding their Masters were yet unconverted they were to render them all due honour and service least either by their haughty carriage or disobedience the Name of God and the Doctrin of Christ should be Blasphemed and to the others who had believing Masters his answer was that they should not despise them because they are brethern but rather do them service because they are Faithful and beloved partakers of the Benefit not only because it was one Branch of Christian Duty for Servants to be obedient