Selected quad for the lemma: religion_n

Word A	Word B	Word C	Word D	Occurrence	Frequency Band	MI	MI Band	Prominent
religion_n	according_a	church_n	true_a	3,494	5	4.5949	4	false

Text snippets containing the quad

ID	Title	Author	Corrected Date of Publication (TCP Date of Publication)	STC	Words	Pages
A48122	A letter of religion to the Protestant-dissenters from the Church of England, of what denomination soever in the county of Kent wherein is reported the ground of their dissent, their worship, way of instruction, and behaviour towards laws and government : to which is added a perswasive to conformity, at least an acquiescence in the religion established / by a curate of the same county.	Curate of the same county.	1675 (1675)	Wing L1574; ESTC R11508	15,343	27

How many soever they be you procure to your selves by this trifling and how bad soever they are in themselves yet they are not so distress'd as to want a piece of Scripture to help them when by discourse they are reduced to that modesty as to be asham'd of a naked and profane Curiosity for then as you have taught them their Curiosity is Scriptural and holy and the Text is 1 Thes 5. 21. Prove all things c. As if a man was thereby obliged to peep into every corner and forsaking his own station to hunt after new matters to try his skill about and not to stay till they are offered to him as matters concerning and weighty for every matter offered to us is not worth searching into and by those too that we have some reason to think are affected with care and Conscience for the good of our Souls 2. Discontent is another thing that hath added to the number of Dissenters which I might call without taking extraordinary licence to my self spite and peevishness For some in whose thoughts it never entred to alter their Principles or so much as to question the usages of the Church of England have yet made too open shew of deserting the Church by a bold frequenting your Meetings when the only reason of so doing was some occasional heat they have lately had with their lawful Ministers For if a Minister either prest by a Conscience of his duty or by the necessity of his condition do venture to take a measuring-cast of the Tythes due to him from his Neighbours Farm and would thereby adjust some mistakes and ill customs to do himself justice if there be no Arts left for the Owner to continue the fraud he shall be sure to find this woful revenge ready for him viz. That his angry Neighbour will hear him no more And to carry on this hasty and unwarrantable resolution he for a while perhaps keeps at home afterwards hovers about some neighbour Parishes and at last settles upon a Conventicle where whatever his Motives were for so doing he is sure to be welcome And if you had leisure or did dare to ask such a one his reasons of departure from us and joyning with you which were but fair in such a change you would find the account very shameful For it is not his love and liking of you but his despite and revenge to his Minister and he commends your Exercises on no other reason but to disgrace his Sermons I know some of you have ways not only to salve the man's Conscience but even to sanctifie the very occasion of leaving us but the great Topick from whence your Methods are derived is Interest not Integrity 3. Designe hath helpt you much in this matter There being some who have such desires and Projects in their Heads distinct enough from Religion which can never be accomplished but by your Success and Prosperity You well remember I suppose when his Majesty was restor'd to the Throne of his Ancestors there were many with him returned to their own Estates that had long been under the hands and embezelments of men that knew how to make a good Market of an unnatural War These men enjoy'd what they had thus basely gotten long enough to make them in love with what they possessed and such love they have thereto still that they will not be out of the Designe for another embrace For there are many pleasant Meadows large Woods and goodly Houses which yet hang in their eyes though they do not stick in their fingers but these can never be compassed again by them without making a new Bead-roll of Delinquents repairing to Haberdashers-Hall and extirpating Episcopacie that is by bringing all things again into War and confusion Or if it be done peaceably yet cannot be done without laying Bishops aside and distributing their Lands Now how can any labouring with this designe of a re-investiture to such Lands more properly bestow himself and his ways than in a diligent attendence on your Conventicles wherein Bishops have been so often declar'd your utter Enemies and the rooting them out both your aims and prayers There is little in such Designers Consciences to byass them more to you than to Rome but dreading that Church is not their friend in this particular they continue with others but on worse Principles to cry out against her It may perhaps be Objected that all of you are not for Alienation of Church-Land but some are against it and are ready as some of your Brethren at first did to declare against it If this be true of which there is some suspicion you may please to make it known at your next meeting which will be well for us but I doubt not for your selves 4. Dependance hath given you some advantage which because it is various I will only instance in such common connexions as are every where observable to have a power to increase the bodies of any sort of men that shall think fit to separate themselves for a distinct Society The Dependances which I mean are those which have a strong relation to food and raiment such as the Shop-keeper hath on the good Customer and the Tenant on the hopeful Landlord which though they are not intrinsecally evil nor the arts of obliging one and the other to be condemned as universally dishonest yet if on such considerations men shall sort themselves to a Sect and distinguish out to themselves a meet Religion or Religious party they are wicked and unreasonable Neither will it help you to say that there are the same presumptions of such among us and though it were true as in this 't is probable what you say For whatever mens secret motives are in abiding with the Church of England they are besides under a known Law for obedience and conformity to it by which all men under the same Government are equally obliged the Seller as well as the Buyer the Tenant as well as the Landlord which is a motive more extrinsecally honest than the other can pretend unto But to see men take a fair place in your meetings not to see and hear best but to be seen and noted best to remove from thence timely to the door and there to abide the train of the Company in their departure and all this time to distribute glances smiles and cringes according to the hopefulness of the person going out and lastly to acknowledge to their private Friends that their Trades and livelihoods engage them so to do whatever profit it brings to them can be no great comfort to you unless you are wonderfully pleased with gang and multitude I will acknowledge that 't is not to be believed that you can easily discriminate those from others or if you could that you would exclude them but yet I know this to be a truth and is to be told only those of you who glory in your number and sincerity My intent is to speak to such that understand and own the

best appearing Grounds of Dissent and Separation and that I might so do I thought it best first to set aside those persons that have none 5. Obedience hath done you no hurt in your Plot of Separation though a little more Obedience in you or them that have on this score separated would have done the Church of England much good They that are drawn and held to you by this Argument are Children and Servants who certainly are the most defensible of all the Families that belong to these Tribes considering they do in some sense assert hereby what their Parents and Masters do deny to the King and the Church viz. Obedience There are many considerations of great efficacie to binde these persons to the very Sentiments as well as Commandments of their domestic Superiours 'T is sufficient if there were only in the case a quiet life Trade and Portion to be forfeited by their reluctancie and this there is too often to say nothing of those fearful curses some are afraid to incur being pronounced on them by their dying friends on condition of returning to the obedience to the English Antichristian and Idolatrous Church I think the Servants are under the hardest terms who for the most part have had other kind of Education and come to their Masters with Catechisms Principles and Practises according to the Church of England and therefore must unlearn somethings and disuse more in the practice of their Religion before they can comply with yours You know a little skill in Case-Divinity will help these young people to some ease and the very Doctrine you often needlesly press of an indispensable and prime subjection to God will do them real good and you know the subjection we owe to the Church and the King for Gods-sake supercedes the obedience we owe to Parents and Masters if they once draw up to a competition And ' truly 't is pity but these should be relieved not only in respect of the Church and the good of their Souls but also of their bodies especially when they are galli'd often a whole day to hunger to strange Prayers and strange Propositions whereof many of your underling Conventicles are very full and is not unknown to your Chief Rabbies and Masters Let me then dismiss these as not bringing much credit to any Society and least of all to yours whose pretended formality and essence is to outgo others in purity of heart and life The ground of your Dissent is next to be lookt into which after the most diligent search that I could make seems finally resolved into this Principle viz. That nothing may be lawfully done or used in the Church of Christ without Command or Example for it in Scripture For I suppose your chief dislike of our Church is because in its usages there are somethings inscriptural and so I may boldly say will be while the world stands But this is such a Principle that if you resolve to stand by it and are content to abide by the just Consequences of the same it will as well serve you against any Church as ours not only that of Rome but Geneva not only against the late magnified Platform of Scotland but New England also But to be short either you approve of this Principle or you do not if you do why do you not observe it and govern your selves within your selves by it If you do not why would you obtrude it on the Church of England and desert her too for want of an impossible Conformity to it For examine the next most Evangelical Assembling and tell me whether there be not some Circumstances in the time place gesture manner of Preaching and Praying for which the best Textuary of you all can bring forth no plain positive and particular Commands and Examples from the Holy Scripture And these Circumstances of yours ye are over-rul'd in and suffer your selves to be obedient to on a Vassalage to some private man and it may be he no great Apostle yet continuing to blame those that in as innocent and much more decent Ceremonies and Circumstances are observant of Authority and were derived from those men that were not ashamed to live nor afraid to die for the Gospel Moreover this being the great Postulatum of the Science of Non-conformity and Novel Puritanism may I be so bold as to ask you whence you had it Not from the Scriptures I am sure neither in word nor sense not from Examples of Jewish or Christian Church in the Scripture registred for they both used Ceremonies and Circumstances in Worship again took them up and laid them down without the interposition of a particular Divine Command and yet are guiltless All that I can find of Scriptures that you are wont to alledge for this Opinion are some conceptions of your own on those Texts that mention God's Holiness and Jealousie That thou shalt not add nor diminish c. which have been an hundred times answered to you and had you been ingenuous the Answers had long before removed the dotage You will not say sure that this is a Principle enforced on you by Spiritual Wisdom and prudential debates in the understanding of every man that is possessed with a due fear of God for this were to make your selves the only true Christians or to be found if you venture to talk of prudence in the same Oven wherein you seek to finde or to put your Adversaries But the Church of England must be cautious in contending against this Principle for scarce any of her Members do but they are readily accused for disparaging the fulness of Scripture for speaking un-Protestantlike of the perfection of that Sacred Volume and lastly that Christ as Moses was not faithful in his house Which Accusations were they true would signifie but they are not true inasmuch as the Members of the Church of England have always willingly asserted and learnedly justified the perfection of Holy Scriptures as having in them a sufficient and full Revelation of supernatural Truths and the Substantials of God's Worship and the advancing moral and civil Duties to a more sublime and spiritual height by directing them to a more noble end and exacting performance of them in a holy manner Bishop Sanderson Pref. to 20 Serm. But then 't is added by that renowned Bishop that this the Protestants do assert without any purpose thereby to exclude belief of what is otherwise reasonable or the practise of what is prudential Idem ibid But the truth is that Bishop might say what he pleased my meaning is that his Exercitations on the Cause of the Church of England as it stands in Controversie with you are above your refuting Else though Mr. Hookes's be a longsome Book why are not the Right Reverend Sanderson's few Sermons and two Prefaces taken into consideration For doth he not enervate your Principle and establish our Ceremonies with that freeness as if he craved favour from no man's Reason or Learning Therefore let it be thought no