Selected quad for the lemma: scripture_n

Word A	Word B	Word C	Word D	Occurrence	Frequency Band	MI	MI Band	Prominent
scripture_n	believe_v	faith_n	revelation_n	3,045	5	9.5466	5	false

Text snippets containing the quad

ID	Title	Author	Corrected Date of Publication (TCP Date of Publication)	STC	Words	Pages
A77424	A Breife description or character of the religion and manners of the phanatiques in generall. Scil. [brace] Anabaptists, Independents, Brovvnists, Enthusiasts, Levellers, Quakers, Seekers, Fift-Monarchy-Men, & Dippers. Shewing and refuting theur absurdities by due application, reflecting much also on Sir Iohn Præcisian and other novelists. Non seria semper.		1660 (1660)	Wing B4573; Thomason E1765_1; ESTC R209656	17,102	54

not suffering from the world but triumphing in the world They are in fancy as the Argonautae bringers of the golden Fleece the Riches of Righteousness of Christ the Treasures of Heaven the true Gold of Ophir pretending that God is their Father that they are Saints and spiritual inspired Prophets sent of God to call the world to repentance to reign with Christ c. in such conceited confidencies proud hypocrisies soft fallacies rotten sensualities libidinous excrescencies like Estrike birds set forth their soft and gay feathers having but little bodies but less brains by wandring from their nests their Shops and Looms Thimbles and Bodkins the stations wherein most of them have been bred up and from which they have no sufficient rule from God or man to move them having at the best but very moderate gifts not tried or approved by any wise men but onely blown up by the pittifull applauses of some silly men and women with levity gapings swellings hollowness crookedness and weakness These curious Speculatists recite may be by rote some raw and fejume Notions and disorderly Meditations which weak men call prophecying with much error froth and vanity incident to these self-ostentations of Gifts which have more of the tongue than heart or head and oft times resemble more the Player than the Preacher Narcissus-like they are so deluded with the flattering echo's of their silly admirers and so taken with their own fashion in such false glasses that they are like to doat till they die and starve themselves as to all real sufficiencies by the fond imaginations of how great they have and their ignorance of how much indeed they want Much of these mens temper and opinion and after the same riotous fashion was that ignorant and abominable rabble of the Circumcelliones a subsection of the Donatists who were wont to ramble idly up and down like squibs with fire and force till after great ostentations of piety and devotion and zeal for martyrdome calling themselves duces Sanctorum Captains of the Saints and Contenders for the Faith they fell at length to pilfering then to plundering and wasting whole Countreys opposing in an hostile manner the Vicegerents of the Emperour Honorius at length were by him destroyed Religion Perjury innocent bloodshed and Sacriledge are drawn on by them like streight and pinching shooes at first with the shooing-horn of Religion and Reformation with antipathies against Idolatry and abhorrencies of Superstition and the better to set off their skill they make as Herod most artificial Speeches mixed with preaching and praying and sprinkling of Scripture and Gods Cause or as Mountebanks make large haranges specious and popular Orations as gilded bitter pills to give the better Gusto In this wise these Hucksters and Cheats of Religion as the Magicians of Egypt sometimes so enchant and delude poor credulous souls that they believe all that comes from them to be miraculous abusing or changing glow-worms for Stars counterfeit with cropt opinions and round-headed Tenents with full weight of Christian Doctrine still cogging with religious dice and cheating with plausible Fallacies seemingly brought out of Scripture until poor Believers like the bewitched Galatians Gal. 3. have lost all or most of their true faith and belief Yea some of these Impostors do not leave poor Christians whom they have cozened with fair shews of the Spirits revelations and new Gospels so much true faith as to believe the Articles of Christian Doctrine And for the better colour some of them pretend to set up as Iohn of Leyden did the Kingdom of righteousness the Throne and Scepter of King Iesus Yet this is but a decoy to intrap the vulgar for who will not seem willing to submit to Christs Kingdom But we are better taught than to expect his Kingdom to be of this world Joh. 18.16 But afterwards when their phanatick power comes to be Paramount you will finde no such lenities and gentle salves then in popular Proposals and levelling Principles with Goliabs of uncircumcised enormities they are much for a new Paracelsian practice unexperienced Applications and Chymical Extractions then with the Sword of blood they can be merry in peoples miseries with Populus vult decipi decipiatur like Muncer and Knipperdoling Hacket and Arthington These presumptious Phaetons never think they enlighten the Church enough unless they set Kingdoms and States on fire Accoring to the method of those rare cures they sometimes wrought in Germany about the year 1530. by the slaughter of an hundred thousand people in the Anabaptist and phanatique ways of mutiny and rebellion To be short in the first broachings and after drawings forth of their new Doctrine projects and inventions the Authors of them more look upon men than God how it may suit with secular aimes and interests than the practice of Antiquity Like the Hantons of the Swisse become willing upon the least apprehension of advantage to plant the same Engines and weapons against the wrong side as the right And their late minted Doctrinals verminly bred out of the putrefactions of mens brains and the corruptions of the times serve in some sort to scratch itching ears to some tune of liberty pleasures profit or preferment while they clamour like Demetrius and his Complices in his pannick fears for his silver and Diana where he considered more his gain than his Goddess Some though fiery yet are orderly and patient in Government though they excell in gifts yet are not swelled with tumours but these are as unsavoury salt that is good for nothing unless it be new boiled in an Independent or levelling Cauldron over a Socinian furnace with a popular fire they are proud forward and presumptuous like the Giant who presumed of his vast limbs and extraordinary number of his fingers and toes sc 24. have such extraordinary excrescencies which exceed mens noses or blind their eyes sometimes swelling bigger than their heads Being drunk with their own fancies sometimes reel and stumble upon notions metaphysical which vainly puffe them up while they are still Wells without Water deep but dark and dry in their profound follies and profane nicities Or clouds without moist exhalations carried with the tempests of passion and high presumptions above the plain and practical way of true Christians and indeed above the proportion and sphere of their Gifts and Parts A little goes a great way with these illiterates in their supposed inspirations and where they cannot go far on they go round in circling tautologies snarled repetitions intricate confusions which are still the same skains of thread which other men have handsomely spun and wound up in better method and order which these men have neither skill nor patience to unfold but pull out here a thread and there an end which they break off abrubtly to the confounding of all method order and proportion Divine or Moral In their new Models of Independent levelling quaking and anabaptistick scabious Congregations they fold up the curtains of the true Church so short

and narrow to such small figures and obsure Conventicles and Paucities that they will scarce allow the whole company of true Christians in the world to be so great as would fill one Iewish Synagogue being as Pygmalion with his Image enamoured with their corpusculoes the little Flock and new Bodies of their Churches or rather meeting-places shutting themselves up into some blind corners and confining Christian Religion to obscure Cells and silly Assemblies where in stead of the Suns faire light of true Reason good Learning and sound Religion men should like Owls and Bats and Moles onely howl chatter and foratch one another in the dark They are the kind of Animals which curse the day cannot abide the light because their eyes are weak their works are dark and both minds and manners are depraved Having presented them to you in gross I will now give you them in their Anatomy They are a fond and fraudulent pusillanimous and frothy Generation of vaperers Plagiaries who infect the common air of Christian Charity Order and Peace bring forth out of the rude mould of their own invention nothing but disorder they are the left Band of Babels Builders fit Instruments to divide confound and destroy but never to plant and cultivate whose lips never yet dropped like Hermon so much as a dew of sweet and wholsome knowledge on any place They are a riotous promiscuous and incomposed rabble a swarm of ignorant Quacks preaching Mountebanks of the rude and vulgar of no value Mahometan Juglers religious Monopolizers pious Impostors devout Devils angelized Satans sanctified Demons Bells and Dragons of phanatique Divinity as the cheating Pontifs of the heathen gods and Oracles sit still in their lazie and unlearned ignorance expecting miraculous illuminations and assistancies like seiled Pigeons the less they see the higher they soar in airy light and high-flying fancies as moon-ey'd horses whose light follows the flux of reflux of the mad Planet blaunch and start more by day than night There are saith Plato in Timaeo two diseases of the soul Madness and Ignorance madness is from the abounding with pride and passion ignorance from the want of knowledge and instruction those men are infected with both distempers For they are a People given over to dementation and astonishment blindness and madness to seek after and trust in lying vanities and desperate hypocrisies to rest in the flattery of vulgar successes who think every one that prospers a Saint or good Angel and every one that is unfortunate a Devil or great Offender as the Barbarians did S. Paul when the Viper seized upon his hand and he shook it off unhurt They judge of Spiritual Gifts by bare and barren forms by soft insinuations and expressions by melancholy sowreness pharisaical frowns bold assertions audacious adventures and successefull insolencies Fly to their enchantments by using much Scripture expression by following popular sermonings hasty assurances uncharitable despisings by affecting an odde kinde of canting way of writing and speaking Pretending to Sanctity thorow Reformation and advancing the Kingdom of Jesus Christ to Raptures Enthusiasmes holy Convulsions and Revelations and such like quaking and quacking tricks conjuring up strange hopes fears and jealousies like so many Ghosts and Goblins to scare and amaze the common people Like Ambulatory Arabs and wandring Scythians they must every week or month change their quarters to vend their transcendent and damnable Doctrines transferring diseases like the running gout from one part to another more dangerous than the plague or epidemical malady breathing out nothing but ashes and cinders like Visuvius and Aetna whose eruptions are vastutions to all near them They are fit to be followers of Goths and Vandals or listed with Iack Cade or Watt Tyler or Subjects to Iohn Bowld a Tayler of Leyden who assumed the Title of Rex justitiae hujus mundi King of Justice of this world Or to Iohn Williams the last King of Sion and of this mad tribe who had at once twenty wives and wore by his side the great Gideons Sword sent him from Heaven as he gave out who exhorted his Subjects and Brethren the Phanatique Anabaptists to look upon all other Nations and Religions as the Israelites did upon the Cananeans and others of the Land of Promise but at length he was burnt at Clave Anno 1580. You may finde these modern Knipperdolings amongst the Hierarchy of handycraftsmen in the Kingdome of the fifth Monarchy men at the meeting-places of Iames Naylor the late Separatist amongst the Rumps mourners or the scattered separate bodies of the late decimo sexto edition or in the Court of Justice they lately erected in Ireland from whence they have driven the Gentry and Nobility and extirpated the Natives They were a Phanatique livery composed of self-confidence intolerable boastings of sequaciousness of feminine softnesse of lying Prophecies of violent Zealotries of swelling excrescencies and loud clamours and empty noises of reformation They have a head composed of the threads of Faction and wear a long sword of destruction you may easily know them by the gogle of their eye by their pale and wan looks by the queint device of their groaning devotion by the counterfeit current of their sanctified tears by their godly way and zeal which lately made them aspire to the Pulpit and renounce the awle and the anvill and set up a new Exchange for Religion at the charges of the honest party To conclude my Anatomy I will epitomise them in a line or two more They are mothy and moungril Predicants Centaures in the Church half Clericks and half Laicks the by-blows of the Clergie gifted hypocrites severe Momasses a whineing people tribolary Christians new dwindling Divines the prophetical Pigmies of this age unordained unblest untried unclean spirits whose calling commission and tenure depends on popularity flattery and beggery their excellency consists in tautologising in praying ex tempore that is out of all time without order or method being eminent in nothing above the Plebeian pitch and vulgar proportion They spin out their Sermons at their wheels or weave them up at their looms or dig them out with their spades weigh or measure them in their shops or stitch and cobble them with their Thimble and Lasts or thrash them out with their Flayles and afterward preach them in some Barn to their dusty disciples who the better to set off the oddness of their silly Teachers fancy themselves into some imaginary persecution as if they were thus driven into dens and caves and woods Their holy and learned Academies where they first conned this chymical new Divinity and are since come to so great proficiency were Munsters Revelations Geneva's Calvinism Amsterdams Toleration and New-Englands Precisenesse Their Plantation sprung first from the putrified part of Iohn Calvin who being branded with Heresie and Sodomy in his own Countrey of Picardy retired to Angolesme where he went by the name of Deparcan there he copied his Institutions stealing the greatest part out of the Works of Melancton and Hiperius Sarcerius or as Westphally the Lutheran saith he stole all from Oeclampadius Thence he went to Germany and came at length as in regression to Geneva Where this our headless yet fancifull Monster by Sir Iohn was begotten on an Elders Maid and afterwards impt upon the stocken of Schisme by Knox and Buchanan and brought up after the reformed fashion of the Scotch Kirk for propagation of the Gospel and better reformation creeping into this Nation and thus multiplied and increased by the phanatique lechery of the lascivious Rump-Parliament and Olivers Redcoats They are crafty enough to do evil but to do good they have no knowledge or honesty they have hands active enough but corrupt and base ends secular interests wrapped up under specious pretensions of piety Like Water-men while they look one way they row another They abuse Learning to abett Errors and Religion to colour hypocrisie and the name of the Spirit to indulge the flesh and Heaven to carry on earthly designs They mistake anger for zeal dreams for revelations memory for conscience Enthusiasms for Prophesies to wave flattery they fall into incivility and to avoid pride into baseness They are worthy of themselves and wiser mens pity If they have truth enough to save any man they have uncharitableness enough to damne any Angels These Lines perfectly describing all or most of our Fantasticks in general I remit their particular opinions to more particular Remonstrances this very Relation being a sufficient Confutation FINIS