Selected quad for the lemma: scripture_n

Word A	Word B	Word C	Word D	Occurrence	Frequency Band	MI	MI Band	Prominent
scripture_n	church_n	ground_n	pillar_n	2,625	5	10.3132	5	false

Text snippets containing the quad

ID	Title	Author	Corrected Date of Publication (TCP Date of Publication)	STC	Words	Pages
A66403	A manual, or, Three small and plain treatises viz. 1. Of prayer, or active, 2. Of principles, or positive, 3. Resolutions, or oppositive [brace] divinity / translated and collected out of the ancient writers, for the private use of a most noble lady, to preserve her from the danger of popery, by the Most Reverend Father in God, John, Lord Arch-Bishop of York.	Williams, John, 1582-1650.	1672 (1672)	Wing W2711; ESTC R38653	30,581	162

to be the ground of your Faith and reason of your believing so as you do therefore believe all the points of your salvation to be true because the Church doth teach and instruct you in the same Or have you any other rule and ground of your faith Prot. The Authority and good conceipt we have of Gods Church prepareth us to believe the points of our Salvation and serveth as an introduction to bring us to the discerning and perfect apprehension of these Mysteries of our faith but the Scripture only is the ground and reason of our believing For as the Samaritans were induced and drawn on to believe in Christ by that talk of the woman but having heard Christ himself profess plainly they believe no longer for her saying but because they heard him speak himself So do we begin to believe moved thus to do by the good conceipt we have of the Church but rest not in it as the ground of our believing but only in the infallible assurance of God's truth in the Book of Scriptures Pap. Then God help you if that be your last resolution For our Church cannot erre but your Scriptures without the help of the Church to tell you so much can never be ascertained unto you to be the word of God and therefore what assuredness of belief can you propose your selves upon so unsetled a foundation Protest The Catholick Church indeed spread over the world cannot erre damnably though the Church of Rome and all other particular Churches may as your own Writers confess But the Scriptures we know to be the word of God not because the Church or Church-men do tell us so much but by the Authority of God himself whom we do most certainly discern to speak in his word when it is preached unto us For if we bring pure eyes and perfect senses the Majesty of God forthwith presenteth it self unto us in the Holy Scriptures and beating down all thoughts of contradicting or doubting things so Heavenly forceth our hearts to yield assent and obedience unto the same And therefore if you doubt whether that which you read in your Bible be the Word of God or find any reluctancy in your understanding to the Doctrin of the same it is in vain to flie unto either Church or Church-men to be perswaded in this point but down upon your knees and pray fervently unto God for Faith and the illumination of the Holy Ghost which can only assure you of the truth of the Scriptures For after we are enlightned by the Spirit we do no longer trust either our own judgement or the judgement of other men or of the Church that the Scriptures are of God but above all certainly of humane judgement we most certainly resolve as if in them we saw the Majesty and Glory of God that by the ministery of men they came unto us from Gods own most sacred mouth Pap. But what certain ground of faith can you place on the Scriptures seeing by the several interpretations of men and women they are turned and wrested like a nose of wax to every private design and purpose Do not you observe how the Catholicks Protestants and especially the Brownists and Anabaptists do fit all their turns out of the Holy Scriptures on which of these senses and imaginations is your faith rooted or peradventure have you some odd capritchious kind of interpretation of your own apprehension to direct you in these businesses Prot. We Lay-folks are licensed in the Church of England to read but not to interpret Scriptures excepting only those passages which contain the necessary points of our Salvation the which passages are so plain and easie every where that any man or woman of the meanest capacity especially if he or she be instructed in their Catechism or grounds of Religion may perfectly conceive and understand them But for the harder and more difficult places we leave them to be interpreted by our Church-men in their Sermons and daily Ministery For the ordering of which interpretations there are as I have been told ten several helps the which if they be followed will be sure and unfallible guides to boult out the true meaning of each place of Scripture 1. An illumination of the understanding by the Holy Ghost 2. A mind free from other thoughts and desirous of the truth 3. Knowledge of the Scriptures Creeds Catechismes Principles and other Axiomes of Divinity 4. A consideration how our meaning suits with other points of Christianity 5. The weighing of circumstances antecedents and consequents 6. Knowledge of Histories Arts and Sciences 7. Continual Reading Meditating and Praying 8. Joint and unjarring expositions of the Fathers 9. Consenting decrees of Synods and Councils 10. Knowledge in the tongues Because therefore Lay-men and women Papists Brownists and Anabaptists are wanting in all or some of these helps they bring forth many times such lame and prodigious interpretations Pap. If we make the Scripture and not the Church the rule of our Faith how shall we believe the Creed the Trinity the Sacraments the unity of Essence the Three Persons in the Deity c. words never read in the Bible and yet necessarily to be apprehended of us upon pain of damnation Prot. I say that all these things are set down in Scriptures either in so many syllables or at leastwise by necessary inferences and deductions And we do not therefore believe them because they are only taught by the Church but because they are rooted and grounded in the Holy Scriptures the only stay and pillar of our affiance To sum up therefore all this Chapter 1. The Church doth prepare us but the Scripture only doth force us to believe 2. The whole Church cannot any part thereof may erre damnably 3. We are taught the Scriptures to be the Word of God by the Holy Ghost moving in our hearts and not by the Church sounding in our ears 4. Lay-men are to read not to interpret Scriptures 5. The miss of some rules causeth wrong expositions of Scriptures 6. All things necessary to be believed are either found in or collected and inferred from the Scriptures CHAP. III. Of Iustification Papist HOw then do you learn out of the Scriptures that you are to be justified and saved before God Prot. I am to be justified before God by an Act single in it self but double in our apprehension which is by Gods not imputing unto me my sins and the same Gods imputing unto me Christs righteousness and withall by his creating of faith in my heart by the Holy Ghost I mean an operative a lively a working Faith to assure my Soul that God for the Active and Passive obedience of Christ Jesus hath accomplished those two former Acts of not imputing my Sin and of imputing unto me Christs Righteousness Pa. A very easie no doubt and reasonable Religion which you have learned out of the Scriptures Here is no burthen left for your own back you cast all

righteously because it is the Will and Commandment of God 7. If you take more delight than you did in praying to God 8. If you thank God privately for these his good motions By these eight points you may soon know whether you have true faith or not Q. What is the infallible mark of true and justifying Faith A. The effectual applying of Christ and all his benefits to your own soul in particular And is then only effectual when it worketh by love an impartial obedience to the Commandments of Christ This application doth make a difference betwixt justifying Faith and all other kinds of Faith which cannot save us As Historical Faith which is a a bare assent Faith of Miracles which is a bare confidence added to assent Temporary Faith which is but a bare profession of the Faith for a time embraced only for the desire of Knowledge Credit Profit Q. What is the meaning of this assertion of S. Pauls that we are justified by faith alone A. It is meant of a practical and working Faith for even as when you give your alms to a Begger it is received by his hand alone and yet his hand is not alone when it receives these alms but accompanied with an arm sinews and arteries Even so when God offers unto you Christ and his righteousness you do receive him by Faith alone as it stands in opposition to the deeds of the Law and yet this Faith which receives Christ is never alone but still accompanied with Charity good Works In a word 1. To hold alms is proper to the hand and not the arm and to hold Christ proper to Faith not good works 2. You are justified by Faith alone and yet if your Faith be alone it cannot justifie you Q. What is the meaning of St. James when he saith That we are justified by works and not by Faith only A. His meaning is clearly that obedience to God's Commands as well as Faith in his Promises is absolutely required to our Justification Q. What is the least and weakest degree of Faith that I may build upon to keep me from despair in case I find not all those alterations in my self which you spake of before A. 1. If you desire Faith or pray unto God that you may desire Faith 2. If you can pray or desire of God to enable you to pray 3. If you find fault with your want of Faith and desire sometimes of God to help this want 4. If you dare not live indulgently in any one wilful or deadly sin but sincerely and earnestly strive against it Then you are for all your doubting the child of God RESOLVTIONS Oppositive DIVINITY OR The ordinary Objections of Papists against them of the Reformed Churches A DIALOGUE Papist Protestant CHAP. I. Of the Church Papist THe Church of England is no Church Protest That were very strange considering your own Writers conclude a Church to be there where there is found 1. Doctrine of salvation according to Scripture 2. the Vse of the Sacraments and 3. outward Discipline or Ecclesiastical Government although the Church-men should fall short of those Apostolical and primitive perfections which flourished in their predecessors Pap. Yea but it is not the Catholick Church mentioned in the Creed I believe in the Catholick Church Prot. 1. No more is the Church of Rome For there was no Church at all in Rome when the Creed was made by the Apostles at Hierusalem every Apostle making his Article when they were to depart to plant particular Churches in Rome England and other places 2. But our Church is a branch and portion of that Catholick Church as is also the Greek Armenian Aethiopian and Syrian as well if not rather than the Roman Church Pap. Peradventure these other Churches may be members of that Catholick Church as joyned and united with us but the union betwixt your Church and ours hath been cut asunder above an hundred years agone and therefore you are quite cut off from the Catholick Church Prot. This is more than you know or than I am bound to believe For This union of the members of the Catholick Church is inward not outward and therefore discerned only by God himself We never sundred our selves from the People or Church of Rome but from the Faction or Court of Rome not from the sincere doctrin of that Church but from the corruptions and innovations foisted into that Church And therefore although we be never so hated and excommunicated by your Priests yet we may be still united in internal society with your Church if you retain those principles of Religion sound and unaltered in the which our forefathers died and as we well ●ope were saved Pap. How are you then gone from us if you be still ●nited with us Prot. As the Prophets went from the corrupt Churches of the Jews and as Christ and his Apostles from the Scribes and Pharises clamando dissentiendo by crying out against your corruptions and dissenting from your innovations and this your own men allowed us to do Pap. I but some of your men say that we had no true Church of God in the West of many years before Luther's time Prot. Their meaning is to be limited in respect of the Predominant and prevailing Faction Your Church held I confess a saving profession of the Truthmof God but your Church-men mingled therewith many damnable impieties And these innovators only carrying the greatest shew of the Church are denied by our Writers to be the true Church of God Pap. This it is we Catholicks observe You dare not for all your malice deny the Church of Rome to have in some sort a saving profession of the truth of God but our Priests conclude directly that your Church hath no truth at all and that none can be saved in that Church Prot. As in every Kingdom the general estate is nothing so forward active quick and peremptory as the private Factions and yet is found at the last more wise and staied in final resolution So in the Catholick Church the Factions are ever more heady and precipitate in their denunciations of Heaven and Hell than the main body thereof Hence it cometh to pass that although the Greek Armenian Ethiopian and Syrian and for the most part the Protestant doth censure charitably of those Laicks who living rather in than of the Church of Rome hold the grounds of the doctrin of Salvation without any notorious mixtures with the late superstitions and impieties crept into the same yet doth the Papist Russeist Anabaptist Familist and Puritan hold no Church a Church of God but his own conventicle and all to be damn'd that are not of his society and combination Now what belief you shall afford these Boutefeux of the Catholick Church that dispose of Heaven and Hell as if it were their own Fee-simple I leave to your wisdom and common understanding Pap. Me thinks

Act of Reformation begining in sundry estates by reason partly of their divers shapes and forms of governments and partly of a great disadvantage thatone part of Christendom knew not what another did nor consulted with their fellows that so they might with unanimity proceed in the same did necessarily produce a seeming difference in the outward forms of particular Churches But loe the goodness and providence of Almighty God Although these Churches have several faces yet have they all but one heart there being no essential fundamental or material difference amongst any of us of the reformed Religion as you may easily find by reading the confessions of our several Churches And therefore for these odious Nick-names of Lutheran Calvinist Huguenot Zuinglian and the like be more sparing of them until you have reconcil'd your own Church-men as your Minorits and Dominicans about the conception of the Blessed Virgin your Jesuits and Dominicans about predestination and those dependant questions Your Sorbonists and Jesuits about the bounding and meeting out the Regal and Papal Authority and you shall find more doctrinal oppositions in your own than you can imagin ●n our Churches But keep you at home in your ●ative Country and look without envy or partia●ity upon this flourishing Church of England and ●ame me one Kingdom in all Europe that hath continued ●ery neer this hundred years in that constancy and ●mmutability of Doctrin or Discipline We are ordered with that consecration that Archbishop Cranmer was we renounce the Pope by that abjuration that Archbishop Cranmer did we subscribe to those Articles of Religion which Arch Bishop Cranmer in the Reformation pitch'd upon before we can be admitted to any Ecclesiastical function Some wild coults we have that start and boggle at the first if they see but their own shadows but by the discipline of the Church they are curb'd and fetch'd about again and taught in a little while to come on gently to this uniformity and subscription So that malice it self cannot challenge the Church of England this most glorious portion of that Catholick Church of any fractions or divisions in points of Doctrin Pap. Nay but I have often heard that you have no Bishops or Priests at all in your Church But that in the beginning of Q. Elizabeths reign Lay-men in the Parliament did appoint you Bishops who consecrated one another in a Tavern at the Nags-head in Cheapside and that your Priests were ordered only by these Parliamentary Prelates Prot. This tale of the Nags-head Harding Sanders and Stapleton have forged out of their own Nags-heads without any grounds or likelihood at all And yet as easily as they came by it put a Minister of our Church to an infinite deal of learned pains Who by His Majesties special commandment did search out the ancient Records of the Arch-bishop of Canterbury agnized since by many Priests and Jesuits in the Clink and other prisons and out of them hath composed a learned Book shewing the successive Consecrations of all the Bishops of England from that first convocation that banish'd the Pope about the year 1536 so as any Minister looking out that Bishop who gave him Orders may presently ascend in a right line of Bishops to those Prelates that lived in the Reign of Henry the eighth before the reformation And therefore if your own Priests be lawful you may not quarrel with ours differing only from yours in their renouncing of your impieties and superstitions Pap. This Record you speak of is somewhat to the purpose unless the heresie of those first Bishops did disable them for granting of lawful Consecrations and Orders Prot. Heretick indeed is a common word for us in the mouth of every Woman that is but a little Romaniz'd But is it not strange how he should be an Heretique that saies the Creed and the Lords Prayer in that literal and explicate sense and meaning that all the Fathers of the Church for the first 500 years understood the same Yet this is nothing to the point in hand For first if the Bishops in Queen Maries time were lawful notwithstanding their being consecrated by Cranmer and other tainted Bishops as you term them why may not the Bishops in Queen Elizabeth and King James his time expect the same priviledge And secondly your own Writers confess that Heresie which we suppose but not yield these Prelates fallen unto cannot rase out from that Character of a Bishop this inseparable power of consecrating and ordering Pap. Yet there remains an objection against your Church that it cannot possibly be a true Church because it is severed from the true visible head thereof the Pope of Rome Prot. This is a stale objection and soon answered The Church of Asia severed from Pope Victor in the year 200. Athanasius and his fellows from Faelix and Tiberius in the year 375. Cyprian and his Brethren yea and three National Councils from Pope Stephen in the year 250. the Bishops of Carthage Schismatized from all Popes of Rome for an hundred years together about the year 409. lastly the Greek Church cut off from the Roman for 300. years are sufficient testimonies there may be a true Church of God though severed and divided from the Pope of Rome And here in this Kingdom it was no Protestant but Popish Bishops that concluded in a National Synode our King might if he pleased create a Pope of his own in his own Kingdoms and Dominions and yet remain a member of the Catholick Church Pap. Well the best is you have been so tedious in your answers that I have I thank God forgotten all that you have said for your reformed Church Prot. But I will help that quickly by summing up of all into these twelve Positions 1. We have a Church as having Doctrine Salvation Discipline 2. It is a portion of the Catholick Church 3. It hath a Spiritual union of Doctrin with the untainted members of the Church of Rome 4. And yet hath severed her self from the Church of Rome by crying against and dissenting from her Superstitions 5. Which some of us hold no true Church of Gods in regard of the prevailing Faction 6. Although we judge charitably of the Salvation of some in that Church 7. Who notwithstanding are saved not as Papists but as Christians 8. And in one lump or Communion with this Church lived ours before the Reformation 9. Which then for want of a General did sever her self by a National Council from the same 10. Nor was it any by-respect of the Kings but God and the cry of that age that caused this reformation 11. Nor do our reformed Churches dissent amongst themselves in Doctrine but in outward policy and discipline only 12. Our Bishops and Priests come by a lineal Succession from Henry the eights time nor can a supposal of Heresie cut off this discent CHAP. II. Of the Scriptures Papist DOe you then hold this Church of yours

upon Christ's shoulders by the means of these two fine words Not imputing and imputing and a third swimming notion of your own conceipt which any man may have with a little imagining termed by you faith it would be known therefore where your Church hath found out these words of Art in the Holy Scriptures Prot. We do in all humility confess that the globe of our sins and the World of that righteousness which is to appear in the presence of Gods Justice is too massie for us to sustain that are but dust and ashes and subportable only by that Atlas Christ Jesus upon whose shoulders not our conceits but the goodness of God hath plac'd and pressed them But that these words imputing and not imputing are such Greek unto you I do impute it to your not reading of Scriptures and taking up your Religion by trust and credit from such Fripperers and Brokers as by lending your souls a false opinion of Merits and good works do dive into your purses and eat up your estates by way of interest Not to trouble you as I might with a thousand places ask David whether not imputing of sin and S. Paul whether the imputing of Christs righteousness doth not make us blessed and justified For the words use your own eyes and inspection And for the meaning I refer you to S. Augustin upon the one and St. Ambrose his commentary upon the other passage Now that you fondly imagin that Faith this Heavenly hand that reacheth at this double Act and applies it to our own Souls is such an apprehension as you may command when you please out of your own phantasie it is such a poor opinion that no Soul warmed with the least touch or feeling of religion but contemns with a most holy scorn and reproach I tell you and if you once have it your conscience will tell you no less this Faith is the richest jewel in Gods cabinet and can never be compas'd by any sole endeavour of ours until the Holy Ghost comes down from Heaven to set and enchase it in our hearts with his own fingers as it were And being once obtained it new molds and fashions the whole nature of man so as the understanding becomes more enlightned to know God the will to obey God the affections to love God and our brethren Nor can it be preserved to the comfort of our conscience without daily praying meditating doing good works reading the Scriptures hearing good Sermons and perusing of devout and Godly Treatises My belief therefore is this God not imputing sin and imputing righteousness is the worker The Merits of Christ the procurer Faith wrought by the Holy Ghost the instrument or applier good works or my inherent righteousness poor as it i is partly a concause or a necessary condition and partly an effect of my Justification For Faith it self does sanctifie in part and thereupon it is God that justifies Pap. I have heard some of your side rail against the very name of inherent righteousness which you seem now to acknowledge and embrace Do Protestants therefore challenge any other righteousness besides that of Christ's which is imputed Prot. They do acknowledge a Sanctification or inherent righteousness in the same sense as the ancient Fathers took the Word but not as Jesuits of late mistake it We have righteousness inherent or subsisting in us according to which we shall be judged but not according to which we shall be juctified though we cannot be justified in the whole unless in some measure such as God in Christ accepts we be sanctified first Which yet we cannot be of our selves but by Gods free Grace We cannot therefore plead Merits as you of Rome are wont to do at the Throne of God For Faith it self cannot justifie although without it we cannot be justified That indeed is a Condition but God in Christ is the sole Author of our Justification because by him and by him alone our sins are not imputed to us You make your righteousness to go before as the cause we ours to come after as the effect of justification Pap. But have you any use of your Free-will in either righteousness I mean that imputed or this inherent Or are you as some relate your opinions meerly suffering and passive like so many stocks and stones casting not so much as a sigh grone or short wish towards this great work of your conversion Prot. In our first conversion to be righteous we are not like so many Niobes or images of marble which move not at all but as they are in the whole lump carted and transported Our understandings not affording themselves the least glymps of knowledge nor our wills the least shew of inclination unto this Act but being quickened enlivened by the engines of Grace and motions of the Holy Ghost in our souls and consciences our understandings wills and affections do cooperate and run along with the Grace of God in all our works of piety and devotion The points therefore of this Chapter are these 1. Justification consists in Gods not imputing of Sin and in his imputing of Christs righteousness unto us 2. It is not our conceipt but the justice and mercy of God which layes this load on our Saviour Christ 3. Whosoever is acquainted with the Scripture cannot be unacquainted with imputed righteousness 4. Imputed righteousness is soon appprehended but infused Faith must be first obtained 5. We have an inherent righteousness in part which is the Condition of our Justification 6. Grace alone works our justification grace and we together but we in the second place our Sanctification CHAP. IV. Of Saints Souls of the Dead and those dependant Questions Pap. WE are scandalized likewise at your Church because you give no more reverence to the Saints than you do neither praying unto them nor adoring their images nor giving them any set imployment above in Heaven or the least care of us here on earth Which smells very much of the Heresies of the Cainans and Eunomians condemned so many years agone in the Christian Church Prot. What employment the Saints have in Heaven besides the contemplation of God face to face we know not nor do we deny their praying for us Upon earth they receive in our Church all that honour bespoken for them in the primitive Church We keep duely the memorials of the Blessed Virgin and the twelve Apostles and a yearly panegyrical commemoration of all the Martyrs and Saint of God respecting them as our fellowes and friends though not as our Tutelar gods and young little Saviours We admire their lives and as we do not furiously deface so do we not adore their Images Because S. Augustin would fain know where that Christian may be found that prayeth or adoreth beholding an Image We rear them no Temples as to Gods but trophees only of praise as to deserving men S. Paul himself did all this and he did no more