false Prophecies as Revelations of the Paraclete They were sometimes circumcised with the Jews sometimes they sacrificed with the Heathens consecrated the soulest Pollutions into Mysteries and betrayed true Christians up to all manner of Persecutions This and a much more dreadful account we have of Heresies from the Fathers and Ecclesiastical Histories From whom let us ascend to the Apostles and see what they say of them St. Jude calls the Hereticks of his time ungodly men that turn'd the grace of God into wantonness denying the only God and our Lord Jesus Christ filthy dreamers defilers of the flesh despisers of Dominion blasphemers of Dignities clouds without water carried about of winds withering fruitless trees raging waves of the Sea foaming out their own shame mockers separatists sensual and without the spirit Saint Peter foretells of the same Hereticks That their false Teachers should bring in damnable Heresies and deny the Lord God that bought them men of unclean lusts despisers of Government presumptuous selfwilled blasphemers of Dignities having eyes full of adultery constant in sin beguiling unstable Souls having covetous hearts cursed children forsaking the right way and following the way of Balaam wells without water clouds carried about with a tempest speaking great swelling words of vanity and thereby alluring those who were clean escaped from them that live in error St. Paul saith of those that made Divisions at Rome That they served not the Lord Jesus Christ but their own belly and with good words and fair speeches deceived the hearts of the simple Of the Cretan Hereticks he instructs Titus That they were fond of Jewish fables being turned from the truth and being disorderly bablers and deceivers He foretells Timothy That the time would come in which they would not endure sound doctrine but according to their own lusts would heap to themselves Teachers having itching ears turning away from the truth and enclining unto fables That they should be lovers of themselves covetous boasters proud blasphemers disobedient to parents unthankful unholy without natural affection truce breakers false accusers incontinent fierce despisers of good men Traytors heady high-minded lovers of pleasures more than lovers of God having a form of godliness but denying the power thereof creeping into houses and leading away captive silly women laden with sins led away with divers lusts ever learning but never able to come to the knowledg of the truth Which if we take one collective view of the whole aggregate of Hereticks we shall find all these abominations universally diffused among them if we consider them distributively it is not to be understood as if every Heretick were actually guilty of all these open Villanies but that in every Heretick there are more or less of these Impieties being the proper productions or improvements of their several Heresies according to the several tempers and inclinations of Men upon which they operate since Men encline to different Heresies according to their previous dispositions unto evil in which they are confirmed by those pleasing errors which they admire and entertain Now if such be the Complexion Genius and Original of all Heresies if their Extraction be so apparently from and their tendency leads unto Hell how falls the Church under a Necessity of them Why should St. Paul say there must be Heresies Shall we make them the issues of an Eternal Fate or of the Anti God of the Manichees Or shall we father them on an Horrible Decree of God for an irrespective and inexorable Reprobation Or shall we dream with Lactantius That God originally put the Devil upon the amazing employment of scattering Snares and Temptations among the Sons of Men St. James cautions us against all the least approaches to this jealousie of the Lord our God Let no man say when he is tempted that he is tempted of God for God cannot be tempted with evil neither tempteth he any man. Whereupon we must search out for such a necessity of Heresies as is imputable not to the operative Determination of God but the Evils of Men Since there must be Heresies they must be ours not God's They must derive from an unclean and puddled not from a Divine Fountain or Original For Let God be true and every man a lyar Except therefore only violent Force All Necessity is either Natural or Moral Natural consisting in the proper tendencies of operative Causes to their suitable Effects Moral in the reasonable proposals of Wisdom or Equity And both these kinds of Necessity are either Primary Simple and Absolute or Secondary only and Consequential with respect to antecedent Causes voluntary or unnecessitated Thus in Naturals That I am is to me of absolute necessity but that under the folly of too much Wine I talk and act idly is from no primary and absolute Necessity irresistible from the beginning but consequential only on my Intemperance That I can see is from a natural Necessity absolute and primary but that I actually must see is consequential to the opening of mine Eyes Thus likewise in Morals That a Man love the Lord his God with all his heart and with all his soul is primarily simply and eternally necessary but the moral Necessity of my Repentance is consequential only on my Sin. That I do exact Justice to every Son of Man is of necessity absolutely moral but the moral Necessity of repairing Injuries is secondary and introduced by my former Wrongs Upon which preliminary distinction of the kinds and forms of Necessity we are now to examine First what Natural and Secondly what Moral Necessities there are for the admission of Heresies in the Christian Religion First then The Truth and Sanctity of God require us to resolve that there is no natural necessity of Heresies primitive and absolute by the operation of him that made not Death nor hath any delight in the destruction of the Living For from the beginning the original state of Man needed no kind of evil to corrupt it But all the natural necessity of them is secondary suppositive and consequential to precedent Sins and those actual too and most times habitual For though other Immoralities begin to break out in the very first essays of our tender Understandings yet the inculcations of Heresie have no such early influence on our Fancies but require antecedently a longer sense and experience of Good and Evil To which when a Man is arrived he cannot be precipitated into the guilt of Heresie without want either of Piety or Care. For though a Soul aspiring with all care to a great devotion may in the infancy of that piety be ignorant of many excellent Doctrines yet by this care he will espouse no Principle absolutely as fundamental either in heart or prosession which neither the Voice of Nature nor the Rules of Faith have clearly revealed to his Understanding nor oppose those Points that either by the Light of Nature or of God's holy Word have ever been received by the Universal Church
〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 O the depth of the riches both of the Wisdom and Knowledg of God! How unsearchable are his Judgments and his ways past finding out But since all Scriptures are written for the instruction of Devout and Religious Souls which God Almighty communicates to all according to their measures studies and benefits I will with all sobriety offer to consideration what seems to be the sair and clear account of the Divine Wisdom in this particular In order whereunto we are to examine three things First What that is which St. Paul here calls Heresies and of which he asserts and moral Necessity Secondly What God does toward the production or propagation of them And thirdly What kind and degree of moral Necessity there is to induce God to such a form of concurrence as we shall discover in this Enquiry First then When St. Paul saith There must be Heresies he intends no internal Principles or Passions heretical of these he asserts no moral Necessity in this place but only on presupposition of these he makes the external eruptions of them in heretical professions to be morally useful and necessary This appears from the End in prospect That they that are approved may be manifested Now external Acts only can give us a distinctive sense of Mens Qualifications and so are only necessary to that use So that the sense is to be thus resolved Since there among you men of corrupt and heretical Principles against the Peace and Fundamentals of Christianity with latent Vices whence these Errors spring it is necessary and convenient that they should break out into open and actual Heresies and Divisions in order to a detection of them and a manifestation of the sincere Which is the effect not of habitual merely but of actual and professed Heresies Secondly It is to be considered what God does how far he concurs to the production or increase of these actual Heresies First then As God instils not the inherent Principles or Vices heretical so neither doth he promote them into outward Acts by any influential force upon their Wills at least not ordinarily nor in a manner obstructing their present power or liberty of conversion or suggesting greater animosity to their former prejudices Though otherwise if were not unjust in Almighty God to compel an inward Heretick against his designs of concealment and secresie to discover his ulcer even by immediate impulses on his Soul when else the secrecy would be more injurious to others or more hurtful to himself than an open detection For so it happens that an undiscerned Heretick may transmit an undiscerned venom into many Members of the Church by the advantage of an outside Communion which he perhaps may not in an open state of Separation according to that wicked Maxim in Politicks Of making ones self of that Party which he designeth to destroy And many times an open discovery exposeth the Heretick to such shame condemnation and means of conviction too as may end in his Conversion which he might have no advantage of under a covert privacy Secondly God not restraining the Heretick from a liberty to return may put him into such occurrences of Objects Acquaintance or Examples by attending unto which he may give vent to his Thoughts and Principles in order to the attainment of some flattering Hopes And in this God doth no evil because they are no inevitable Stumbling-blocks to him he being at liberty to recall himself and not yield up his Soul to the unlawful Appetites and Temptations that present themselves before him Thirdly When a man hath devoted himself to all Impiety God may justly deliver him up to the power of lying and Apostate Spirits as he did Ahab's wicked Prophets to act him to all those kinds and degrees of actual Sins and Heresies from which the hand of God shall not restrain them Fourthly When Impiety is rampant God may permit it a greater or less latitude of acting according as to his Infinite Wisdom shall seem expedient in the general issue of things by which greater or straiter limitation the Sinner shall not be forced to any actual Crime but only confined within such a compass without which he shall not be able to exert his Malice Even as the Envy of the Devil at Job was permitted Exercise but with a precaution not to touch his Life In all which methods of God's positive permissive or restrictive Concurrence there is no tincture of the least Iniquity not only from the just Causes and laudable Ends thereof but because God infuses no evil Intention into either the actual or habitual Wills of wicked Men but only either infatuates permits or encloses them and their operations as he seeth requisite For that which these Ways and Counsels of God are concerned in is not the inner Determination of the Impious Mind to the love or choice of Evil in which alone consists the guilt before God but only at the most the restriction of it in its outward Actions which considered separately in themselves from all relation to the Will that acts them may be indeed occasionally hurtful but involve not in them the intrinsick guilt which is purely seated in the Malice of the Mind For a Falshood unwittingly uttered is no Lye and in Man-slaughter 't is not Chance but Intention makes the Murther So that these Divine Concurrences touching only the bare external Acts of Heresie separately from their Fountains affect not the malice nor the radical guilt of Evil but only the results and consequences of it which are on this side the Mind wherein the guilt only lodges with no other design but to convert them to a great and noble good And if God having dominion over the life and fate of Man may permit a violent Man to murther the Innocent though the Murther be an inevitable oppression of the Murthered while God instills no malice into the Mind of the Murtherer much more is the Almighty innocent in his Providential Permissions of actual Heresies 'T is true indeed that Heresie is the murther of the Soul whereas Homicide is only the destruction of the Body but to this I answer That the murtherous tendency of Acts Heretical is neither inevitable nor insuperable nor irrecoverable For the passiveness of the Proselyte is voluntary and so he is Felo de se his own Murtherer though at the temptation of a Seducer and so cannot charge his murther wholly upon the very Tempter much less upon God who did not force him to imbibe but by his Word and the good motions of his Holy Spirit forewarned to beware of the Delusion and in mercy to him offers him time and means of recovery e're the poyson determine in his eternal Death And when to these Considerations we shall add That all these Procedures of Almighty God are occasioned by the impulsive provocations of monstrous Impieties and diffusive Corruptions we cannot condemn our Heavenly Father of Injustice if he had no other end herein but only To deliver up the
all things endureth all things And in distinction of true from vain Religion St. James gives you a clear Direction If any man among you seem to be religious and bridleth not his tongue this man's Religion is vain True Religion and undefiled before God and the Father is to visit the Fatherless and Widows in their affliction and to keep himself unspotted from the World. For What doth the Lord your God require of you but to do judgment and love mercy and to walk humbly with your God Which care as it would preserve us from the Snares of Heresie so would it at least shame and confound if not reduce the Adversaries whereas the Debaucheries and Abominations of those who pretend to the Communion of the Church as they are an offence to God so do they make us a scorn and derision to the Tabernacles of the Ishmaelites Edomites Moabites Gebal and Ammon and Amalek Philistines Tyrians and Assyrians and all the Enemies that are round about us To conclude The common Concernment of us all is with all industry to purify our selves from all filthiness both of Flesh and Spirit perfecting Holiness in the fear of God to prepare our Souls for temptation Perhaps the Church needeth the Fuller's Soap or the refining Fire and God may think it seasonable to enter his Judgments at his own House To endure which an integrity of Affections as well as Principles is most absolutely necessary Upon which previous Qualification Let us count it all joy when we fall into temptation and esteem them happy that endure being afraid of no terror nor being troubled but let us sanctify the Lord God in our hearts being ready always to give an answer to every one that asketh a reason of the hope that is in us with meekness toward Man and fear toward God rejoycing and being exceeding glad that we are accounted worthy to suffer for his sake and to bear in our Body the marks of the Lord Jesus For what the late Royal Martyr foretold of his own Reputation upon his Sufferings I can confidently presage of the Glory of this Church as the result of her present Afflictions upon former Experiences That after Owls and Bats have had the freedom of the night and darker times it shall like the Sun rise again and recover it self to such a degree of splendor as those feral Birds shall be unwilling to behold and unable to bear Nor will the Sufferings of this present time be worthy to be compared to the Glory that shall be revealed in her And after the dissolution of our present Bondage and the power of Temptations we shall find an exceeding great Reward For when we have trampled upon the Adder and Scorpion and all the Power of the Enemy God that delivered us out of the mouths of Lyons and from every evil work will at last bring us to his heavenly Kingdom To whom be glory for ever and ever Amen FINIS Books lately Printed for Robert Olavell at the Peacock in St. Paul 's Church-Yard 1688. A Discourse concerning a Judge of Controversies in Matters of Religion Being an Answer to some Papers asserting the Necessity of such a Judge With an Address to wavering Protestants shewing what little Reason they have to think of any Change of their Religion Written for the private Satisfaction of some Scrupulous Persons And now Published for Common Use With a Preface concerning the Nature of Certainty and Infallibility By an Eminent Author An Historical Description of the Glorious Conquest of the City of Buda the Capital City of the Kingdom of Hungary by the Victorious Arms of the Thrice Illustrious and Invincible Emperor Leopold the First Under the Conduct of His most Serene Highness the Duke of Lorraine In Nine Sheets The Plausible Arguments of a Romish Priest from Scripture Answered by an English Protestant Seasonable and Useful for all Protestans Families A Plain and Familiar Discourse by way of Dialogue betwixt a Minister and his Parishioner concerning the Catholick Church In Three Parts I. Shewing what 's the Nature of the Catholick Church II. That the Church of Rome is not the Catholick Church III. That the Scriptures and not the Church are the Rule of Faith. Which may serve as an Answer to some late Tracts upon that Argument By a Divine of the Church of England A Discourse of DUELS shewing the Sinful Nature and Mischievous Effects of them And Answering the usual Excuses made for them by Challengers Accepters and Seconds By T. Comber D. D. Of the Authority of Councils and the Rule of Faith With an Answer to the Eight Theses laid down for the Tryal of the English Reformation in the Book that came lately from Oxford The Law and Equity of the Gospel in two plain Sermons c. By Tho. Pierce D. D. and Dean of Sarum The History of the English Monarchy shewing the benefit of Kingly Government and inconvenience of Commonwealths c. An Historical Vindication of the Divine Right of Tythes from Scripture Reason and the Opinion and Practice of Jews Gentiles and Christians in all Ages designed to supply the Omissions Answer the Objections and rectify the Mistakes of Mr. Selden's History of Tythes Part I. A further Vindication of the Divine Right of Tythes proved by Scripture and Antiquity and Illustrated by the Solemn Consecration and great Conveniency of them with an Answer to the Objections of other Authors against them Part II. To which is added a Discourse of Excommunication By Thomas Comber D. D. Precentor of York (a) Orig. contra Celsus 1.4 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 (b) Matt. 18.7 (c) Matt. 10.34 35. (d) Tertull. Praescript adv Haer. (e) Epist of St. Jude v. c. (f) 2 Pet. 2. (g) Rom. 16.17 18. (h) Tit. 2. (i) 2 Tim. 4. (k) 2 Tim. 3. (l) Jam. 1.13 (m) 2 Thess 2.11 12. (n) Theodor. de Curand Graec. affectib Ser. 2. 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 (o) Psal 107. (p) Deut. 13.1 2 3. (q) Matt. 24.11 24 25. (t) 1 John 4.1 (s) Jud. Epist (t) Orig. contra Celsum 1.3 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 (u) Aug. de Fid. Operib cap. 5. (w) Tit. 2.7 8. (x) 2 Tim. 2. (y) 1 Tim. 6.4 5. (z) Clem. Alex. Paedag. l. 2. c. 7. 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 (a) 2 Tim. 2.24 25 26. (b) Ignat. ad Ephes (c) 2 Tim. 1.13 14. (d) Greg. Naz. 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 (e) Rev. 3.5 (f) Hieron Dialog in t Attic. Critob (g) Clem. Alex. Paed. l. 3. c. 11. 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 (b) Lev. 21.17 (i) 1 Tim. 6.11 12. (k) Heb. 13.17 (l) Iren. adv Haeres l. 2. c. 45. (m) 1 Cor. 1◠31. 14.1 13.4 5 6 7 8. (n) Jam 1.26 27. (o) Jam. 1.2 1 Pet. 3.14 15. (p) 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 (q) Rom. 8.18 (r) 2 Tim. 4.18