Selected quad for the lemma: truth_n

Word A	Word B	Word C	Word D	Occurrence	Frequency Band	MI	MI Band	Prominent
truth_n	believe_v	delusion_n	unrighteousness_n	1,978	5	11.2673	5	false

Text snippets containing the quad

ID	Title	Author	Corrected Date of Publication (TCP Date of Publication)	STC	Words	Pages
A43805	The necessity of heresies asserted and explained in a sermon and clerum / by the author of the Catholic balance and published as a consolatory to the Church of England in the days of her controversie ...	Hill, Samuel, 1648-1716.	1688 (1688)	Wing H2010; ESTC R32969	19,436	34

ungodly unto strong delusions that they should believe a lie to the end they might all be damned who believed not the truth but had pleasure in unrighteousness But since this is not the design but the event only of these Divine Methods upon the finally Incorrigible and there are many gracious ends to the good of all Men in God's permission of actual Heresies in which consists this moral Necessity of them mentioned by the Apostle We are now smoothly brought to the third Consideration What is the Moral Necessity for their being in the World. That therefore is Morally necessary which either the Rules of Duty or Dictates of Wisdom recommend and this either strictly so that the omission will be either a fault or a damage or else more freely in such a latitude that though the omission be not injurious yet the observation will be expedient in which latter degree and sense Moral Necessity is no more than Rational Convenience and amounts not to the force of a rigorous Obligation And both these kinds of Moral Necessity may be either absolute in the nature and reason of the things themselves or relative to antecedent Causes of which they are consequential or to final Issues to which they are ministerial by a Moral influence and motion on the Mind Which being thus premised it is natural to resolve that the Moral Necessity of actual Heresies descends not from any Laws of Duty but from the Reasons of Wisdom which upon an antecedent Supposition of wicked Men and secret Hereticks in the Church proposes the detection of them in a manifestation of their Principles extremely beneficial and convenient First To the Hereticks themselves in order to their conversion Secondly To the Wavering in order to their probation and settlement And thirdly To the Approved and Faithful in order to their glory First then The permission of actual Heresies is intended by God to the good of Hereticks many ways For first While Men kept their Heresies close within their secret Cells the Catholick Doctors not discerning the Hearts make no direct applications to them to reform and cleanse them So that detection is necessary in order to their better instruction And secondly During the secrecy of Heresies within the Breasts of Men they fondly imagine that upon a discovery they will take mightily in the World and charm great multitudes of Men into rapture and admiration and that no Man will be able to gainsay them But so it always happens that tho Fools and Wretches may be imposed upon yet the Wise and best part of Mankind will despise and abominate what the Hereticks thought would ravish them And thus collecting all their force of Truth and Wisdom will baffle and confound them and hiss them off the Stage and expose them to the publick Sense of Men as the Pests of Religion and Agents of the wicked One. Which Issues so defeating the false Hopes and Expectations of the Heretick together with the convictions of Truth to be found in the Labours of those that refute him the general contempt and abomination past upon him the reverberations of his Conscience deserted by the Spirit of God and scourged by the Spirits of Darkness whom he served are proper and forcible motives to Humiliation and Repentance which nought but an habitual and obdurate Stupor can resist And yet if these prove ineffectual the Lenity of God uses other means to tire them out of their own Follies For when men have once forsaken the way of Truth they travel into perplexing and endless mazes from one Error to another either successive and consequential or else casual and collateral For as Theodoret observes The ways of Falsehood are cross and intricate so that in those that are bewildred in them is fulfilled that of the Psalmist They went astray in the Wilderness out of the way and found no City to dwell in Hungry and thirsty their Soul fainted in them And being in such a desert state they will if at all or ever be apt to relent And to cry unto the Lord in their trouble to deliver them out of their distress to lead them forth by the right way that they may go and dwell in the City that is refreshed with the streams and fountains of living waters Secondly The diffusion of open Heresies contributes to the probation and settlement of wavering indifferent and ungrounded Souls For in times of Ignorance or Carnal security many Men attend not to the force or design of Religious Institutions but sleep on supinely in the implicit Faith of the fashionable Religion In which case and state of drowsiness no moral or external Good is so apt to excite men to a severe enquiry and study of True Religion as the outrage of Heresies which startle Men out of their heavy Lethargy yea even out of their Graves by a quick and forcible Resurrection crying as it were aloud with the voice of a Trumpet and that a Trumpet of War too in the ears of every such dull and doating Christian Awake thou that sleepest and arise from the dead and Christ shall give thee light To this end God sometime permitted false Prophets to arise and to tempt his People to Idolatry that he might try and confirm them Thus Moses If there arise among you a Prophet or a Dreamer of dreams and giveth thee a sign or a wonder And the sign or wonder come to pass whereof he spake unto thee saying Let us go serve other Gods c. Thou shalt not hearken unto the words of that Prophet or that Dreamer of dreams for the Lord your God proveth you to know whether you love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul viz. Permitting such Temptations to arise not to be of equal force with the Miracles of Moses and Prophets but only strange enough to startle the Careless and the Improvident and to try them by the Prodigy and to provoke them to compare it with the Testimonial Fortifications of Moses and the Prophets and thus finally to instruct and confirm them in the Laws and Ordinances of the God of Israel Thus at the entrance of Christianity our Lord foretold That many false Prophets and false Christs should arise and shew great signs and wonders and deceive many Behold saith he I have told you before That we might not believe every Spirit but try the Spirits whether they are of God when many-false Prophets are gone out into the World. Thirdly the Divine Permission of Heresies is useful to the manifest justification of the Faithful and the Faith. For while the truth of our Faith meets with no opposition Men are generally content with the simplicity of its Tradition in Creeds and summary Abstracts of Christian Doctrine and with the plain sense of the obvious and easie Scriptures But when it 's attacked by Heresies and false Principles pretendedly deduced from Divine Authority this puts the Zeal of the Faithful into a mighty fervour to trace

〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 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