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
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
the Sacred Oracles through all the Prophecies and Mysteries interspersed both in the Old and New Testament and by a Canonical Interpretation from the concurrent harmony of them to deduce a firm Catena of all the Catholick Principles of Christian Piety and to chase away into shame and confusion every Imposture that exalts it self against the healing Truth and Wisdom of God. Thus as soon as Hereticks were crept into the Church St. Jude gave all diligence to write to them of the common Salvation and to exhort them to contend earnestly for the Faith that was once delivered unto the Saints viz. by discussing the Scriptures which are able to make us wise unto salvation through faith that is in Christ Jesus Thus Catechism makes us Babes in Christ but even Heresie it self makes the 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 the Approved and Faithful perfectly mature in the Wisdom that is of God by which he hath and will destroy the wisdom of the Wise and bring to nought the understanding of the Prudent Heresie therefore which Celsus and other Enemies of Christianity deride as the blemish of our Religion proves the goodness of it in the Original and the glory of it in the End. For it was a sagacious hint of Origen That all different Heresies in all Wisdom secular or sacred spring from some good and noble Original Which while it can be preserved virgin and inviolate suffers no reproach from the lascivient follies of vain and imprudent Sciolists And as to the Majestick glory of our Religion it sits in the Firmament of Heaven on high clothed with the Sun and the beams of Essential Light which all the filthy Exhalations of Spiritual Wizards and Impostors will never be able to darken or vilify Since Christianity ever improved by oppositions emerged above Heresies and lives the more strongly by continual Persecutions and by its immovable perpetuity against all possible force and fraud becomes a Symbol and a Pledge of that Eternity which it promiseth and to which it leads us Thirdly Having thus discovered both the natural and moral Necessity of Heresies in the World Let us in the last place consider what seasonable Uses besides those which are already touched on Humane Prudence under the conduct of the Divine Wisdom will suggest unto us Upon which being to speak to an Auditory of a double Character it is fit I should offer some Considerations proper to each Order And here indeed were there time to expatiate lies a large Plain before me relating to the Discipline Doctrine and Sanctity of the Priesthood and the Sincerity Humility and Morals of the People But a regard to your uneasiness the narrowness of the time and the Laws of Modesty must and shall confine me First then The Administration of Discipline being in the hands of my Superior requires from him a Lesson of Prudence and Wisdom to me and to us all and consequently enjoins me silence in this particular And perhaps the present State and Circumstances of the Church require no such accurate enforcements of it in this juncture The Counsel of St. Austin being seasonable Nos vero ad sanam Doctrinam pertinere arbitramur ut canes in Ecclesiae propter pacem Ecclesiae toleremus Canibus vero sanctum ubi pax Ecclesiae tuta est non demus So that I am immediately to pass to the consideration of that Doctrine which we ought to support for the prevention diminution or extirpation of Heresies And here my Brethren you need a Draught from the Judgment of a Superior And if our Reverend Ordinary had thought good instead of making proof of me to have filled up this place of Sacred Oratory himself he would have given us an excellent Copy from the Authority of the Scriptures and the Prudence of the Primitive Fathers In opposition to the Follies and Fables of Heresie he would have admonished us in all our Doctrine to shew uncorruptness gravity and sincerity sound speech that cannot be condemned that they of the contrary part may be ashamed To study to shew our selves approved unto God Workmen that need not be ashamed rightly dividing the word of truth In opposition to the disputatious vanity of Hereticks he would have forbidden us to doat about questions strifes about words whereof cometh envy strife railings evil surmisings and perverse disputing with men of corrupt minds remembring the magnificent sense of Clemens Alexandrinus in this particular Not to strive for empty victory for that with us quietness is the designed end of Conferences For the Servant of the Lord must not strive but be gentle unto all men apt to teach patient In meekness instructing those that oppose themselves if God peradventure will give them repentance to the acknowledgment of the truth And that they may recover themselves out of the snare of the Devil Thus Ignatius to the Ephesians In opposition to their anger be you gentle to their boasting be you lowly to their blasphemies oppose you your Prayers against their Errors stand you firm in the Faith against their rage be you always mild not aiming to imitate them but being emulous of the Lord. In contrariety to heretical Innovations he would have bid us keep close to the Faith which was once delivered to the Saints To magnify the excellency and improve the use of Catechetical Doctrines To hold fast the Tradition of Faith the form of sound words which we have received from the Apostles and by the Holy Ghost that dwelleth in us to keep that good thing which was committed to us For they indeed pursue a vain glory by daring enquiries into Riddles that tend to the subversion of the Hearers but St. Gregory Nazianzen gives us sounder direction Not to despise the trite and common Principles not to hunt out for novelties to gain a reputation with the multitude In all our methods of Instruction he would have enjoined us to preach not our selves or our own Conceptions or meer Humane and novel Traditions but Jesus Christ and him crucified and the power of his Resurrection and such noble Mysteries of Salvation from the sole Authority of the Divine Oracles Whence the Priest's lips are to preserve knowledg and the People are to seek the law at his mouth And you know the High-Priest gave no Oracular Responses to the People from the Holy of Holies but what the Excellent Glory that dwelt between the Cherubims had written with rays of purest light upon the Pectoral In all our Doctoral Offices he would have required of us an unwearied diligence in season and out of season not to neglect but to stir up the gift of God which is in us by the imposition of the hands of our Fathers and the Presbytery watching in all things enduring afflictions doing the work of Evangelists making full proof of our Ministry that being faithful unto death God may give us a Crown of Life The last thing relating to our Order and the great Envy of Hereticks