faith and knowledge thrives by exercise, as well as our limbs and complexion. Truth is compared in Scripture to a streaming fountain; if her waters flow not in a perpetual progression, they sicken into a muddy pool of conformity and tradition. A man may be a heretic in the truth; and if he believe things only because his pastor says so, or the Assembly so determines, without knowing other reason, though his belief be true, yet the very truth he holds becomes his heresy. There is not any burden, that some would gladlier post off to another, than the charge and care of their religion. There be, who knows not that there be of protestants and professors, who live and die in as errant and implicit faith, as any lay papist of Loretto." "Truth indeed came once into the world with her divine master, and was a perfect shape most glorious to look on: but when he ascended, and his apostles after him were laid asleep, then straight arose a wicked race of deceivers, who, as that story goes of the Egyptian Typhon with his conspirators, how they dealt with the good Osyris,-took the virgin Truth, hewed her lovely form into a thousand pieces, and scattered them to the four winds. From that time ever since, the sad friends of Truth, such as durst appear, imitating the careful search that Isis made for the mangled body of Osiris, went up and down gathering up limb by limb still as they could find them. We have not yet found them all, lords and commons, nor ever shall do, till her master's second coming; he shall bring together every joint and member, and shall mould them into an immortal feature of loveliness and perfection." "There be who perpetually complain of schisms F and sects, and make it such a calamity that any man dissents from their maxims. It is their own pride and ignorance which causes the disturbing, who neither will hear with meekness, nor can convince, yet all must be suppressed which is not found in their syntagma. They are the troublers, they are the dividers of unity, who neglect and permit not others to unite those dissevered pieces, which are yet wanting to the body of truth. To be still searching what we know not, by what we know, still closing up truth to truth as we find it, (for all her body is homogeneal and proportional,) this is the golden rule in theology as well as in arithmetic, and makes up the best harmony in a church; not the forced and outward union, of cold, and neutral, and inwardly divided minds." "Where there is much desire to learn, there of necessity will be much arguing, much writing, many opinions; for opinion in good men is but knowledge in the making. Under these fantastic terrours of sect and schism, we wrong the earnest and zealous thirst after knowledge and understanding, which God hath stirred up in this city. What some lament of, we rather should rejoice at, should rather praise their pious forwardness among men, to reassume the illdeputed care of their religion into their own hands again. A little generous prudence, a little forbearance of one another, and some grain of charity, might win all these diligencies to join and unite into one general and brotherly search after truth; could we but forego this prelatical tradition of crowding free consciences and christian liberties into canons and precepts of men. I doubt not, if some great and worthy stranger should come among us,-wise to discern the mould and temper of a people, and hov to govern it, observing the high hopes and aims, the diligent alacrity of our extended thoughts and reasonings in the pursuance of truth and freedom,-but that he would cry out as Pyrrhus did, admiring the Roman docility and courage; if such were my Epirots, I would not despair the greatest design that could be attempted to make a church or kingdom happy. Yet these are the men cried out against for schismatics and sectaries, as if, while the temple of the Lord was building,-some cutting, some squaring the marble, others hewing the cedars, there should be a sort of irrational men, who could not consider there must be many schisms and many dissections made in the quarry and in the timber, ere the house of God can be built. And when every stone is laid artfully together, it cannot be united into a continuity, it can be but contiguous in this world neither can every piece of the building be of one form; nay rather the perfection consists in this, that out of many moderate varieties and brotherly dissimilitudes that are not vastly disproportional, arises the goodly and the graceful symmetry that commends the whole pile and structure. Let us therefore be more considerate builders, more wise in spiritual architecture, when great reformation is expected." : "Neither is God appointed and confined, where and out of what place these his chosen shall be first heard to speak; for he sees not as man sees, chooses not as man chooses, lest we should devote ourselves again to set places and assemblies, and outward callings of men; planting our faith one while in the old Convocation house, and another while in the chapel at Westminster; when all the faith and religion that shall be there canonized, is not sufficient without plain convincement, and the charity of patient instruction, to supple the least bruise of conscience, to edify the meanest Christian, who desires to walk in the spirit, and not in the letter of human trust, for all the number of voices that can be there made; no, though Harry the Seventh himself there, with all his liege tombs about him, should lend their voices from the dead to swell their number." * ages, It would have been well for that and succeeding if the noble sentiments embodied in these passages had been generally received. Freedom of thought and speech-a perfect tolerance of differing opinions-a charitable construction of the motives and aims even of those who may be considered in error-are essential preliminaries to all real agreement and union amongst the followers of truth. But bigotry too often prevails over justice and charity; and believers in the patient process by which the God of truth advances the spiritual interests of the human race, have always been comparatively few. The opinions of Milton and his coadjutors prevailed only to a limited extent, and have yet to be inculcated with a world-wide diffusiveness, before the prospect of permanent liberty, civil and religious, can be realized. The thorough Independents might have succeeded in securing religious freedom for their country, but for the existence of factions deeply pledged to certain traditionary forms of opinion-the prelatists on the one hand, who were ever watching their opportunity to restore the abolished hierarchy; and the presbyterians on the other, who were determined not to relinquish the adventitious position they had acquired. * See note on page 15. Milton confirms Shakspeare's account of the Jerusalem Chamber. The latter, in particular, were especially intent on the prosecution of their designs. It is difficult to say which predominated, their zeal for the presbyterian polity, or their hostility to toleration. Their perseverance, notwithstanding the manifest injustice of their exclusive claims and the innumerable obstacles that opposed them, is even yet a matter for wonder. Every method, likely or unlikely,-every kind of instrumentality, worthy or unworthy, was employed to further their projects. Led on by the "Scots Commissioners," who never forgot to turn to the best account their relation to the estates, assemblies, and army of Scotland; emboldened by their numerical strength in the synod of Westminster, where they could always command overwhelming majorities; encouraged by their influential position in the city, whose rich lectureships and livings they had secured, almost without exception; they were resolutely bent on procuring the establishment of their polity and worship, on the ruins of all others. Their success was vastly disproportionate to their efforts. They hoped. to see the "two nations" brought to "the nearest possible agreement." It was their thought by day, their dream by night, to bring every village, town, city, county, in England, under the coercive sway of their "parochial, classical, presbyterial, and provincial assemblies," and thus to have had the moulding of the entire British mind.* To accomplish this, their : *"The Perfection of Justification maintained against the Pharisee The Purity of Sanctification against the Stainers of it: The Unquestionablenesse of a Future Glorification against the Sadducee: In several Sermons. Together with an Apologetic Answer to the Ministers of the New Province of London, in Vindication of the Author against their Aspersions. By John Simpson, an unworthy Publisher of Gospel-truths in London. 1648." |