A Christian Directory, Part 4: Christian Politics

32. Therefore too many godly ministers will be great opposers of many of those truths of God, which they know not, and which they err about, and will help on the service of Satan in the world; and will be the authors of factions and contentions in the churches; whilst too many are "proud, knowing nothing," (in those matters when they think they are most orthodox,) "but doting about questions and strifes of words, whereof cometh envy, strife, railing, evil surmisings, perverse disputings of men of corrupt minds, (in this,) and destitute of the truth," 1 Tim. vi. 4, 5.

33. And if many good men will erroneously stand up against that truth which any man wiser than themselves maketh known, the worldly and malicious, that have a manifold enmity against it, will be ready to strengthen them by their concurrence, and to join in the opposition.

34. Not they that are wisest at a distance, but they that are nearest the people, and are always with them, are most likely to prevail to make disciples of them, and bring them to their mind: so great an advantage it is, to talk daily and confidently to ignorant souls, when there is none to talk against them, and to make their folly known.

35. Especially if the same men can get interest in their esteem as well as nearness, and make themselves esteemed the best or wisest men.

36. Therefore Jesuitical, worldly clergymen, will always get about great men, and insinuate into nobles, and will still defame them that are wise and good, that they may seem odious, and themselves seem excellent, and so may carry it by deceitful shows.

37. And they will do their best, to procure all wise and good men, that are against their interest, to be banished from the palaces of princes and nobles, where they are; lest their presence should confute their slanderers, and they should be as "burning and shining lights," that carry their witness with them where they come: and also to bring them under public stigmatizing censures and sufferings; that their names may be infamous and odious in the world.

38. And heretical pastors will play a lower game, and creep into the houses of silly people, prepared by ignorance and soul-disturbers to receive their heresies.

39. Between these two sorts of naughty pastors, (the worldly and the heretical,) and also the multitude of weak, erroneous, honest teachers, the soundest and worthiest will be so few, that far most of the people (high and low) are like to live under the influences and advantages of erring men; and, therefore, themselves to be an erring people.

40. In that measure that men are carnal, their own carnal interest will rule them. And both the worldly and heretical clergy, are ruled by carnal interests, though not the same materially. And the more honest, erring ministers, are swayed by their interests too much; insomuch, that on this account, it was no overvaluing of Timothy, or wrong to the other pastors, that it should plainly be said by Paul, "For I have no man like-minded, who will naturally care for your state. For all seek their own, not the things which are Jesus Christ's," Phil. ii. 20, 21. "Of your ownselves shall men arise, and speak perverse things, to draw away disciples after them," Acts xx. 30. Besides the grievous wolves which would not spare the flocks.

41. The interest then of the worldly clergy, will consist in pleasing the great ones of the world; for lordships, and worldly wealth, and honour, and to be made the rulers of their brethren, and to have their wills: and the interest of heretics will be to have many to be of their own opinion to admire them: and the interest of upright ministers will be to please God, and propagate the gospel, increase the church, and save men's souls; yet so that they have a subordinate interest, for food and raiment, and families, and necessary reputation, which they are too apt to overvalue.

42. Therefore, it will be the great trade of the worldly clergy, to please and flatter the rulers of the world, and by all artificial insinuations, and by their friends, to work themselves into their favour, and by scorns and calumnies to work out all other that are against their interest.

43. And it will be the trade of heretics, to insinuate into the more ductile people, especially as ministers of truth and righteousness, that have somewhat more excellent in knowledge or holiness, than the faithful ministers of Christ.

44. And it will be the work of faithful ministers, to save men's souls. But with such various degrees of self-denial or selfishness, as they have various degrees of wisdom and holiness.

45. Many great and piously disposed princes, like Constantine, will think that to honour and advance the clergy, into worldly power and wealth, is to honour God and the christian religion; and great munificence is fit for their own greatness.

46. And because such honour and wealth cannot possibly be bestowed on all, it must make a great disparity, and set some as lords over the rest.

47. And the unavoidable weakness, passions, and divisions of the clergy, will make rulers think, that there is a necessity; that besides the civil government, there should, be some of their own office, to rule the rest, and to keep them in order, obedience, and peace.

48. Ambition and covetousness will abuse this munificence of princes: and whilst that any church preferments are so great (beyond the degree of a mere encouraging subsistence) as to be a strong bait to tempt the desires of a proud and worldly mind, the most proud and worldly that are within the reach of hope, will be the seekers, by themselves, and by their friends.

49. Mortified, humble, heavenly men, will either never seek them, or with no great eagerness; their appetite being less, and their restraints much greater.

50. Therefore they that have the keenest appetites to church grandeur and preferments, and are the eager seekers, are most likely to find.

51. Therefore the lovers of wealth and honour, are more likely still to be the lords among the clergy; except in such marvellous happy times, when wise and pious princes call the more worthy that seek it not, and reject these thirsty seekers.

52. The greatest lovers of worldly wealth and honour, are the worst men, 1 John ii. 15; James iv. 4, &c.

53. Therefore, except in such times as aforesaid, the worst men will be still the rich and powerful in the clergy, for the most part, or at least, the worldly that are very bad.

54. These carnal minds are enmity to God, and cannot be subject to his law. And the friendship of the world is enmity to God. And the honour and wealth of these worldly men, will be taken by them for their interest; and they will set themselves to defend it, against all that would endanger it.

55. The doctrine and practice of humility, mortification, contempt of the world, forsaking all, taking up the cross, &c. is so much of the christian religion, that however the worldly clergy may formally preach it, their minds and interests are at enmity to it.

56. Such men will make church canons according to their interests and minds.

57. And they will judge of ministers and people according to their interest and mind; who is sound, and who is erroneous; who is honest, and who is bad; who is worthy of favour, and who is worthy of all the reproaches that can be devised against him.

58. The humble, mortified ministers and people, that are seriously the servants of a crucified Christ, and place their hopes and portion in another world, have a holy disposition, contrary to this worldly, carnal mind; and their manner of preaching will be of a different relish, and the tenor of their lives of a contrary course.

59. The generality of the best people in the christian churches will perceive the difference between the worldly and the heavenly manner of preaching and of living, and will love and honour the latter far above the former; because their new nature suiteth with things spiritual, and fitteth them to relish them.

60. The worst of vicious and worldly men will disrelish the spiritual manner of preaching and living, and will join with the worldly clergy against it.

61. The worldly clergy being hypocrites, as to christianity and godliness, (like Judas that loved the bag better than Christ,) they will make themselves a religion, consisting of the mere corpse and dead image of the true religion; of set words, and actions, and formalities, and orders, which in themselves are (many, at least, if not all) good; but the life they will not endure.

62. This image of true religion, or corpse of godliness, they will dress up with many additional flowers out of their own gardens, some tolerable, and some corrupting: that so they may have something which both their own consciences and the world may take to be honourable religion; lest known ungodliness should terrify conscience within, and shame them in the world without.

63. This image of religion, so dressed up, will suit their carnal auditors and people too, to the same ends; and therefore will become their uniting interest.

64. That which is but a weed among these flowers, the more heavenly ministers and people will dislike, and much more dislike the loathsome face of death (or lifelessness) in their religion.

65. These differences of mind and practice, will engage both parties in some kind of opposition to each other. The worldly clergy, or hypocrites, will have heart-risings against the ministers and people that think meanly of them, and will take it for their interest to bring them down: for enmity is hardly restrained from exercise. And Cain will be wroth that Abel's sacrifice is better accepted than his own.

66. The better ministers will be apt, through passion, to speak too dishonourably of the other; and the rash and younger sort, and the heretical hypocrites that fall in with them, will take it for part of a godly zeal to speak against them to the people, in such words as Christ used of the scribes and Pharisees.

67. Hereupon the exasperations of each party will be increased more and more; and the powerful, worldly clergy will think it their interest to devise some new impositions, which they know the other cannot yield to, to work them out.

68. Whether they be oaths, subscriptions, words, or actions, which they believe to be against God's word, the spiritual and upright part of the clergy and people will not perform them; resolving to obey God rather than man.

69. Hereupon the worldly part will take the advantage, and call them disobedient, stubborn, proud, schismatical, self-opinionated, disturbers of the public peace and order, "pestilent fellows, and movers of sedition among the people," that will let nothing be quiet, but "turn the world upside down," Acts xxiv. 5, 6; and will endeavour to bring them to such sufferings, as men really guilty of such crimes deserve.

70. And because the suffering and dissenting party of ministers, when silenced, will leave many vacancies in the churches, they will be fain to fill them with men, how empty and unworthy soever, that are of their own spirit, and will be true to their interests.

71. The exasperation of their sufferings will make many, otherwise sober ministers, too impatient, and to give their tongues leave to take down the honour of the clergy whom they suffer by, more than beseemeth men of humility, charity, and patience.

72. When the people, that most esteem their faithful ministers, are deprived of their labours, by the prohibitions of the rest, and themselves also afflicted with them; it will stir up in them an inordinate, unwarrantable, passionate zeal; which will corrupt their very prayers, and make them speak unseemly things, and pray for the downfal of that clergy, which they take to be the enemies of God, and godliness. And they will think that to speak easily or charitably of such men, as dare forbid Christ's ministers to preach his gospel, and by notorious sacrilege alienate the persons and gifts that were consecrated solemnly to God, is but to be lukewarm, and indifferent between God and the devil.

73. And when they take them as enemies to religion, and to themselves, the younger and rasher sort of ministers, but much more the people, will grow into a suspicion of all that they see their afflicters stand for: they will dislike not only their faults, but many harmless things, yea, many laudable customs, which they use; and will grow into some superstition in opposition to them, making new sins in the manner of worship, which God never forbad or made to be sins; and taking up new duties, which God never made duties; yea, ready to forsake some old and wholesome doctrines, because their afflicters own them; and to take up some new, unsound doctrines, and expositions of God's word, because they are inclined by opinion and passion conjoined, to go as far as may be from such men, whom they think so bad of.

74. And the vulgar people that have but little sense of religion, (that are not by the aforesaid interest united to the afflicting clergy,) having a reverence to the worth of those that are afflicted, and an experience of the rawness and differing lives of many that possess their rooms, will grow to compassionate the afflicted, and to think that they are injured themselves, and so to think hardly of the causers of all this.

75. Hereupon the powerful clergy will increase their accusations against the party that is against them, and declare to the world in print and from the pulpits, their ignorance, unpeaceableness, unruliness, giddiness, false opinions and conceits about the manner of worship, and how unsufferable a sort of men they are.

76. By this time the devil will have done the radical part of his work; which is to destroy much of christian love to one another, and make them take each other for unlovely, odious persons: the one part, for persecuting enemies of godliness, and hypocrites, and Pharisees; the other for peevish, seditious, turbulent, unruly sectaries. And on these suppositions, all their after characters, affections, and practices towards each other will proceed.

77. By this enmity and opposition against each other, both parties will increase in wrath, and somewhat in numbers. The worldly, afflicting clergy will multiply not only such as are disaffected to them, but downright fanatics, and sectaries that will run as far from them as they can, into contrary extremes. For when they are once brought into a distaste of the old hive, the bees will hardly gather into one new one; but will divide into several swarms and hives. As every man's zeal is more against the afflicting party, so he will go further from them; some to be separatists, some anabaptists, some antinomians, some seekers, some quakers, and some to they know not what themselves.

78. For the women, and apprentices, and novices in christianity, that have more passion than judgment, will abundance of them quite overrun, even their own afflicted teachers, and will forsake them, if they will not overrun their own judgments, in forsaking those that do afflict them.

79. And many hypocrites that have no sound religion; but ignorance, pride, and uncharitableness, will thrust in among them, in these discontents; or spring up in the nurseries of these briers of passion, and will bring in new doctrines, and new ways of worship, and make themselves preachers, and the heads of sects; by reason of whom, the way of truth shall be evil spoken of.

80. And many unstable persons seeing this, will dread and loathe so giddy a sort of men, and will turn papists, upon the persuasions of them that tell them that there is no true unity nor consistency but at Rome; and that all must thus turn giddy at last, that are not fixed in the papal head. And thus they that fly too far from the Common Prayer Book, will drive men to the mass; and the afflicters will make sectaries, and the sectaries will make papists.

81. When the violent clergy, instead of a fatherly government of the flocks, have driven the people into passions, distempers, and uncharitable disaffections to themselves, and have also been the great cause of multiplied heresies and sects by the same means, instead of being humbled and penitent for their sin, they will be hardened, and justify all their violences, by the giddiness and miscarriages of those sectaries, which they themselves have made.

82. And when they publish the faults of such, for the justification of their own violence, they will draw thousands into an approbation of their courses, (to think that such a turbulent people can never be too hardly called or used,) and consequently into a participation of their guilt.

83. By all this, the dissenters will be still more alienated from them; and many will aggravate the crime of the ministers that conform to their impositions, and obey them: and for the sake of a few that afflict them, they will condemn many laudable conforming ministers, that never consented to it, but could heartily wish that it were otherwise.

84. And the younger, and more indiscreet, passionate sort, will frequently reproach such, as unconscionable temporizers, that will do any thing for worldly ends, and that as hypocrites for a fleshly interest, concur with the corrupters and afflicters of the godly.

85. These censures and reproaches will provoke those conforming ministers, who are not masters of their passions, nor conquerors of their pride, to think as badly of the censurers as their afflicters do, and to join with them in the displaying of all enormities, and promoting their further sufferings, and publishing the folly and turbulency of their spirits, with spleen and partiality.

86. By these kind of speeches, preachings, and writings, multitudes of the debauched will be hardened in their sin against all religion: for when they observe that it is the same party of men, who are thus reproached, that are the strictest reprovers of their lewdness, their fornications, tippling, gaming, luxuries, and ungodliness; they will think it is no great matter what such a defamed, giddy sort of people say, and that really they are worse themselves.

87. Each party of these adversaries will characterize the adverse party as hypocrites: the passionate sufferers will call the afflicters hypocrites and Pharisees, that have no religion, but a formal show of outside ceremonies and words, and that tithe mint and cummin, and wash the outside, while within they are full of persecuting cruelty, and are wolves in sheep's clothing, loving the uppermost seats, and great titles, and ceremonious phylacteries, whilst they are enemies to the preaching of the gospel of Christ, and get revenues to themselves, and devour not only the houses, but the peace and lives of others, under pretence of long liturgies; and that devour the living saints, while they keep holy days and build monuments for the dead ones, whom their fathers murdered, &c. And the powerful clergy will call the others hypocrites, and labour to show that the Pharisees' character belongeth to them, and that their pretences of strictness in religion, and their long praying and preaching, is but a cloak to cover their disobedience, and covetousness, and secret sins; and that their hearts and inside are as bad as others, and that their fervency in devotion is but a hypocritical, affected whining and canting; and that they are worse than the lesser religious sort of people, because they are more unpeaceable, and disobedient, and add hypocrisy to their sin.

88. The ignorant, worldlings, drunkards, and ungodly despisers of holiness and heaven, being in all countries most contradicted in their way, by this stricter sort of men, and hearing them in pulpit and press so branded for hypocrites, will joyfully unite themselves with the censurers; and so they will make up as one party, in crying down the precise hypocrites; and usually make some name to call them by, as their brand of common ignominy: and they will live the more quietly in all their sins, and think they shall be saved as soon as the precisest, that make more show, but have no more sincerity, but more hypocrisy, than themselves.

89. The suffering party, seeing the ungodly and the conforming afflicters of them thus united, and made one party in opposition to them, will increase their hard thoughts of the adverse clergy, and take them for downright profane, and the leading enemies of godliness in the world, that will be captains in the devil's army, and lead on all the most ungodly against serious godliness, for their worldly ends.

90. And the young and indifferent sort of people, in all countries, that were engaged in neither part, being but strangers to religion, and to the differences, will be ready to judge of the cause by the persons: and seeing so many of the dignified, advanced clergy, and the more sensual sort of the people, on one side, and so many men of strict lives on the other, that suffer also for their religion, and hearing too that it is some name of preciseness that they are reproached by, will think them to be the better side; and so the title of the godly will grow by degrees to be almost appropriated to their party, and the title of profane and persecutors to the other.

91. All this while the nonconforming ministers will be somewhat differently affected, according to the different degrees of their judiciousness, experience, and self-denial.

Some of them will think these passions of the people needful, to check the fierceness of the afflicters (which doth but exasperate it); and therefore will let them alone, though they will not encourage them.

Some of the younger or more injudicious, hot-brained sort will put them on, and make them believe, that all communion with any conforming ministers or their parish churches is unlawful, and their forms of worship are sinful and antichristian; and that they are all temporizers and betrayers of truth and purity, that communicate or assemble with them.

The judicious, and experienced, and most patient and self-denying sort, will themselves abstain from all that is sin; and as far as it is in their choice and power, will join with the churches that worship God most agreeably to his word and will; but so, as that they will not be loud in their complaints, nor busy to draw men to their opinions in controvertible points; nor will unchurch and condemn all the churches that have something which they dislike as sinful; nor will renounce communion of all faulty churches, lest they renounce the communion of all in the world, and teach all others to renounce theirs: but they will sometimes communicate with the more faulty churches, to show that they unchurch them not (so they be not forced in it to any sin); though usually they will prefer the purest: yea, ordinarily they will join with the more faulty, when they can have no better, or when the public good requireth it. They will never prefer the interest of their nonconforming party, before the interest of christianity, or the public good. They will so defend lesser truths, as not to neglect or disadvantage the greater, which all are agreed in. They will so preserve their own innocency, as not to stir up other men's passions, nor to make factions or divisions by their difference. They will so dislike the pride and worldliness of others, and their injuries against God and godliness, as not to speak evil of dignities, nor to cherish in the people's minds any dishonourable, injurious thoughts of their kings, or any in authority over them. They will labour to allay the passions of the people, and to rebuke their censorious and too sharp language, and to keep up all due charity to those by whom they suffer; but especially loyalty to their kings and rulers, and peaceableness as to their countries. They will teach them to distinguish between the cruel that are masters of the game, and all the rest that have no hand in it; and at least not to separate from all the rest for the sake of a few. If they will go as far as Martin (in Sulpitius Severus) to avoid all communion with Ithacius and Idacius, and the councils of bishops, that prosecuted the Priscillianists, to the scandal of godliness itself; yet not for their sakes to avoid all others, that never consented to it: nor with Gildas, to say of all the bad ministers, that he was not eximius christianus, that would call them ministers, or pastors, rather than traitors. They will persuade the people to discern between good and evil, and not to run into extremes, nor to dislike all that their afflicters hold or use; nor to call things lawful, by the name of sin, and anti-christianity; nor to suffer their passions to blind their judgments, to make superstitiously new sin and duties, in opposition to their adversaries; nor to disgrace their understandings and the truth, by errors, factions, revilings, or miscarriages; nor to run into sects; nor to divide Christ's house and kingdom, while they pretend to be his zealous servants. They will persuade the people to patience, and moderation, and peace, and to "speak evil of no man," nor by word or deed to revenge themselves; much less to resist the authority that is set over them by God; but to imitate their Saviour, and quietly suffer, and being reviled not to revile again, but to love their enemies, and bless their cursers.