SECTION IV. 47 whensoever we find any such iniquities, let us purify ourselves and cast them out. If there be any persons in the nation whoare called to greater degrees of love and forbearance than others, and who should stand further off from imposingon the conscience of their neigh- bour and from judging their brother, we are the persons ; we whom the laws of God and the laws of this land have permitted to judge for ourselves, and that even in opposition to the rules and constitutions of a national church. If there be any ministers or people in the whole kingdom who should shine in charity to men, in love and condescension to their brethren,'and in receiv- ing those whom Christ has received without laying bars of doubtful disputation upon them ; we should be those ministers and those people, we who pretend to stand up to vindicate our freedom from every yoke of bondage, and to support the liberty of men and christians. IV. Another obligation which lies upon you to do more than others is this ? you and your fathers have professed to observe a greater 'strictness in some necessary practices of religion and virtue, than thecommon multitude of those who call themselves the national church ; I say, the common multitude : I desire you to remember the caution which I gave in the beginning of these discourses, that I had no design to compare the most strictly pious and religious persons of the church of England with those of the protestant dissenters : I am well assured there are many on both sides who make a most serious profession of piety, and who practise strict godliness; nor would they Clare to offend the great God in any point, through their great tenderness of con- science : but the persons whom I compare in these discourses are the bulk or multitude of the one side and the other. I will not maintain, and indeed I cannot believe, that our fathers hereto- fore have been in the right in every punctilio of their severities and restraints, which they have laid upon themselves and those of their own household. Some of them did not so well under- stand that great article of christian liberty, bywhich they profes- sed to walk ; some of ,them, in order to obey that advice of the apostle, that they should abstain from all appearance of evil, vvere.sonle(imes inclined to restrain themselves and their families from those things, which had no reasonable appearance of evil or blame in them. But I dare and I will pronounce, that in some instances of their strictness, they had the word of God and the reason of things on their side. The late Bishop Burnet, in his excellent discourse on the pastoral care, does not scruple to acknowledge that our fathers had a good character for strictness in religion, which gained them their credit, though he suspects we in this age have in a great measure lost it ; chap. viii. p. 204. New shall we by our sinful neglect support and confirm this sus-
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