544 now TO DO GOOD TO MANY. would save souls in good earnest, and pull them out of the fire, and go any further than pomp and stage-work, they pass for the most insufferable men in the world: Elias is taken for the troubler of Israel, and Paul for a pestilent, seditious fellow, and the apostles as the offscouring of all things. Many a martyr bath died by fire, for seeking to save men from the fire of hell; and when the bedlam world is at this pass, what good is to be expected from such men? When men, called Christians, hate and oppose the God, the Christ, the Holy Ghost, to whom they were vowed in baptism; when drunkenness, and whoredom, and perjury, and lying, and all debauchery, is taken to be more friendly and tolera- ble than the most serious worship of. God, and obedience to his laws, and avoiding sin ; in a word, when the greatest good is taken for unsufferable evil, you mayknow what good tò expect from such. They will all tell you that we must love 'God above all, and our neighbors as ourselves; but to fight against his word, and worship, and servants, is but an ill expression of their love to God ; and seeking their destruction, because they will not sin, is an ill expression of love to their neighbors. When men judge of good and evil as. Satan teacheth them, and as selfish pride and worldly interest incline them, what wonder if such love have murdered thirty thousand, or forty thousand, at once, in France, and two hundred thousand in Ireland, and have filled the Christianworld with religious blood! Read but the doleful histories of church contentions for one thousand three hundred years, the stories of their wars and mutual persecutions, the streams of blood that have been shed in east and west, the inquisition, and bloody laws still kept up, and all this as good works, and done in love, and you would think that the sacred Roman hierarchy did believe that Christ bath put down the legal sacrificing of beasts, that he might, instead of it, have the blood of men ; and that he who requireth his disciples to lay down their lives for him, would have a priest- hood kept up to sacrifice their lives to him, that will not willfully break his laws. And all this is but as Christ foretold ns, that his servants should be killed as a piece of service to God. No won- der if such men offer God a ludicrous, mimical sort of service, and worship him in vain, by heartless lip-labor, according to the tradi- tions of men, when they dare sacrifice saints to the Lord of saints, and quiet their consciences by calling them such as they are them- selves. But to the honor of goodness, and shame of sin, to show that they sin against the light of nature itself, they put the name of evil upon good before they dare openly oppose and persecute it; and they put the names of good upon evil before they dare defend and justify it But, alas ! it is not only the ungodly that do mischief, thinking
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