86 A CHRISTIAN CHURCH. the flesh, and perseverance in faith and holiness, I esteem fun- damental and necessary duties ; because the scripture expressly saith, he that believeth not shall be damned; Markxvi. 16. If ye live after the flesh ye shall die ; Rom. vii. 13. If any man draw back, my soul shall have no pleasure in him ; Heb. x. 38. And for the. same reason this error, that justification is to be at- tainedby the works of the law, seems to bean heresy, or funda- mental error; because the scripture saitb, Christ is become of none effect to you, whosoever ofyou will be justified by the law; ye are fallen from grace; Gal. v. 4. By which we are to un- derstand such a hope of justification by the law, as made the sacrifice and atonement of Christ needless ; and which was most probably thesense of the heretics in that day. SECT. IV. But here I desire my- readers to take notice of these five things : ' 1. That I have by no means pretended to reckon up all the fundamental articles, or give a full or regular catalogue of them: There may be some which I have omitted, and some which I have mentioned twice, and that are included in each other. I have Only laid down some general tokens or marks, whereby necessary truths and duties may be known, so far as the terms of christian communion are concerned therein. f,; I have here joined several doctrinal and practical articles together, supposing that all those duties which the scripture makes necessary to be practised, are necessary also to be known in order to practise. 3. I call these articles fundamental ; and it is my'opinion they may he insisted on as necessary to communion, because they seem to me necessary to true Christianity, in such an age and land of light as ours is. Yet, what I hinted beforeI repeat now, that, as I will not judge all the heathen world, and condemn iliern for want of .christian knowledge, so neither will I utterly condemn every poor soul in the obscurest corners of a christian nation, for want of such degrees of knowledge as to me seems necessary to salvation, to all that know and read the New Tes- tament. I grant, that God, in his word, does not seem to give encouragement to their hope of heaven, nor allow their commu- nion withchrist.iecs on earth : But the final condemnation ofthem is alone with him. And after all that we can say, every person must judge for himself, which articles are necessary in order to his own salvation ; and every church must judge for itself, to regulate its own communion ; and God alone is a superior judge with regard to the one or the other. 4. I do not think every one of these articles necessary to be expressly insisted on, and professed by every communicant ; but so many only as the church shall think necessary, in order to give them a reasonable satisfaction that he knows and believes the rest.
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