world, for above three hundred years, under heathen and persecuting emperors, cannot stand or continue, supported by the same divine presence and protection to the world's end, much easier under the defensive favour only of a Christian magistrate, unless it be enacted and settled, as they call it, by the state, a statute or a state-religion; and understand not that the church itself cannot, much less the state, settle or impose one tittle of religion upon our obedience implicit, but can only recommend or propound it to our free and conscientious examination; unless they mean to set the state higher than the church in religion, and with a gross contradiction give to the state, in their settling position, that command of our implicit belief which they deny, in their settled confession, both to the state and to the church. Let them cease, then, to importune and interrupt the magistrate from attending to his own charge in civil and moral things, the settling of things just, things honest, the defence of things religious settled by the churches within themselves, and the repressing of their contraries determinable by the common light of nature; which is not to constrain or to repress religion, probable by Scripture, but the violators and persecutors thereof: of all which things he hath enough and more than enough to do, left yet undone ; for which the land groans and justice goes to rack the while let him also forbear force where he hath no right to judge for the conscience is not his province-lest a worse woe arrive him, for worse offending, than was denounced by our Saviour (Matt. xxiii. 23) against the Pharisees: Ye have forced the conscience, which was not to be forced, but judgment and mercy ye have not executed; this ye should have done, and the other let alone. And since it is the counsel and set purpose of God in the Gospel by spiritual means, which are counted weak, to overcome all power which resists him, let them not go about to do that by worldly strength, which he hath decreed to do by those means which the world counts weakness, lest they be again obnoxious to that saying, which in another place is also written of the Pharisees, (Luke vii. 30,) "that they frustrated the counsel of God." The main plea is, and urged with much vehemence to their imitation, that the kings of Judah, as I touched before, and especially Josiah, both judged and used force in religion. 2 Chron. xxxiv. 33: "He made all that were

present in Israel to serve the Lord their God,”—an argument, if it be well weighed, worse than that used by the false prophet Shemaiah to the high-priest, that, in imitation of Jehoiada, he ought to put Jeremiah in the stocks (Jer. xxix. 24, 26, &c.), for which he received his due denouncement from God.

But to this, besides, I return a three-fold answer: first, that the state of religion under the Gospel is far differing from what it was under the law; then was the state of rigour, childhood, bondage and works, to all which force was not unbefitting; now is the state of grace, manhood, freedom and faith, to all which belongs willingness and reason, not force. The law was then written on tables of stone, and to be performed according to the letter, willingly or unwillingly; the Gospel, our new covenant, upon the heart of every believer, to be interpreted only by the sense of charity and inward persuasion the law had no distinct government or governors of church and commonwealth, but the priests and levites judged in all causes, not ecclesiastical only, but civil, (Deut. xvii. 8, &c.,) which under the Gospel is forbidden to all church ministers, as a thing which Christ their Master in his ministry disclaimed (Luke xii. 14), as a thing beneath them (1 Cor. vi. 4), and by many of our statutes, as to them who have a peculiar and far differing government of their own. If not, why different the governors? Why not church ministers in state affairs, as well as state ministers in church affairs? If church and state shall be made one flesh again, as under the law, let it be withal considered that God, who then joined them, hath now severed them; that which, he so ordaining, was then a lawful conjunction, to such on either side as join again what he hath severed, would be nothing now but their own presumptuous fornication.

Secondly, the kings of Judah and those magistrates under the law might have recourse, as I said before, to divine inspiration; which our magistrates under the Gospel have not, more than to the same spirit which those whom they force have ofttimes in greater measure than themselves and so, instead of forcing the Christian, they force the Holy Ghost, and, against that wise forewarning of Gamaliel, fight against God.

Thirdly, those kings and magistrates used force in such things only as were undoubtedly known and forbidden in

the law of Moses-idolatry and direct apostacy from that national and strict enjoined worship of God, whereof the corporal punishment was by himself expressly set down; but magistrates under the Gospel, our free, elective and rational worship, are most commonly busiest to force those things which in the Gospel are either left free, nay, sometimes abolished, when by them compelled, or else controverted equally by writers on both sides, and sometimes with odds on that side which is against them. By which means, they either punish that which they ought to favour and protect, or that with corporal punishment and of their own inventing, which not they, but the church, hath received command to chastise with a spiritual rod only. Yet some are so eager in their zeal of forcing, that they refuse not to descend at length to the utmost shift of that parabolical proof, Luke xiv. 16, &c., "Compel them to come in ;" therefore, magistrates may compel in religion. As if a parable were to be strained through every word or phrase, and not expounded by the general scope thereof; which is no other here, than the earnest expression of God's displeasure on those recusant Jews, and his purpose to prefer the Gentiles on any terms before them, expressed here by the word "compel."

But how compels he? Doubtless no otherwise than he draws, without which no man can come to him (John vi. 44), and that is by the inward persuasive motions of his spirit and by his ministers, not by the outward compulsions of a magistrate or his officers.

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The true people of Christ, as is foretold (Psalm cx. 3), are a willing people in the day of his power." Then much more now, when he rules all things by outward weakness, that both his inward power and their sincerity may the more appear. "God loveth a cheerful giver;" then certainly is not pleased with an uncheerful worshiper, as the very words declare of his evangelical invitations, Is. lv. 1, "Ho, every one that thirsteth, come;" John vii. 37, "If any man thirst;" Rev. iii. 18, "I counsel thee ;" and xxii. 17, "Whosoever will, let him take the water of life freely." And in that grand commission of preaching to invite all nations, Mark xvi. 16, as the reward of them who come, so the penalty of them who come not, is only spiritual. But they bring now some reason with their force, which must not pass unanswered; that the church of Thyatira was blamed (Rev. ii. 20) for

suffering the false "prophetess to teach and to seduce." I answer, that seducement is to be hindered by fit and proper means ordained in church discipline; by instant and powerful demonstration to the contrary; by opposing truth to error-no unequal match; truth the strong, to error the weak, though sly and shifting. Force is no honest confutation, but uneffectual and, for the most part, unsuccessful,-ofttimes fatal to them who use it: sound doctrine, diligently and duly taught, is of herself both sufficient and of herself (if some secret judgment of God hinder not) always prevalent against seducers. This the Thyatirians had neglected, suffering, against church discipline, that woman to teach and seduce among them; civil force they had not then in their power, being the Christian part only of that city, and then especially under one of those ten great persecutions, whereof this, the second, was raised by Domitian: force, therefore, in these matters could not be required of them who were then under force themselves.

I have shewn that the civil power hath neither right nor can do right by forcing religious things: I will now shew the wrong it doth, by violating the fundamental privilege of the Gospel, the new birthright of every true believer-Christian liberty. 2 Cor. iii. 17, "Where the spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty." Gal. iv. 26, "Jerusalem which is above, is free, which is the mother of us all;" and ver. 31, "We are not children of the bondwoman, but of the free." It will be sufficient in this place to say no more of Christian liberty, than that it sets us free, not only from the bondage of those ceremonies, but also from the forcible imposition of those circumstances, place and time, in the worship of God, which, though by him commanded in the old law, yet in respect of that verity and freedom which is evangelical, St. Paul comprehends both kinds alike—that is to say, both ceremony and circumstance-under one and the same contemptuous name of "weak and beggarly rudiments," (Gal. iv. 3-10; Col. ii. 8, with 16,) conformable to what our Saviour himself taught, (John iv. 21-23,) "neither in this mountain nor yet at Jerusalem.-In spirit and in truth; for the Father seeketh such to worship him." That is to say, not only sincere of heart, for such he sought ever, but also, as the words here chiefly import, not compelled to place, and, by the same reason, not to any set

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time, as his apostle by the same spirit hath taught us (Rom. xiv. 6, &c.),- one man esteemeth one day above another, another," &c. Gal. iv. 10, "Ye observe days and months," &c. (Col. ii. 16.)

These and other such places of Scripture, the best and learnedest reformed writers have thought evident enough to instruct us in our freedom, not only from ceremonies, but from those circumstances also, though imposed with a confident persuasion of morality in them, which they hold impossible to be in place or time. By what warrant, then, our opinions and practices herein are of late turned quite against all other Protestants, and that which is to them orthodoxal, to us become scandalous and punishable by statute, I wish were once again better considered; if we mean not to proclaim a schism, in this point, from the best and most reformed churches abroad.

They who would seem more knowing, confess that these things are indifferent, but for that very cause by the magistrate may be commanded. As if God of his special grace in the Gospel had to this end freed us from his own commandments in these things, that our freedom should subject us to a more grievous yoke, the commandments of men. As well may the magistrate call that common or unclean which God hath cleansed, forbidden to St. Peter (Acts x. 15); as well may he loosen that which God hath straitened, or straiten that which God hath loosened, as he may enjoin those things in religion which God hath left free, and lay on that yoke which God hath taken off. For he hath not only given us this gift as a special privilege and excellence of the free Gospel above the servile law, but strictly also hath commanded us to keep it and enjoy it. Gal. v. 13, "Ye are called to liberty." 1 Cor. vii. 23, "Be not made the servants of men." Gal.

v. 1, "Stand fast, therefore, in the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free, and be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage." Neither is this a mere command, but for the most part, in these foresighted places, accompanied with the very weightiest and inmost reasons of Christian religion. Rom. xiv. 9, 10, "For to this end, Christ both died and rose and revived, that he might be Lord both of the dead and living. But why dost thou judge thy brother?" &c. How presumest thou to be his lord, to be whose only lord, at least in these things, Christ both died and rose and lived again? "We shall

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