But if you leave the Communion or fellowship of our
Church, and join yourselves to any of the sects which are risen up amongst us,
as you will be certain to want many of the means of grace which you here enjoy,
you will be uncertain whether you shall enjoy any of them, so as to attain the
end for which they are appointed, even the salvation of your souls; for you
will be uncertain whether they who administer them be lawfully called and sent
by Christ to do it, as be sure many of them are not. You will be uncertain
whether you can join with them in prayer; for in some places they know not what
they say, in other places they themselves know not what they intend to say,
until they have said it, and how they can you know it? You will be uncertain
whether you shall ever receive any befit from the Sacrament of the Lord’s
Supper; for some never administer it at all, others do it either so imperfectly
or so irregularly, that the virtue and efficacy of it is very much impaired, if
not quite destroyed; you will be uncertain, whether they preach the true
doctrine of the Gospel, for they never subscribe to it, nor solemnly promise to
preach that and no other; neither are they ever called to account for any thing
they say or teach, be it never so false or contrary to what Christ and His
Apostles taught, so that they may lead you blindfold whithersoever they please,
without control; and after all, you will be uncertain whether they seek you or
your souls than you have to take care of theirs; and therefore the most favourable
and the most charitable construction that can be put upon the separation from
our Church is, that it is leaving a certainty for an uncertainty, which no wise
man would do in any thing, much less in a matter upon which his eternal
happiness and salvation depends; from whence ye may easily observe, that it is
your wisdom and interest, as well as duty, to be steadfast as in the doctrine,
so likewise in fellowship or communion with the Church, as the first Disciples
were. (William Beveridge, Sermon LI. Works, ed. L. A. C. T.., Vol II, p.
429, cited in Anglicanism: The Thought and Practice of the Church of
England, Illustrated from the Religious Literature of the Seventeenth Century,
ed. Paul Elmer More and Frankl Leslie Cross [London: SPCK, 1951], 82)
The reasons by which the more rigid Protestants seem to
themselves to have proved most clearly that each doctrine, both that of the
Romanists and that of the Lutherans, is contrary to the articles of the Faith
and therefore heretical, impious, and blasphemous, have been abundantly refuted
both by the maintainers of these opinions and by others who are anxious for the
unity of the Church. . . . (William Forbes, Considerationes Modestae et
Pacifae Controversiarum de Justificatione, Purgatorio, Invocatione Sanctorum,
Christo Mediatore, et Eucharistia, De Eucharistia, Book I, ch. 1, 2, cited
in Anglicanism: The Thought and Practice of the Church of England,
Illustrated from the Religious Literature of the Seventeenth Century, ed.
Paul Elmer More and Frankl Leslie Cross [London: SPCK, 1951], 471)
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