Pills to purge out the spirit of persecution.
Lastly, notwithstanding their confidence of the truth of their own way, yet the experience of our fathers’ errors, our own mistakes and ignorance, the sense of our own weaknesses and blindness in the depths of the prophecies and mysteries of the kingdom of Christ, and the great professed expectation of light to come which we are not now able to comprehend, may abate the edge, yea, sheath up the sword of persecution toward any, especially [toward] such as differ not from them in doctrines of repentance, or faith, or holiness of heart and life, and hope of glorious and eternal union to come, but only in the way and manner of the administrations of Jesus Christ.
CHAP. LXXV.
Peace. To close this head of the testimony of writers, it pleaseth the answerer to produce a contrary testimony of Austin, Optatus, &c.[195]
Superstition and persecution have had many votes from God’s own people.
Truth. I readily acknowledge, as formerly I did concerning the testimony of princes, that anti-christ is too hard for Christ at votes and numbers; yea, and believe that in many points, wherein the servants of God these many hundred years have been fast asleep, superstition and persecution have had more suffrages and votes from God’s own people, than hath either been honourable to the Lord, or peaceable to their own or the souls of others: therefore, not to derogate from the precious memory of any of them, let us briefly consider what they have in this point affirmed.
To begin with Austin: “They murder,” saith he, “souls, and themselves are afflicted in body, and they put men to everlasting death, and yet they complain when themselves are put to temporal death.”[196]
Austin’s saying for persecution examined.
I answer, this rhetorical persuasion of human wisdom seems very reasonable in the eye of flesh and blood; but one scripture more prevails with faithful and obedient souls than thousands of plausible and eloquent speeches: in particular,