But though he name not these corrupt doctrines, a little before I have, as they were publicly summed up and charged upon me, and yet none of them tending to the breach of holy or civil peace, of which I have ever desired to be unfeignedly tender, acknowledging the ordinance of magistracy to be properly and adequately fitted by God to preserve the civil state in civil peace and order, as he hath also appointed a spiritual government and governors in matters pertaining to his worship and the consciences of men; both which governments, governors, laws, offences, punishments, are essentially distinct, and the confounding of them brings all the world into combustion. He adds:
CHAP. VII.
Mr. Cotton. “And to speak freely what I think, were my soul in your soul’s stead, I should think it a work of mercy of God to banish me from the civil society of such a commonweal, where I could not enjoy holy fellowship with any church of God amongst them without sin. What should the daughter of Sion do in Babel, why should she not hasten to flee from thence?”
Answer. Love bids me hope, that Mr. Cotton here intended me a cordial to revive me in my sorrows:[240] yet, if the ingredients be examined, there will appear no less than dishonour to the name of God, danger to every civil state, a miserable comfort to myself, and contradiction within itself.
A land cannot be Babel, yet a church of Christ.
For the last first. If he call the land Babel, mystically, which he must needs do or else speak not to the point, how can it be Babel, and yet the church of Christ also?
Famous civil states where yet no sound of Jesus Christ.
Secondly, it is a dangerous doctrine to affirm it a misery to live in that state, where a Christian cannot enjoy the fellowship of the public churches of God without sin. Do we not know many famous states wherein is known no church of Jesus Christ? Did not God command his people to pray for the peace of the material city of Babel, Jer. xxix. [7,] and to seek the peace of it, though no church of God in Babel, in the form and order of it? Or did Sodom, Egypt, Babel, signify material Sodom, Egypt, Babel? Rev. xi. 8, and xviii. 2.
A true church of Jesus Christ in material Babylon.
There was a true church of Jesus Christ in material Babel, 1 Pet. v. 13. Was it then a mercy for all the inhabitants of Babel to have been banished, whom the church of Jesus Christ durst not to have received to holy fellowship? Or was it a mercy for any person to have been banished the city, and driven to the miseries of a barbarous wilderness, him and his, if some bar had lain upon his conscience that he could not have enjoyed fellowship with the true church of Christ?