Clearly an undeterminable controversy; inasmuch as there is no centra-definition possible of sin and inconvenience in religion: while the exact point, at which an inconvenience, becoming intolerable, passes into sin, must depend on the state and the degree of light, of the individual consciences to which it appears or becomes intolerable. Besides, a thing may not be only indifferent in itself, but may be declared such by Scripture, and on this indifference the Scripture may have rested a prohibition to Christians to judge each other on the point. If yet a Pope or Archbishop should force this on the consciences of others, for example, to eat or not to eat animal food, would he not sin in so doing? And does Scripture permit me to subscribe to an ordinance made in direct contempt of a command of Scripture?
If it were said,—In all matters indifferent and so not sinful you must comply with lawful authority:—must I not reply, But you have yourself removed the indifferency by your injunction? Look in Popish countries for the hideous consequences of the unnatural doctrine—that the Priest may go to Hell for sinfully commanding, and his parishioners go with him for not obeying that command.
Ib. p. 191.
About this time died my dear friend Mr. Thomas Gouge, of whose life you may see a little in Mr. Clark's last book of Lives:—a wonder of sincere industry in works of charity. It would make a volume to recite at large the charity he used to his poor parishioners at Sepulchre's, before he was ejected and silenced for non-conformity, &c.
I cannot express how much it grieves me, that our Clergy should still think it fit and expedient to defend the measures of the High Churchmen from Laud to Sheldon, and to speak of the ejected ministers, Calamy, Baxter, Gouge, Howe, and others, as schismatics, factionists, fanatics, or Pharisees:—thus to flatter some half-dozen dead Bishops, wantonly depriving our present Church of the authority of perhaps the largest collective number of learned and zealous, discreet and holy, ministers that one age and one Church was ever blest with; and whose authority in every considerable point is in favor of our Church, and against the present Dissenters from it. And this seems the more impolitic, when it must be clear to every student of the history of these times, that the unmanly cruelties inflicted on Baxter and others were, as Bishops Ward, Stillingfleet, and others saw at the time, part of the Popish scheme of the Cabal, to trick the Bishops and dignified Clergy into rendering themselves and the established Church odious to the public by laws, the execution of which the King, the Duke, Arlington, and the Popish priests directed towards the very last man that the Bishops themselves (the great majority at least) would have molested.
Appendix II. p. 37.
If I can prove that it hath been the universal practice of the Church in nudum apertum caput manus imponere, doth it follow that this is essential, and the contrary null?
How likewise can it be proved that the imposition of hands in Ordination did not stand on the same ground as the imposition of hands in sickness; that is, the miraculous gifts of the first preachers of the Gospel? All Protestants admit that the Church retained several forms so originated, after the cessation of the originating powers, which were the substance of these forms.