Series 5 > Religious Controversy in Scotland 1625-1639

70
RELIGIOUS CONTROVERSY IN SCOTLAND
But though the doctrine which men hold be false and perverse, if they do not maintain
it with passionate obstinacy, especially when they have not devised it by the rashness of
their own presumption, but have accepted it from parents who had been misguided and
had fallen into error, and if they are with anxiety seeking the truth, and are prepared to be
set right when they have found it, such men are not to be counted heretics .Were it not
that I beheve you to be such, perhaps I would not write to you.
And ought not they of the Church of Rome to have as charitable an opinion of
some of us at least, as the good Father had of the bishops ofDonatus,his crue? As
for the imputation of shisme, not every one that refuseth to communicate with
them (though acknowledged for a part of the Catholick church) in all the points
of their doctrine, and parts of their worship, or that refuseth to obey the pope in
all things that they doe, is therfore a shismatick—else the prophets who lived
among the 10 tribes, (which with the tribe of Benjamin and Judah made up one
visible church) were shismaticks for not communicating with them in their su¬
perstition and idolatrie. If it be asked, who then at this day are to be reputed
shismaticks? I answenThey are: 1. who leave the communion of the Catholique
church in rebus lititis,9' let it otherwise have never so foule blemishes, even grosse
Idolatrie, such as by publick autoritie was erected among the 10 tribes. The rea¬
son is for that schisme is a worse evill then idolatrie, and that so it is St Augustine
thus proveth Epistle 43, To Glorius, Eleusius, the Felixes, Grammaticus, et al:92 ‘The
men who made an idol perished by a common death, being slain with the sword;
but when men endeavoured to make a schism in Israel, the leaders were swal¬
lowed up by the opening earth, and the crowd of their accomplices was con¬
sumed by fire. In the difference between the punishments, the different degrees
of demerit may be discerned.’ 2. They are that exclude all but themselves, and
those that be on their side, from hope or possibility of salvation. So then, though
all be within the church, good and bad, yet they only are truely of the church
that have Christ’s cognizance, viz: charitie: (‘By this shall men know you to be
my disciples, if yee love one another’93) and they have it not who either being
among us, quite exclude them, or being among them, quite exclude us from the
Catholique church, and so from salvation. Hence it will follow that the moder¬
ate, peaceable, and charitable, are the only [71v] true Christians, and only revera94
of Christ’s sheepfold: the other, though they be in it, yet are they not of it, being
(as St Augustine speaketh) praecisi a radice unitatis95 by heresie or schisme, or a
lewd life and impenitencie. Thus did St Augustine proove Petilian to be a
shismatick, Answer to the Letters of Petilian: ‘for, as a matter of fact, you do not
91 ‘thing? lawful’.
92 Epistle 162 [ii,251]; Works,wt, 158-9.
93 John 13:35.
94 re vera,‘in truth’.The thrust concerns who are the true sheep of Christ’s flock.
95 ‘cut offfiom the root of unity’.