“Sanctify them through thy truth: thy word is truth.”
Jn. 17:17
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Order of Contents
Articles 4
Quotes 14+
What Truth is 2
Ignorance 4
Guides in 2
Latin 1
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Articles
1500’s
Vermigli, Peter Martyr – ‘Of Truth & of a Lie’ in The Common Places… (d. 1562; London: Henrie Denham et al., 1583), pt. 2, ‘The Ninth Precept’, pp. 542-46
Musculus, Wolfgang – Common Places of the Christian Religion (1560; London, 1563)
Truth of God 393.a
What is the difference of the truth of God and that of creatures 393.b
How many kinds of truth there be in God 394.a
That it is very hard for few to come unto the knowledge of God’s truth 394.b
How men may come unto the knowledge of God’s truth 395.a
What is the efficacy of the truth 396.b
What is the lot or hap of the truth of God in this world 397.b
That all things are to be suffered for the truth 398.a
Whether that the truth may be overcome 398.b
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1600’s
Turretin, Francis – 12. ‘Whether it is lawful to use ambiguous equivocations and mental reservations in oaths. We deny against the papists and especially the Jesuits.’ in Institutes of Elenctic Theology, tr. George M. Giger, ed. James Dennison Jr. (1679–1685; P&R, 1994), vol. 2, 11th Topic
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1700’s
à Brakel, Wilhelmus – Proposition 1, ‘A Christian must have a great love for the truth; all splendid pretense void of love for the truth is deceit’ in 43. ‘A Warning Exhortation against Pietists, Quietists, & All who in a Similar Manner have Deviated to a Natural & Spiritless Religion under the Guise of Spirituality’ in The Christian’s Reasonable Service, vol. 2 ed. Joel Beeke, trans. Bartel Elshout Buy (1700; RHB, 1992/1999), pp. 644-48
a Brakel (1635-1711) was a contemporary of Voet and Witsius and a major representative of the Dutch Further Reformation.
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2000’s
Novaes, Catarina Dutilh – ‘Lessons on Truth from Medieval Solutions to the Liar Paradox’ The Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 61, no. 242 (Jan. 2011), pp. 58-78
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Quotes
Order of
Sprint
Burges
Aberdeen Professors
Pascal
Rutherford
Hooker
London Presbyterians
Presbyterians & Independents
Baxter
Goodwin
Fleming
Sprague
Ross
Machen
Congar
Feser
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1600’s
John Sprint
Cassander Anglicanus, showing the Necessity of Conformity to the Prescribed Ceremonies of our Church in Case of Deprivation (London: Bill, 1623)
“…the common condition of man’s will which may be induced, when it cannot be enforced.”
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‘To the Reader’ no page number
“Every part of truth is precious, even the least (as the least grain of musk is sweet). Because it is the truth; because God’s truth, and because small errors entertained against small truths, have often evil, sometimes pernicious, effects.”
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Aberdeen Professors
Duplyes of the Ministers & Professors of Aberdeen to the Second Answers of some Reverend Brethren concerning the Late [National] Covenant [of 1638], ‘To our Brethren’, p. 73 appended to General Demands concerning the Late Covenant... (Edinburgh: Robert Young, 1638; repr. Aberdeen: John Forbes, 1663)
“To our reverend brethren Mr. Alexander Henderson and Mr. David Dickson. That your answers, reverend and dear brethren, have not in any degree satisfied us, we impute it not to your weakness, whom we know to be able men, and much exercised in the matters debated betwixt us: but we impute it to the weakness of your cause, and to that inability which is in all men, as well as in you, to bear out against the truth.”
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Blaise Pascal
Pensees, section 14, Appendix: ‘Polemical Fragments’ in Pensees – The Provincial Letters in The Modern Library (d. 1662; NY: Modern Library, 1941)
p. 305
“There are then a great number of truths, both of faith and of morality, which seem contradictory, and which all hold good together in a wonderful system.
The source of all heresies is the exclusion of some of these truths, and the source of all the objections which the heretics make against us is the ignorance of some of our truths. And it generally happens that, unable to conceive the connection of two opposite truths, and believing that the admission of one involves the exclusion of the other, they adhere to the one, exclude the other, and think of us as opposed to them.
Now exclusion is the cause of their heresy; and ignorance that we hold the other truth causes their objections.”
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p. 306
“All err the more dangerously, as they each follow a truth. Their fault is not in following a falsehood, but in not following another truth.”
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Samuel Rutherford
The Due Right of Presbyteries... (London, 1644)
“There be two happy things (worthy Reader), as one says, ‘The one is not to err, the other is to escape from the power of error.’ (Cassian, De incarnatione, bk. 1, ch. 4) Time’s womb brings forth many truths, though truth be not a debtor to time, because time puts new robes on old Truth; but truth is God’s debtor and owes her being to Him only.
It is a great evil under the sun and the sickness of man’s vanity that the name of holy men should be a web to make garments of for new opinions, but the errors of holy men have no whiteness, nor holiness from men. And it is a wrong that men’s praise should be truth’s prejudice, and men’s gain, truth’s loss. Yet I shall heartily desire that men herein observe the art of deep providence, for the Creator commands darkness to bring forth her birth of light, and God does so over-awe, with a wise super-dominion, men’s errors, that contrary to nature’s way, from collision of opinions, results truth; and disputes, as stricken flint, cast fire for light, God raising out of the dust and ashes of errors a new living truth.
What mistakes, errors, or heresies have been anent Church government, that vigilant and never slumbering wisdom of providence has thence made to appear the sound doctrine of God’s Kingdom. So here Satan shapes and God sews and makes the garment. Error is but dregs, by the artifice of all compassing Providence, from whence are distilled strong and cordial waters. And what Antichrist has conceived for a hierarchy and human ceremonies, has put Christ in his two witnesses in Britain to advocate for the truth and native simplicity of his own Kingdom.
But I heartily desire not to appear as an adversary to the holy, reverend and learned [congregationalist] Brethren who are sufferers for the truth, for there be wide marches betwixt striving and disputing. Why should we strive? for we be brethren, the sons of one father, the born citizens of one mother Jerusalem. To dispute is not to contend. We strive as we are carnal, we dispute as we are men, we war from our lusts, we dispute from diversity of starlight and daylight. Weakness is not wickedness, a roving of wit must not be deemed a rebellion of will, a broken engine may part with a dead child and yet be a mother of many healthy children.
And while our reverend and dear Brethren, fleeing the coast of Egypt and Babylon’s wicked borders, aim to shore upon truth, wind may deceive good sailors; natural land-motions (as when heavy bodies move downward toward their own (clay country) are upon a straight line. But sea-motions of sailing are not by right lines, but rather by sea-circles. We often argue and dispute as we sail. Where grace and weight of Scripture make motion, we walk in a right line toward God. But where opinion, a messenger only sent to spy the Land of lies and truth, usurps to conduct us, what marvel then we go about truth rather than lodge with truth.
And Christ his Kingdom, scepter, glory, Babylon’s fall, be the material object of opinions, on both sides; and yet the Word of God has a right lith [joint], that cannot suffer division. In God’s matters there be not as in grammar the positive and comparative degrees: there are not here truth, and more true, and most true. Truth is in an indivisible line, which has no latitude and cannot admit of splitting. And therefore we may make use of the Philosopher’s word, amicus Socrates, amicus Plato, sed magis amica veritas [Socrates a friend, Plato a friend, but most of all, truth is a friend]. Though Peter and Paul be our beloved friends, yet the truth is a dearer friend: The sons of Babylon make outcries of divisions and diversity of religions amongst us, but every opinion is not a new religion.
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But I leave off, and beg from the Reader candor and ingenuous and fair dealing; from Formalists, men in the way to Babylon, I may wish this, I cannot hope it. Farewell.”
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pt. 2, p. 415
“…but the truth is, neither the king’s judgment [is] as a certain rule to the representative Church, nor [is] the representative Church’s judgment a rule to the king, but the Word of God [is], the infallible rule to both. Judgement may crook; truth cannot bow; it stands still, unmoveable, like God the Father of Truth.”
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Thomas Hooker
A Survey of the Sum of Church-Discipline… (London: Bellamy, 1648), Preface, no page numbers
“Truth is the daughter of time, was the saying of old, and our daily experience gives in evidence and proof hereof, to every man’s ordinary observation. Only as in other births, so here, the barrenness and fruitfulness of several ages, depend merely upon God’s good pleasure; who opens and shuts the womb of truth from bearing, as He sees fit, according to the counsel of his own will.
Not that there is any change in the truth, but the alteration grows, according to men’s apprehensions, to whom it is more or less discovered, according to God’s most just judgment and their own deservings.
Sometimes God makes an eclipse of the truth at midday, that so He might express his wrath from Heaven against the unthankfulness, prophaness and atheism of a malignant world.
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Sometimes when men entertain the truth in profession, but not in the love of it and that endeared affection that is due thereunto, the Lord gives men up to the activity of error, as the apostle speaks, because they did not love that the trutb should be truth, they embraced falsehood instead of truth, that so they might be deluded and damned…
He that will estrange his affection [to others] because of the difference of apprehension in things difficult, he must be a stranger to himself one time or other. If men would be tender and careful to keep off offensive expressions, they might keep some distance in opinion, in some things, without hazard to truth or love. But when men set up their sheaves (though it be but in a dream, as Joseph’s was) and fall out with every one that will not fall down and adore them, they will bring much trouble into the world, but little advantage to the truth or peace.
Again, the Reader must know for his direction in this inquiry, my aim only was, and is, to lay down, and that briefly, the grounds of our practice, according to that measure of light I have received, and to give answer to such reasons which might seem to weaken the evidence thereof: declining purposely, for the present, the examination of such answers which are made to the arguments alledged by some of our reverend Brethren touching the same subject: because I would neither prejudice nor prevent their proper defense, which I do suppose in the fittest season they will so present unto the world as shall be fully satisfactory to such as love and desire the knowledge of the truth.
The sum is, we doubt not what we practise, but it’s beyond all doubt that all men are liars and we are in the number of those poor feeble men; either we do, or may err, though we do not know it; what we have learned we do profess and yet profess still to live that we may learn.
And therefore the errand upon which this present discourse is sent, is summarily to show these two things unto the world:
1. That there must be more said (than yet it has been my happiness to see) before the principles we profess will be shaken, and consequently it cannot be expected, that we should be unsetled in our practice.
2. That I might occasion men eminently gifted to make further search, and to dig deeper, that if there be any vein of reason which lies yet lower, it might be brought to light, and we profess and promise, not only a ready ear to hear it, but a heart willing to welcome it.
It’s the perfection of a man, amidst these many weaknesses we are surrounded withal, by many changes to come to perfection. It’s the honour and conquest of a man truly wise to be conquered by the truth: and he has attained the greatest liberty that suffers himself to be led captive thereby.
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In the handling of all these particulars, so full of difficulty and obscurity, I am not such a stranger at home, but that I am easily sensible of the weight of the matter and mine own weakness: and therefore I can professe in a word of truth that against mine own inclination and affection I was haled by importunity to this so hard a task, to kindle my rush candle, to join with the light of others, at least to occasion them to set up their lamps.
Now He that is the way, the truth, and the life, pave out all the ways of his people and make their paths plain before them: Lead us all into that truth which will lead us unto eternall life: bring us once unto that impotency and impossibility that we can do nothing against the truth, but for it, that so our congregations may not only be styled as Ezekiel’s temple, but be really what was prophesied the Churches should be in these last days, Jehovah Shammah [the Lord is There]. In the arms of his everlasting mercy I leave thee…”
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London (Presbyterian) Provincial Assembly
A Vindication of the Presbyterial-Government & the Ministry… (London, 1650), pt. 2, pp. 110-111
“And we further intreat every one of you… to hate hypocrisy and self-seeking, to receive the love of the truth, lest God give him over to believe lies. Not to trust to his own understanding, lest God blind his understanding. To practice the truths he does know, that God may reveal unto him the truths he does not know; not to heap to himself teachers, having itching ears, lest he turn away his ears from the truth and be turned unto fables; not to have the faith of our Lord Jesus Christ in respect of persons, embracing the doctrine for the person’s sake, and not the person for the doctrine’s sake.
To seek after the truth for the truth’s sake, with uprightness of heart and not for outward respects, lest God answer thee according to the idols thou hast in thy heart. To labor to be more and more grounded in the principles of the doctrine of Christ, to study catechism more diligently and so to be led on to perfection, that he may not always be a babe, unskillful in the word of righteousness, but by reason of use may have his senses exercised to discern both good and evil.”
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Leading English & Presbyterian Ministers
The Grand Debate between the most reverend Bishops & the Presbyterian Divines appointed by His Sacred Majesty as Commissioners for the Review & Alteration of the Book of Common Prayer... (London, 1661), ‘The Papers’, p. 60
“…whatsoever can be expected duly to affect the heart, must keep the intellect and all the faculties awake in diligent attention and exercise…”
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Richard Baxter
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“[A]ll knowledge is useful to one that referreth it to right ends, which is knowledge indeed: For God has made nothing knowable in vain. True physics is the knowledge of the knowable works of God, and God in them, that we may admire, love, serve, and trust him. True logic is but the skill of using our reason truly and orderly. True grammar and oratory are but fitting words to things, and to the hearers’ minds, as most tends to their edification.
God is against none of these, which are his precious gifts. But carnal men have carnal ends, and fit all these abusively to their ends, to wrangle against truth, and divert their minds from things to words, and from great and everlasting things to trifles, and to feed their pride, and ambition, and covetousness, and to make their malignity more keen and hurtful.”
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Christian Concord, or the Agreement of the Associated Pastors & Churches of Worcestershire, with Richard Baxter’s Explication & Defence of it, & his Exhortation to Unity (London: A.M., 1653), ‘An Explication of some Passages in the foregoing Propositions’, p. 13
“Truth suffers most by being obscured; and Duty, by being but superficially, ignorantly and reservedly owned and performed:”
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The Cure of Church Divisions… (London, 1670), pt. 1, Direction 38, ‘Neglect not any truth of God, much less renounce it or deny it: for lying and contempt of sacred truth is always sinful: But yet do not take it for your duty to publish all which you judge to be truth, nor a sin to silence many lesser truths, when the Church’s peace and welfare does require it’, pp. 208-9
“It is not truth but goodness which is the ultimate object of the soul. And God who is infinite goodness itself, has revealed his truths to the world to do men good and not to hurt them.
And the Devil, who is the Destroyer, so he may but do men hurt, will be content to make use even of truth to do it; though usually he only pretends truth to cover his lies: And this angel of Light has his ministers of light and righteousness, who are known by their fruits; whilst the pretenses of light and righteousness are used to Satan’s ends and not to Christ’s, to hurt and destroy and to hinder Christ’s Kingdom, and not to save and to do good: as the wolf is known by his bloody jaws, even in his sheep’s clothing.” – pp. 208-9
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Thomas Goodwin
Works, 12 vols. (d. 1680; Edinburgh: Nichol, 1861), vol. 1, Exposition of Eph. 1 (1681), sermon 36, on 1:22-23, p. 559
“I have found by trial of things that there is some truth on all sides. I have found holiness where you would little think it, and so likewise truth;”
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Robert Fleming, Sr.
The Church Wounded & Rent by a Spirit of Division... (1681), Section 4, p. 32
“It is sure the way of truth must be still rationally convincing, such as does persuade by teaching and to fix and clear the judgment before the will, by manifestation of the truth to men’s conscience, for thus we are taught, and be always ready to render a reason of the hope that is in you with all meekness and fear, 1 Pet. 3:15.”
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1800’s
William B. Sprague
Lectures on Revivals of Religion (1832), p. 83
“It is not at the option of God’s ministers to select one truth from the Bible and omit another; but they are required to preach the whole counsel of God.”
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J.C. Ryle
Practical Religion (1878; Banner of Truth, 1998), 1. ‘Self-Inquiry’, p. 4
“…he is your best friend who tells you the most truth.”
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Charles Ross
The Inner Sanctuary (1888)
“Truth is catholic; error is sectarian, and tends to divide. For there is such a thing as Christian principle, and the force of conscience. And he is the sectarian—not who adheres to fundamental truth and high Christian principle—but who deviates from the truth, and forsakes Christian principle.”
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1900’s
J. Gresham Machen
Christianity and Liberalism (1923), pp. 142-43
“Things that are false will accomplish a great many useful things in the world. If I take a counterfeit coin and buy a dinner with it, the dinner is every bit as good as if the coin were a product of the mint. And what a very useful thing a dinner is!
But just as I am on my way downtown to buy a dinner for a poor man, an expert tells me that my coin is a counterfeit. The miserable, heartless theorizer! While he is going into uninteresting, learned details about the primitive history of that coin, a poor man is dying for want of bread.
So it is with faith. Faith is so very useful, they tell us, that we must not scrutinize its basis in truth. But, the great trouble is, such an avoidance of scrutiny itself involves the destruction of faith. For faith is essentially dogmatic. Despite all you can do, you cannot remove the element of intellectual assent from it. Faith is the opinion that some person will do something for you. If that person really will do that thing for you, then the faith is true. If he will not do it, then the faith is false.
In the latter case, not all the benefits in the world will make the faith true. Though it has transformed the world from darkness to light, though it has produced thousands of glorious healthy lives, it remains a pathological phenomenon. It is false, and sooner or later it is sure to be found out.”
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Yves Congar
in Bernard Doering, ‘Jacques Maritain & Charles Journet on Human Sexuality [Contraception]’ in Theological Studies 62 (2001), p. 605 Congar was a Roman Catholic, French theologian.
“There has been a veritable inflation of infallibility [in the Roman Catholic pronouncements in his context] as if, between infallibility and error, there did not exist an immense domain of partial truth, of probable certitude, of search for truth and of approximations, indeed of precious truth that is not guaranteed against the risks of human finitude.”
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2000’s
Edward Feser
Neo-Scholastic Essays (South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press, 2015)
ch. 9, ‘The Road from Atheism’, p. 214
“And once you have allowed yourself to see the truth that reason leads you to, what reason apprehends is (given the convertibility of the transcendentals) as good and beautiful as it is real.”
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ch. 16, ‘In Defense of the Perverted Faculty Argument’, pp. 385-86
“For like every other natural phenomenon, practical reason has a natural end or goal toward which it is ordered, and that end or goal is just whatever it is the intellect perceives to be good or worth pursuing. Now given what has already been said, human beings, like everything else in nature, have various capacities and ends the fulfillment of which is good for them and the frustrating of which is bad, as a matter of objective fact. A rational intellect apprised of the facts will therefore perceive that it is good to realize these ends and bad to frustrate them.
It follows, then, that a rational person will pursue the realization of these ends and avoid their frustration. In short, practical reason is directed by nature toward the pursuit of what the intellect perceives to be good; what is in fact good is the realization of the various ends inherent in human nature; and thus a rational and correctly informed person will perceive this and, accordingly, direct his actions towards the realization or fulfillment of those ends.
In this sense, good action is just that which is “in accord with reason” (Summa Theologiae I-II.21.1; cf. Summa Theologiae I-II.90.1), and the moral skeptic’s question “Why should I do what is good?” has an obvious answer: Because to be rational just is (in part) to do what is good, to fulfill the ends set for us by nature. Natural law ethics as a body of substantive moral theory is the formulation of general moral principles on the basis of an analysis of the various human capacities and ends and the systematic working out of their implications.
So, to take just one example, when we consider that human beings have intellects and that the natural end or function of the intellect is to grasp the truth about things, it follows that it is good for us—it fulfills our nature—to pursue truth and avoid error. Consequently, a rational person apprised of the facts about human nature will see that this is what is good for us and thus strive to attain truth and to avoid error.”
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What Truth is, or on the Definition of Truth
Quotes
1200’s
On Aquinas
Robert Schmidt, The Domain of Logic according to S. Thomas Aquinas (Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1966), ‘Conclusion’
“Cognition, according to St. Thomas, is a form of tendency by which the knower, without ceasing to be himself, becomes something else. A cognitive faculty is a capacity to take on the form of another being. The form received into the intellect is called the intelligible species. By it the knower is given the formal or intelligible determinations of the thing known. Thus informed, the knower actively expresses or acts out the part of the thing known, so that the accidental act of the knower becomes one (in intention) with the act of the thing known…
This intention, expressed by the knower and expressing the thing known, has a twofold relation: it is a form or quality perfecting the knower and a relation of likeness to the thing known. Viewed in this latter relation, according to what it expresses, it is essentially the relation of truth, the conformity of intellect to thing.”
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“Since the real existence of a composite being results from the composition of its elements, the intellect, to know it as concrete and as existing, must reproduce in its own way that composition [such as in a proposition]. It thus posits the thing in thought and affirms its existence.
In this affirmation of the existence of the composite being, the intellect attests that the thing is as the intellect represents it. Here is found truth in its formal sense; for there not only is in fact a conformity of the intellect and the thing but this conformity is consciously apprehended. But this can be done only if the intellect actively compares the apprehended natures both with each other and with the real concrete thing which they diversely represent.”
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“Because the proposition is the expression and attestation of the conformity of the intellect to the thing, it is by its very nature ‘the true’ (verum). It is that by which the intellect is conformed to the thing. It is a being whose whole existence is to be true; and for it to be false is not to be. When therefore, it is said, as was seen in Chapter III, that logic considers the true and the false, what is meant is, not that logic studies the relation of real things to the intellect, but that it studies propositions, the rationate beings by which the intellect expresses its conformity to things.”
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“Logic, then, though itself not about the real or directly a quest of the real, is nevertheless entirely subordinated to such knowledge. Its whole purpose and reason for existing is to guide human knowledge to truth in its quest of the real. Truth, and truth about real being, is the end and final cause of logic.”
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1900’s
Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange
God: his Existence & his Nature, vol. 1 (B. Herder: 1945), p. 131
“Truth is the conformity of being with the intellect upon which it depends, or the conformity of the intellect with being of which it is the measure ([Aquinas, ST] Ia, q. 16, a. 1-3).”
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Ignorance
Order of Contents
Quotes 2
Latin 2
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Quotes
Order of
Pascal
Baxter
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1600’s
Blaise Pascal
Pensees, section 14, Appendix: ‘Polemical Fragments’ in Pensees – The Provincial Letters in The Modern Library (d. 1662; NY: Modern Library, 1941), p. 305
“There are then a great number of truths, both of faith and of morality, which seem contradictory, and which all hold good together in a wonderful system.
The source of all heresies is the exclusion of some of these truths, and the source of all the objections which the heretics make against us is the ignorance of some of our truths. And it generally happens that, unable to conceive the connection of two opposite truths, and believing that the admission of one involves the exclusion of the other, they adhere to the one, exclude the other, and think of us as opposed to them.
Now exclusion is the cause of their heresy; and ignorance that we hold the other truth causes their objections.”
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Richard Baxter
The Cure of Church Divisions… (London, 1670), pt. 1, Direction 40, ‘Labour for a sound judgment to know good from evil, lest you trouble yourselves and others by mistakes: And till you grow so judicious, forsake not the guidance of a judicious teacher, nor the company of the agreeing generality of the Godly’, pp. 212-13
“Almost all our contentions and divisions are caused by the ignorance and injudiciousness of Christians, especially the most self-conceited. They are for the most as children, that yet need to be taught the very principles of the divine oracles, and to be fed with milk when they think themselves fit to be teachers of others, Heb. 5:11-12, and therefore [are] as children they are tossed to and fro and caried about with every wind of doctrine, Eph. 4:14.
And when they have many years together been crying up an opinion and vilifying dissenters, at last they turn to some other opinion and confess that they did all this upon mistake. And was it not a pitiful life that they lived that while? and a pitiful zeal which did set them on? and a pitiful kind of worship which they thus offered to God? Alas to hear a man pray and preach up Antinomianism one year, and Arminianism the next, and Socinianism the next! To hear a man make Separation and Anabaptistry a great part of his business to men in preaching and to God in prayer for seven and seven years together; and at last confess that all this was his error and his sin (or if he confess it not, it is so much the worse). Is it not sad that ignorance and hasty rashness should so much injure the Church and men’s souls that so many well-meaning people should put evil for good and good for evil, darkness for light and light for darkness, Isa. 5:20.”
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Latin Articles
1600’s
Voet, Gisbert – ‘Of the Sin of Ignorance, Contra the Conscience, & of Malice’ in 3. Of Actual Sin in Tract 4, Of the Misery of Man, or of the State of Sin in A Syllabus of Theological Problems (Utrecht, 1643) Abbr.
Maresius, Samuel – 6. ‘Whether a proneness of concupiscence to evil and ignorance constitutes original sin? It is affirmed contra Papists and Pelagians; and the error of Flaccius is picked off’ in A New Synopsis of Elenctic Theology, or an Index of the Controversies of Faith out of the Sacred Scriptures (1646-1647), vol. 1, 11, ‘On the State of the First Parents & Original Sin’, pp. 503-10
Maresius (1599-1673)
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On Finding & Following Guides in Truth
Article
1600’s
Baxter, Richard – Direction 42, ‘Your belief of the necessary articles of faith, must be made your own, and not taken merely upon the authority of any: And in all points of belief or practice which are of necessity to salvation, you must ever keep company with the universal Church: for it were not the Church if it erred in these: And in matters of peace and concord the greater part must be your guide; In matters of human obedience, your governors must be your guides: And in matters of high and difficult speculation, the judgment of one man of extraordinary understanding and clearness is to be preferred before both the rulers and the major vote’ in The Cure of Church Divisions… (London, 1670), pt. 1, pp. 216-18
“In several sorts of controversies and cases you must prefer several sorts of guides or judges: It is a grand pernicious error to think that the same men’s judgments must be most followed in every case. And it is of grand importance to know how to value and vary our guides, as the cases vary. And for the most part every man is more to be regarded in his own way of study and profession than wiser men in other matters of other studies and professions.” – p. 216
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Quote
1600’s
Richard Baxter
The Cure of Church Divisions… (London, 1670), pt. 1, Direction 40, ‘Labour for a sound judgment to know good from evil, lest you trouble yourselves and others by mistakes: And till you grow so judicious, forsake not the guidance of a judicious teacher, nor the company of the agreeing generality of the Godly’, pp. 212-13
“But because there is no hope that most should be judicious, there is no other remedy for such but this of Christ’s prescript which I have here set down:
First, happy is he that chooses a judicious faithful guide and learns of him till his own understanding be better illuminated; and that escapes the conduct of ignorant, erroneous, self-seeking, proud, dividing teachers.
Secondly, continue in the communion of the generality of agreeing Christians: The generality of the godly are more unlikely to be forsaken of Christ than a few odd self-conceited singular professors. This is the way of peace to yourselves and to the Church of Christ.”
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Latin Article
1600’s
Leydekker, Melchior – ‘An Inaugural Oration on Eagerly Pursuing the Truth in Love’ appended at the end of The Power of Truth, or Disquisitions on Some Controversies which are now Greatly Moved in Belgium, on the Economy of the Covenants of God… (Utrecht, 1679)
Leydekker, a Dutch reformed theologian, wrote numerous volumes elucidating the theological controversies in the Netherlands, yet while arguing against the Cocceians at each point.
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“Should not the multitude of words be answered? and should a man full of talk be justified? Should thy lies make men hold their peace? and when thou mockest, shall no man make thee ashamed? For thou hast said, My doctrine is pure, and I am clean in thine eyes. But oh that God would speak, and open his lips against thee;”
Job 11:2-3
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