Selected quad for the lemma: law_n

Word A	Word B	Word C	Word D	Occurrence	Frequency Band	MI	MI Band	Prominent
law_n	gentile_n	heart_n	write_v	7,180	5	5.8793	4	false

Text snippets containing the quad

ID	Title	Author	Corrected Date of Publication (TCP Date of Publication)	STC	Words	Pages
A42952	Trade preferr'd before religion and Christ made to give place to Mammon represented in a sermon relating to the plantations : first preached at Westminster-Abbey and afterwards in divers churches in London / by Morgan Godwyn ...	Godwyn, Morgan, fl. 1685.	1685 (1685)	Wing G974; ESTC R15652	53,257	54

in the Law These having not the Law are a Law unto themselves which shew the works of the Law written in their Hearts their Conscience also bearing witness and their Thoughts between themselves accusing or excusing one another And now this being considered what right can we have thus fiercely to declaim against these Mahometans concerning whom were St. Paul alive to determine the matter if but for their Zeal for their Religion even false as it is in respect of our selves he no doubt would pronounce them Saints So that to bring down this Text to Christianity and our own times we are the Jerusalem therein charged and in our Skirts also is this Blood most eminently discernable And when God shall arise to make Inquisition for it as most certainly he will at our Hands it must be required For we are the Watchmen which should have warned those wicked Men from their evil ways the Sword came and we have not blown the Trumpet nor warned the People and therefore their Blood must be upon our Heads And then it must needs go hard with us and that chiefly upon the score of that abundant Light and Knowledg and that Purity of Religion we so much boast in For Atrocius sub sanctinomine peccamus saith one and that Servant which knew his Masters will but did it not shall be beaten with many Stripes saith our Blessed Lord. And you only have I known of all the Families of the Earth therefore will I punish you for all your Iniquities saith God by his Prophet And who knoweth but that our prophane Silence and unchristian connivance thus long together at those Spiritual Murthers and Soul-depredations are the very accursed thing which hath caused us hitherto not to prosper And that for this our supine and shameful neglect of Religion and that when those Elymas's abroad and their wicked Agents here Those Enemies I say of Righteousness that do not cease to pervert the right ways of the Lord those Soul-Merchants that in the very Letter of the Text do tread under Foot the Son of God and as it were crucify him afresh and put him to an open shame and that account his Blood an unholy thing and do each hour do dispite unto the Spirit of Grace I say when these like Eli's lewd Sons have made themselves vile by the Blood of so many Innocent Souls and we restrained them not no not by Word or Writing and so far at least to have vindicated God's Honour and Truth against them Who I say knows but for this Our God hath hitherto put us to Silence and given us Water of Gaul to drink and that when we looked for Peace no good came and for a time of Health and behold Trouble And that he hath sent those Serpents and Cockatrices among us which will not be charmed and that he hath hedged up our way with Thorns and caused all our Mirth to cease That he hath set us against each other every one against his Brother and against his Neighbour yea City against City and even these against themselves And that our Spirit doth fail in the midst of us That God hath destroyed our Counsels and mingled a perverse Spirit in the midst of us and hath caused us to err in every work and that we are afraid even in our selves And then might it not to be demanded of us as our Prophet here doth of Jerusalem Hast thou not procured this unto thy self in that thou hast forsaken the Lord when he led thee by the way and had done such great things for thee I shall not here stand to enquire how agreeable to Christianity which commands us First to seek the Kingdom of God and his Righteousness and then afterwards to look after other less necessary things a Precept very idle and ridiculous amongst this sort of Christians Nor how suitable the pretence of Trade and Commerce is to that undergoing of the Cross and self-denial and to that condition of forsaking all by our Lord prescribed to all his Followers but shall only observe that if St. Peter was by the same meekest Lord termed a Devil for his too carnal respecting not his own but the same blessed Masters outward Ease and Tranquility to the prejudice of the World's Salvation he will certainly for ever disclaim those Mammonists who prefer their Trade and their Merchandise before him as unworthy of him And if Job's Inference be good that to make Gold our Hope is to deny the God that is above doubtless their Christianity must be very desperate who do the same by their Trade Christ will one day deny all such denyers of him before his Father and the Holy Angels Wherefore since God hath signed this eternal Precept of Blood for Blood and hath as it were sworn That he will require the Blood of our Lives at the Hand of every Man's Brother yea and of the very Beasts too and hath also in several places no less positively declared That no satisfaction shall be accepted for the Life of a Murtherer and that a Land defiled with Blood cannot be cleansed of it but by the Blood of him that did shed it all which is to be referred only to the Body What Punishment can we suppose answerable to this so much more horrid Crime of murthering of Souls If Blood for Blood and Life for Life must go for the one certainly then Soul for Soul here is the least that can be required How long Lord God holy and true dost thou not judg and avenge our Blood upon them that dwell upon the Earth was the incessant cry of the Souls under the Altar And Abel's Blood is said to have pursued Cain to his very Grave 't is certain it cryed for vengeance against him And yet 't was but Abel's Body not his Soul that was murthered Had Cain been guilty of this Lamech's revengeful hand had made but a very defective and sorry expiation The Brimstone-lake must then have been his Portion as undoubtedly it will be of all impenitent Murtherers of Souls And then How will those Mammonists remain in the gaul of Bitterness and in the bond of Iniquity And our Apostats and Hypocrites be confounded and tremble when they shall most sensibly feel themselves perishing together with their impious Money which was the price of Souls And then they shall be admirably convinc'd that they were but Fools indeed for thus determining their Hopes and fixing their whole expectation upon the things of this Life for the getting whereof they sinned against their own and murthered their Peoples Souls And finally they shall be pronounced Children of the Devil because Enemies of Righteousness that is of the Gospel And Christ himself whom they thereby have so Impudently affronted and denied not ignorantly and as the Jews who knew not what they did shall speak them into an Hell as black as that

them Being frequently heard to confess and to glory that they came not thither to promote Religion nor to save Souls but to get Money and Estates That is like to the Beasts of the Field only to devour and as the Prophet speaks Looking every Man for his gain from his quarter And yet whilst like Sodom they stick not to declare their Sin nor do dread to triumph and boast of their so detestible Abominations shall neverthelss presume themselves Innocent and not doubt to affirm that therein they have not sinned nor will be persuaded that they are at all therefore to be reputed the worse Christians And here to omit all enquiry into the Equity and Right of the first purchase where Parents do sell their Children Husbands their Wives Brothers their Sisters and so on the contrary A most blessed Trade for the best Reformed Christians to be conversant and imployed in and in a Word where every Man's strength is the Law of Justice I say to omit all this they hold all their other Cruelties and Oppressions for nothing unless to the enslaving of their Bodies and wasting them with unmerciful Labour and wretched Vsage they bring into final Destruction and Bondage their very Souls also And here before I can proceed a step further I must be so bold as to demand of whomsever shall please to resolve me whether the Jews offering up a few Children to Moloch which some will have this Text to reprove the Papists Superstitions against which so many Volumns have been wrote the old Gentiles Idolatry or even the Turks worshipping Mahomet all Circumstances considered be comparable to this Sin among us viz. of continually sacrificing so many Bodies to Mammon and Souls to the Devil against which no one hath hardly ever yet opened his Mouth And thus I think it doth but too plainly appear that these Skirts are not so much spotted or stained only as thorowly wrenched and dyed in this precious Blood of Souls And those our out-Provinces are most evidently chargeable with this most foul and horrid Guilt far I dare affirm beyond whatever hath by Fame been storied to have been practised or but permitted by any besides yea hardly by the most openly avowed Enemies of Christianity And which is yet more astonishing All this and much more we find to be tolerated and acted under Magistrates and by persons outwardly professors of it and that in the most refined and purest way So strange a mockery and abuse as by no Hypocrisy to be parallel'd but by the Jews crying Hail King unto Christ when they were going to crucify him or by those who murthered their Sovereign to make him more glorious and renowned They might doubtless more innocently give license and freedom for the erecting publick Stews and Brothel Houses or make Proclamation against Justice and common Honesty than thus to encourage or but permit such Sacriledg and Prophaneness to pass without Controul And whilst those abroad are thus acting and carrying on their Butcheries upon the Souls of Men there how quietly and unconcernedly in the mean time do we sit down here and take our ease not once in our thoughts reflecting upon this Calamity Perinde quasi cum membra nostra putrescant nihil grave acciderat as a certain Father speaks As tho like Cain we esteemed all regard of our Brethren to be needless or like the vile Oppressors in Nathan's Parable we had no Bowels nor Compassion or that we believed the rotting and perishing of our Fellow-Members to be a most desirable and pleasant Object Yea we act as tho the Prophet had mistook and talked impertinently when he demanded Have we not all one father and did not one God create us And also Job when he asked Did not he that made me in the Womb make them and did not one fashion us both in the Womb And even Solomon too as wise as he was or whoever was the Author of that Book declaring that no King had other beginning of Birth than what these have all Men having but one entrance into Life and the like going out And lastly as if St. Paul had uttered an untruth when he bespeaks us all as Members one of another And tho in the Captives of Algier's case as in the late Brief it is represented this cruelty to the Souls of Men is termed Tyranny and accursed and made to exceed all other the most Turkish Barbarities and is therein declared a Calamity never sufficiently to be bewailed yet the very same or worse is allowed in our own People that is by Protestants and English-men Our profound Silence being no better than a constructive approbation and our Connivance a consenting thereunto As if such Tyranny over the Souls of Men were Accursed and never sufficiently to be bewailed only in Turks and professed Infidels or that the same Action were Vertue in us but accursed Tyranny in the other Notwithstanding that those do therein act most agreeable to their Belief and for the promoting of their Faith which if true as they suppose it is is a pious deed and but what they were bound to do And they are therefore beyond all peradventure more justifiable before God than such who whilst owning I dare not say believing the Truth do yet upon pretence of Interest which those do therein renounce not only conceal but most industriously decry and oppose the advancement of it Yea and than such other too who tho they do not oppose it yet have never entered their Protests against those that do And of both which I cannot so much as doubt notwithstanding our accursing the other but that these shall receive the greater Damnation And certainly all being impartially weighed these Mahumetans as bad as they are for any thing we can find do herein at least appear more vertuous than our selves and must in the last day rise in judgment and condemn us and that from no other than our own Mouths For if they be accursed for promoting what they think is the Truth what must those be that do oppose or at best neglect what most undoubtedly is so as themselves confess For tho they live in an unpardonable Errour yet because they do it Ignorantly thro unbelief not knowing it to be either Sin or Errour but perswaded of the contrary they are certainly the more excusable And it were an unreasonable incongruity to imagine that the God of Mercy and Justice should be more ready to punish Errours of Understanding than wilful Impieties But that if those that have sinned without Law shall also perish without Law much more those that have sinned in the Law that is against their Profession shall be judged by it as St. Paul argues And as the Wiseman speaks that the most mighty Sinners should be mightily tormented whilst Mercy may sooner acquit the other For as St. Paul go's on When the Gentiles which have not the Law do by Nature the things contained